Jake's birthday gift! Finally!

Some of you already know that I've been working for a while now on Jake's birthday gift. Well yesterday I finally got it in the mail! I came home from school around 4:45pm to find it on the doorstep :) I'm so glad that I didn't get it early in the morning before I left for school because once I had it in my hands it felt like forever until Jake got home!I was really excited to open it and see how it turned out. I was nervous that all my hard work might have been messed up by any number of small mistakes I could've made being that I never wrote a book before. The first thing I saw was the cover. Perfect! The. Everything else inside was perfect as well. I was so happy with the way it came out that I almost cried. All that hard work trying to imagine in my head where to insert blank pages all came out right. And all the hard work of formatting the pages and getting everything to look just right came out as well. And the illustrations are wonderful. You can't even tell I edited them! Both Jake and I read the whole thing last night :) He really loved it. He had no idea what his gift was going to be. And it was hard to keep the secret from him. So many times I caught myself wanting to talk to him about a problem that I had run into with the editing and formatting and such, but I couldn't. Anyways, here are the photos I took of it to share with all of you!

The front cover. The title of the book is Bloom.


The title page on the inside.



Then there is a dedication page and a note from Jeremy, Jakes best friend.
And then this page!
Heaven, I can't thank you enough! The illustrations are wonderful. Jake loved looking at all of them and knew what each one was about :)


Then the Contents page since I decided to do chapters.



The opening chapter! I like the way I finally settled on formatting :)
The chapter number and title are in dark gray incase you can't tell...



Then here are all of the illustrations! This first one is of Jeremy introducing Tiana and I to Jake at the snow rally in 2003.



Then this is of me doing a long jump at horse camp later that year.



Then Jake and I sitting in my family's dining room talking.



Then Jake showing me the Alameda beach at night.



Jake asking me to be his girlfriend outside of Round Table Pizza where I worked at the time.



Jake and I texting each other on a couch at UCLA when we finally got together.
This is my favorite I think :)


Then me in the water and Jake laughing at me because it was freezing cold!



And last but not least our wedding kiss!



The wrapped up gift.



And Jake looking at it right after he opened the package...



And that's it guys!