I refuse to reminisce about the past year unless it's in a "best of" format.

I'm not so much a fan of the "how far we've come" reflections, mainly because I keep this blog for that very reason, but in a best of format, I don't mind.

January:  I got my job offer.  It snowed enough for Sean to take an early day off of work and make soup and grilled cheese.  I took a cake decorating class.  I spent most of my time doing crafty stuff.  We celebrated Sean's 23rd Birthday.


February:  We went to a cooking class.  We celebrated Valentine's Day with surf and turf.  We spent a weekend at a hotel in Uptown Charlotte.  My mom finished her "bad chemo".


March:  I started my job at the beginning of this month.  We visited my family in San Francisco.  I learned to sew.


April:  We spent most of this month looking at houses.  We celebrated Easter in Charlotte.


May:  We bought our first house.  We celebrated Jake's graduation in Hilton Head.  We started our new roles at Elevation.  We celebrated the marriage of Dallas and Liz in Beaufort.


June:  We spent most of this month settling into our new house.


July:  We celebrated the fourth of July at the whitewater center and had a full date weekend.


August:  We celebrated our one year anniversary.  We adopted two cats, Aurora and Oliver.  I went to night shift.  We spent the majority of the month in an effort to restore the health of our adopted cats, and sadly lost one.  I started a young women's Bible Study with Holly Furtick about marriage.  I have learned SO much about our relationship from this study.


September:  We celebrated Labor Day in Hilton Head with Sean's parents, Nick, and Lyndsey.


October:  We went to New England to see the leaves in North Conway, NH and ate lobster in Maine.


November:  We celebrated Thanksgiving in Charlotte with Sean's family.


December:  I turned 24.  We celebrated Christmas in Charlotte, in Greenville, and in Alpharetta.

We have been abundantly blessed.

a Year of Wedded Bliss: II

Continuing on in reflection to our actual wedding itself...

Right before I walked down the aisle, I got really nervous.  I looked up at Jensen, filling in for father-of-the-bride before taking his place as a groomsmen.  He said "what?  did you want me to wear a nametag?" and pulled out a pre-made tag that said "Big Daddy".  And then we started down the aisle.  I was told that when you look around, it's really neat to think that all of those people are there because they're happy and excited for you, so I thought about that on our way down and I will say that it is really cool.  Once we got to the front, everything went really fast.  

After tons of consideration, I finally settled on the readings and music for the ceremony, a few of which I'll share here.

1.  The Gift of Love is what I walked down the aisle to.  I loved the style of this song.  In the context of a small chapel, trumpets seemed like maybe a little much, and although 'How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria' was suggested more than once, I wasn't sure that I wanted the word 'flighty' in a ceremony about commitment.  I'd decided on 'Edelweiss' in keeping with the same Sound of Music theme at some point, but the church put the kabosh on that, and thus I ended up with this one, which I absolutely fell in love with.

2.  1 John 4:7-12:  We had three readings, and this one is my favorite because it explains that we love one another, but that love comes from God.

3.  I had a really hard time settling on a song for the congregation to sing, and finally settled on Praise to the Lord the Almighty.  AND, I love it.

4.  My very favorite part of our ceremony was the a solo performance by the talented Rob Jacobs of 'Behold the Lamb of God' during communion.  It was important to me that the gospel was honored at our wedding since a wedding is supposed to be a demonstration of Christ's relationship with the church.  And I found it to be very fitting for communion.

Our wedding party was amazing, consisting of four brothers, 1 sister-in-law, 3 friends, a little cousin, and a sweet little girl.  One of my favorite parts of our wedding, cosmetically, was the bridesmaids dresses.  They were the first thing that I picked out, and I'm still in love.  After I picked those, I worked on the flower girl dress and went back and forth between a silver flower-girl dress and a junior bridesmaids dress that coordinated with the bridesmaids.  Emily ended up making the decision after discussing the "shape" of the dress with me.  As you can see here, we went with the mini bridesmaids dress.  And I LOVED IT.

