One Year Ago Today...

... we were with all of these lovely people celebrating the start of our marriage.

Photo courtesy of the amazing Ben Blood, of course.

Luckiest At Last Love Theme

I've been listening to our wedding playlist at work this week. Before the wedding I picked out a bunch of songs that I loved, slapped them together on the ipod, and took it to the wedding. It was easy... but not. I wanted the right songs. The ones that had stories behind them. The ones that fit the feel of the day. And the ones that I would hear later and immediately think of our wedding, our story and our life.

This week it's been like a balm on my heart. 

HOTNESS

My friend Shawna (of the upcoming wedding I keep talking about) just posted a sneak peek of her engagement photos, taken this weekend.

Holy crap.

You have to go look. Seriously. Isn't she pretty much the hottest thing you've ever seen? And the planes! And the sexy guy! And the shoes! Ah!

Photo via Shawna, via True Love Photo.

Google Wedding Tools

Seriously? Now? Nearly six months AFTER my wedding? C'mon!

I know this isn't a wedding blog. But I know you all are familiar with the horrors of wedding planning and have fairly recently been through it. Me too. No fun, eh?

So now for a tiny rant: Today I saw that Google launched a set of wedding planning tools through Google Docs and Style Me Pretty. I ended up making most of these forms myself, but already-made versions would have been oh-so-much better.

And DEFINITELY better than anything to do with The Knot, which was a pretty much wedding hell.

The Best Tart EVER

I'm having a super-strong craving for this tart:

I'm not a fan of wedding cake so we chose to have this fruit tart at our wedding instead. The super thing about this was that the giant tart was for us and we got equally delicious small tarts for everyone else.

We got married in Port Townsend, Wash., (six hours from where we live--a very good and very bad idea!) and a couple of months before the wedding we went over to check on a few things. We stopped at this little bakery-hole-in-the-wall and I ordered a fruit tart and coffee.

Oh. my. goodness.

I had never tasted anything so amazing in my whole life. So there it was: one easy wedding decision out of the way.

Today has been dreary and cold and this whole week and pretty much sucked. So I'm dreaming of vanilla bean custard and fresh fruits and flaky crusts.

Thank You Notes

I finally finished my wedding thank you notes! It took almost five months, which totally makes me feel like a slacker, but that's ok.

So the highlight of tonight's note-writing session was written by my husband. I quote:

"Dear _____,
Thank you for the wedding gift."

He certainly can be efficient, eh?

Courtship

Recently I've been wondering how different our wedding and these first few months of marriage would have been had our timing been different.

We married on Labor Day weekend in September--exactly one year after our first date. Neither of us can remember exactly when we got engaged (yeah, that seems weird to us too, but we started talking about getting married so very shortly after our first date) but it must have been March or April because I remember saying to myself many times how I only had about five months within which to plan the wedding.

In many ways only having a few months for wedding planning was a blessing. It wasn't the best experience and I can only imagine that it gets more complicated when you don't have as much pressure to just MAKE A DECISION. But I do think that if we'd planned for a year we'd have done some things differently, or done more of it ourselves and saved money. Or maybe it's just that we would have had a better understanding of ourselves as a couple and that knowledge could have helped to prioritize our decisions.

And that leads to the other side of my wonderings: how would our marriage be different today if we'd known each other as well as we do now (or better even) before starting to plan a wedding and a life together? It seems that I'm learning something new about my husband at least every week, if not more. Not just little things like the fact that he hates black licorice, but things about his character, his dreams, habits and needs and patterns.

Are these things I should have known in advance or are these just things that come from living with/being married to someone no matter how long you've been together?

Nearly half of our courtship consisted of planning a wedding--which doesn't resemble real life. And now we find ourselves in this thing called marriage, in which he is my spouse and I am his. And some days it is really hard. We don't have a well of experiences to reach into. We don't have shared adventures and stories and friends. We can't look back and think of times that were worse or better than this. This short year is all we have had.

But we have many years in front of us. And I suppose in the long run that's all that really matters.

Not Loving My Wedding

Meg at APW asked an interesting question yesterday--one I've thought of many times* but seems like the kind of thing no one says out loud. She wanted to know if anyone didn't love their wedding.

