marriage is what brings us togezza....today.

Marriage is hard. Harder than I expected and I expected it to be hard. However- marriage has brought a new freedom to love that I wasn’t expecting. However there is another part to it that I didn't think of a part that took me by surprise.

The moment I said (or whispered, really) , ‘I do.’ things immediately changed- but- in a good way.

There is a comfort and safety in marriage. There was a space in my heart that opened up, a space I never knew was there. I am now free to love more than I felt possible before. In this space is the a greater understanding of God’s relationship to the church. A greater understanding of caring for someone other than myself. An urge for forgive and move on, to be honest and open. A willingness to be selfless.
Don’t get me wrong, I am still selfish despite not wanting to be but I feel it fading more and more. I feel my character growing. Despite all of the difficulties- despite how hard this marriage thing is- I love it, and I love my husband.

a small wedding budget and 18 days left!

I read a lot of wedding blogs. A LOT. It's my new thing. Along with looking at wedding photographers. I really enjoy it and have learned a lot but one thing that strikes me as strange is that even the budget weddings which I've read about can run to like 10 thousand bucks. That to me is insanity! How is that an inexpensive wedding? It makes me wonder what I would have added if I had 10 grand to spend on a wedding. The only thing I can really think of is one of those cool little photo booths for guests to go in a get their photo for their wedding favor. Instead we're giving soap as a favor....hand made soap. The rest is exactly what I want.
We've done a lot of stuff by hand...well my mom has done a lot of stuff by hand. She made all the bridesmaids dresses (saving them a bundle!) she helped me with the soap, and she's making my wedding dress. My so-far beautiful fancy wedding dress that will end up being a total of probably 150 bucks, but completely unique and original. I've put work into it too- a million beaded flowers, beaded by hand and then hand sewn onto the gown, but my mom did the main work on the dress.
Rebecca is doing to reception decorating. I can't imagine what I would do without her. I wouldn't have decorations or linens or any of that stuff! I'm so grateful to them for doing all of this for me. I don't know the first thing about wedding decorating- and I don't have the motivation to learn.
The one thing we did go all out on money wise was the photographer. If I it wasn't so important to me to have a good photographer we would have spent have the money we are spending....but it was, it's the one thing I really can't do without...that and the groom! :P
Even so- with our small budget that we both put half into- we'll have a beautiful wedding and get our amazing photos. It will be a small wedding, and that's exactly what I've always wanted- but it will also have class and style, thanks to the help of Rebecca and my mom....and I'm starting to get excited!

Count down to the wedding...some thoughts.

Our wedding is in 25 days. There’s so much left to do- left to plan- left to finish. I have a million more flowers to bead, I need to order flowers, e-mail people, get to the church to actually step inside (yeah- we haven’t actually been INSIDE the church yet, although we’ve seen it through the very old windows on tippy toes). There’s stuff to do. People keep asking if I am nervous, I wonder if I should be nervous...should I be nervous? If I’m honest (said like bear grills) I’m not even to the excited point yet. Maybe because I don’t have a dress yet and nothing feels very wedding-eeee yet. There are twinges of excitement at times but nothing permanent yet.

The other day we went and looked at some property. Five acres with a cute little house that needs some work. We probably can’t afford it. But as the skies grew dark and we wandered around I could see it as ours. Not necessarily that house (although we both would love it) but the idea. I could see the chickens foraging around for bugs, the part of the pasture we’d fence for the horse, where we’d extend the garden out to, where we’d put the green house. How we’d clean up and landscape, and where our orchard would be, our goats, cows and sheep grazing. Where Tobes would have free range to run and play. But mostly what I saw was me and Jeremy, sitting on the porch watching the sunset, looking over all our hard work. Mostly I saw our future life together, and that’s what I’m excited about, that’s what makes me feel a good nervous, that’s what makes me so unbelievably happy it can bring me to tears at just the thought of it.
The wedding will be great. Even if things go wrong or get messed up or some things don’t get done, our friends and family, those people who mean the most to us will be there with us (and those who can’t make it will be in our hearts), in a very important moment when we dedicate our lives to each other, when we promise to be selfless instead of selfish, when we choose to go from two to one. I guess I am excited....but I’m especially excited for the after.