Another of my favorite cosmetic details of our wedding was the flower choice.  I went with all white lillies after much debate over a million different types.  I love simple elegance and I really strived to not overtake things that I loved (like the church), with other details.  The florist was hesitant to just use ONE flower, but I'm really glad that we stuck with it.

 

This cake caused me a lot of grief.  This is the photo post-wedding-coordinator-makeover.  But when I originally saw it, 30 minutes before pictures, I had a royal meltdown and I'm actually just a little bit embarrassed about how I acted.  I called the baker, who of course didn't answer the phone and never called me back, and all I saw was our whole reception falling apart.  People told me before our wedding that there would be things that went wrong and that I couldn't let it get to me, and I would give the same advice to someone else, but I let the cake get to me.  That's my one wedding regret.  I spent the 45 minutes prior to our wedding trying to pull it back together after seeing the cake, even after the coordinator assured me that she would fix it.  I think that my mom was also a little embarrassed because she got this really panicked look on her face and goes "SHE is REALLY tired.  She hasn't slept..."  Oh cake...

Another one of my favorite things about our wedding was the tiger's visit.  As someone who can't keep a secret, especially my own, I was proud of myself for keeping this under wraps.  Of course every wedding needs a little tiger rag.

And of course tons of dancing.  This was, of course, one of the best days of my life.  I wish we could do it again, but we can't, so I'm glad that we have all of this amazing photography from my favorite of all of our vendors, Kim DeLoach Photography :)  Does everyone feel like you went to our wedding either for the first time or again now?

A Year of Wedded Bliss

ONE year (and now, 10 days) ago, I got unbelievably lucky and unimaginably blessed when undoubtably the smartest, most handsome, most Godly, most caring man on this green earth made the decision to marry me.  Is that an exaggeration?  I don't think so, but I'm biased.  We are actually celebrating our anniversary over the first weekend in October, but we did go out for dinner and spend some time discussing what a great idea getting married was.  So in honor of this momentous occasion, I'd just like to relive some of my favorite parts of our wedding.

Showers.  We have amazing friends and family and had plenty of showers and parties celebrating our marriage.  This is just a preview to what's really cool about a wedding (besides the marriage :)).  It's just really humbling to think that ALL of these people got up, got excited, and got together all to celebrate you. And it's certainly no downside to get tons of presents.

Our rehearsal dinner was my favorite part of the whole weekend.  What I love about these is that it's a smaller group of people, all of your family and people you care about the most.  You have time to really talk to everyone.  And everyone is SO excited, but the wedding isn't ending yet.  Our rehearsal dinner in particular was my pride and joy of the weekend.  I started planning it when I was finished with the reception and it could NOT have gone more perfectly.  We had it on a horse farm in a barn and it was absolutely beautiful.  Our families cooked the food (much to my mother's chagrin when she found out 3 days prior that I didn't actually hire a caterer) and it was AWESOME.

I love toasts.  Sean's dad had a sweet 2-3 minute congratulatory toast.

My family is slightly more animated and decided to forego the standard 2-3 minutes in favor of a skit.  

It was a source of some anxiety for me, the parts of my wedding that I knew would make it overwhelmingly obvious that my dad was not there.  The father-of-the-bride toast at the rehearsal dinner was one of them, followed shortly by the walk down the aisle and the father-daughter dance.  Unbeknownst to me, however, Jensen was not letting that anxiety overtake HIM.  Instead, he told me later that he felt that "the elephant in the room should be addressed".  The logic behind this, was, and I quote, "if you don't laugh, you'll cry".  So as my stomach turned and my mom got up to talk, I wished that it would just pass as quickly as possible.  Not that I didn't think that my mom would do a good job, but just that I wanted the highlighting of my dad's absence to end.  And that's when Jensen "addressed".  He came running into the barn dressed up like my dad and halted my mom.  "WAIT!  Christie!  This is the father-of-the-bride speech!  I made it.  WHEW!".  And in keeping with what his role would be for the remainder of the weekend, Jensen, in full on rare form, put on a 20 minute rendition of a father-of-the-bride rehearsal dinner toast.  Everyone died laughing, and of course, my family took a bow.

Part 2 to follow...