YES! My answer is a resounding yes!

As far as weddings go, there really isn't much I would change. We had a good party, we spent time with family and friends, we got legally hitched, we ate good food and ended up with great pictures. There were some stressful moments** in the planning process, at the same time, much of of the planning was fun. I was able to be creative and with the help of my mom and some good friends all my ideas came to life and were even better than I imagined. And it was most definitely a good time. 

 Still doesn't mean I loved it.

It was a tiring, busy day. Even though we planned the day so that we could spend time with people it didn't really work out. Yes, we got married and yes, it was fun to walk down the isle and see my husband and yes, it was important to say the "I do's" in front of everyone.***

Except, not really. I know for some people that's a really transcendent moment. It's life-altering and momentous. It's the happiest day of their life.**** Not for me. Am I glad we did it? For our families and the friends who were there and enjoyed it, sure. For me, no way. I never wanted a wedding. I always wanted to be married, yes--but a wedding, no. Before we even got engaged Husband and I talked about a tiny wedding somewhere on the coast with just our immediate families and possibly a friend or two. I dreamed of short white dresses and no fuss and standing on a cliff somewhere to say our vows with hot drinks inside after it was over. Once we were engaged it suddenly became VERY important to my then-fiance to have a "real wedding." With guests and vows and flowers and invites, and, it must be said, presents. We fought about it a lot. And then, I gave in.

But I should have fought harder. We're not the up-front, make a fuss over us type. We're the slipping away and surprising everyone with "guess what? we're married!" kind of people. And I knew it. And it would have been a wedding that I loved. 

*In fact, Husband and I were talking about this last week. He apologized and said he should have listened to me. That made me feel better about the whole thing.
**Ok, tons of stressful moments.
***I appreciate everyone who came to our wedding and everyone who helped out. Just because I didn't love it, doesn't mean I'm not glad you enjoyed it and that you were there.
****Seriously? How can that be?

Not Very Resolute

I don't really believe in resolutions for the new year. Maybe it's because one can only be disappointed so many times by never living up to them, but I think it has more to do with all the extra pressure put on by New Year's resolutions. It's like this huge new start to your life... except really, it's not. It's just putting up a new calendar and remembering to write a new end on dates. By February it feels just like the previous year and all those good new plans are forgotten.

This year my new "start to life," as it were, began in September when Husband and I were married. That's when I made new resolutions, when my life changed, when my routines and habits adjusted (or at least started to). Maybe I should make that my time to check in every year and see how I'm doing compared to where I want to be?








Wedding photo: by the excellent Ben Blood. 

A Shameless Plug for the Movie UP

Watch the movie UP. (Disclaimer: I love just about anything Pixar does. But still. Watch it.)

I saw it in the theatre and would have watched it seven more times in the theatre but Husband put his foot down. Last week it finally, FINALLY came out on DVD and he surprised me with a copy right away. Yes, he knows the way to my heart is through even more adorable dogs ("I was hiding under your porch because I love you... can I stay?").

Beyond the amazing graphics, excellent soundtrack, talking dogs and lots of balloons... well, beyond that is the real reason I love the movie. It's the story of an lonely old guy who heads out on a fantastic adventure--the adventure he and his late wife never did get to have. Taking that adventure was his last gift to her. But, of course, she had an even better gift for him: the late-in-the-movie reminder that their life together had been one big adventure. The biggest and best of all.

And that's what I want from this marriage: that when it's all over and done the whole thing--big pieces and little, tiny everyday moments--is the greatest adventure of my life. 

Off and running

So. I got married. It's been about a month and a half... or has it been a lifetime? Everything is different and yet it's startlingly the same.


During the wedding-planning process I found an abundance of wedding eye-candy blogs and a few more realistic wedding-dissecting ones. Now I see blogs devoted to babies and decorating and other worthy ventures. But only a few from the lovely ladies in the middle--newly married and navigating this new, complicated miracle that is our life.

And I want to join them. It seems like a fitting time to start a new blog about our life. But not just our life: life in general. Married life, specifically. And our puppies. And food (mmmm, how the mister and I love good food!). And whatever else seems appropriate.

So. Here I go!