The Wedding Dress Experience

Since the whole wedding planning thing started one of my top priorities (behind finding the most amazing and yet affordable photographer in the world) was finding a dress. Now I haven’t been planning a wedding since I was 12- so it made it a bit more difficult. I sort of had an idea in my head, but in order to see if my idea fit my body type I went to try on wedding dresses.
My first experience was pleasant enough, besides the one dress that made me look and feel like a sausage- (mermaid cut is now and never will be right for me) I found some good ideas and had some fun. We decided to do one more trying on of the enormous white dresses before buying material and a pattern.
At the Portland Bridal Show I had been very impressed with the dresses that Tres Fabu had and the people at the show were super nice- so I decided to go there. My mom and I headed out on a Saturday morning and after some arguments over directions and me firing her from ‘navigator’ we made it to the shop. They didn’t take appointments and so we found that we’d be waiting around a little over an hour just to try on a dress. While waiting and pinning dresses with my assigned gray pins I overheard a woman discussing a wedding dress event and deciding to go there. I asked them where they were going.
Turns out there was this big dress event with couture dresses and regular dresses all on sale for some breast cancer thing. So I asked them where and we left Tres Fabu to find the event. When we got there it was basically one large room at the bottom of a hotel reserved for rows and rows of wedding dresses. I found my size row (did you know that wedding dresses run 2-3 sizes larger than regular clothes thus making an already tubby girl feel like a big fat walrus huge monstrous fatty mcfat fat....fat) and chose a few dresses. We went to the back to try them on. What I saw when we entered the ‘dressing room’ was a sectioned of place where probably 100 girls were either 1)stripping 2)having a large white dress placed over there heads 3) modeling a dress 4) taking a large white dress off. This is similar to some nightmares I’ve had. Hello gym class! II immediately didn’t like it. I’m not into getting nekkid in front of a bunch of people it makes me uncomfortable. As appeased to my mom who would probably run nekkid through the streets without a care in the world- I prefer for people to see me clothed, if at all. So we wade through half naked women trying to find a corner where we can set up camp. We finally find one that is semiprivate and put the dresses on a rack. At this point my brain is working trying to figure out the best way for me to de-robe while remaining covered. This is how I work. Jean and my mom are both there which added to the difficulty. Jean went off to find more dresses which made it a bit less stressful- not that jean added stress- but having my soon to be mom-in-law see me nekkid added stress. So it was just me, my mom, and 100 other girls to deal with. The entire time my mom kept saying things like, ‘just take off your clothes’ or ‘it’s not a big deal, just strip!’ I should make this more clear- she wasn’t just saying this, she was saying it insistently, occasionally PULLING at my shirt. My brain was near exploding, I looked around as my stomach turned and I felt like barfing all over those dresses, I caught the eye of the mother of the bride in the area next to me, she looked at me with understanding, offering a smile. My mother kept insisting I take off my clothes. ‘Just give me a minute’- I kept pleading, ‘I just need a second’. This is like my worst night mare come true. Finally I lost it. I burst into tears and told her if she didn’t stop I was going to leave. At this point I was feeling awful, not only silly for not just getting out of my clothes and into a dress but now I was crying. hehehe- it was terrible. When I finally composed myself and figured out a way to be less clothed around all those strangers everything went fairly well and we had a great idea of what dress I wanted. In the end it worked out- but just a fair warning in you hear of one of these dress thing where they have ‘thousands of dresses’ on sale, avoid it...unless of course you’re the type of person who either enjoys being naked in front of strangers or doesn’t really mind it. Yep- not for me.