Hello there lovelies ☺ I hope you are all feeling fabulous and are settling into the New Year nicely. Serious January blues over here, I was a right little miss piggy over the festive season so I'm hitting the salads hard to try and get my body back to some kind of normality, all the while having a massive box of Continental winking at me. Damn you Viennese truffles!

You know when you get back to work after Christmas, and the first thing every single person asks you is 'did you have a nice Christmas?' - I'm totally guilty of this - and you're all like 'yeah it was great thanks, I'm so sad to be back here'. Well I didn't have that this year, don't get me wrong everyone wanted to know how my Christmas was, but I couldn't give that usual response. See my wonderful mum unexpectedly passed away on the 15th so it was impossible to have enjoyed a day which normally brings me so much happiness.

I don't want to be a Debbie Downer and kill the mood, so I'll try to keep this as brief as I can (I think by now you know me and brief don't really go together!) before I move on to the good stuff. I've read a lot of real wedding posts on various wedding blogs, where brides sadly don't have one of their parents with them on their special day. I'd always read them and thought 'aawww how awful it must be not to have both your parents there to see you get married' because of course you never imagine that it's going to be you. It's true that no one can say or do anything to make you feel better, you just have to try and get through each day, hoping that tomorrow will be better than today. It's not fair that my mum was taken from me without warning, so suddenly. At the moment I feel so angry that, although our wedding day is going to be wonderful, it's now going to be tinged with sadness at the loss of such a fantastic lady.

Ashley wondered whether I would want to postpone the wedding, and in truth I think if the day was a bit closer I probably would have wanted to, but really if anything this has only made me want to marry him more. He has been so wonderful the last few weeks, I guess calling him my rock would be a little cliché but I don't know how else to describe it. Ash has had to put up with my tears, my silence, my screams, instinctively knowing when I needed a cuddle and when he had to leave me the hell alone. He really is my soul mate, it makes me so happy to say I marry him this year.

Ok then, let's sweep all that horrible stuff under the rug for now, and move on to some wedding planning gossip! We've been quite the busy bees lately, what with wedding rings bought, florist chosen, and honeymoon booked - ridiculously excited about that last one as I'm sure you can imagine, I'm going to keep the details under wraps for now though, but I'll leave you with one little clue.....

I'd like to leave you guys with some amazing pictures taken by our fabulous photographer, Shelly Mantovani of Toast of Leeds, from the engagement shoot we had one chilly Sunday morning in Leeds city centre (it was also VERY windy!)

I'm going to echo what many a bride to be has said, including the lovely Holly and Katy, it was great practise! Ash and I were so awkward, I suppose not really knowing what to expect, luckily Shelly knew just what to do - talking about the latest edition of Playboy was a great ice breaker! Looking at these photos we know we made the right choice in Shelly, not only is she going to be a trusted supplier on the day, but it'll be like having an extra guest ☺