wedding nostalgia

I am feeling very nostalgic about our wedding today. I just got done doing some of my patented blog-hopping, which is when I keep clicking on interesting links on various blogs until 2 hours later I’ve realized that I just spent two hours online and I have no idea how I went from Star Wars-themed living rooms to some stranger’s D.I.Y. wedding, and this is where I just found myself: Sherry & John’s wedding.

Their wedding is like the WASPier, more polished older stepsister of our wedding – they even shared the same color theme as us! I loved that they pulled off such a beautiful D.I.Y. wedding, and I also love that Sherry is as details-oriented as I am. It’s heartening to see that they have a successful blog that leans toward some of the same over-sharey, too-many-details, huge word count tendencies that my own always does, too. That being said, they’re a little more adept at knowing when to share a lot and when not to – I feel like their blog is sort of what my blog wants to be when it grows up, except of course that theirs is mostly focused on home renovation and redesign. I’ve also never tried to or even intended on making this a full-time gig – I just want to grow my audience as a writer and see what happens from there.

ANYWAY

Reading about their wedding has made me misty-eyed remembering ours, so I thought I’d force you all to get misty-eyed right along with me. First I looked back at our wedding as it was featured on Offbeatbride.com. Then I went to my Flickr page to peruse the photos from that day, and looked at all our makeshift photobooth pictures, which always make me smile.

I think it’s funny because it’s such a stereotype for a married woman to dwell fondly on her wedding day forevermore and, while I certainly wanted to have a lovely wedding, I just never thought I’d think much about it afterward. Directly afterward, I was honestly just glad it was over. The thing about a D.I.Y. wedding, even when you have so many amazing helpers, is that it’s still pretty much D.I.Y. – do it yourself. I had no greater goal for the actual day of the wedding than to have everything in place so that I could do as little as possible the day-of and just enjoy my wedding. I think I totally succeeded in this, but the whole weekend was so exhausting and exhilarating that by the time it was over and all the friends and relatives had left town I was so relieved.

For the longest time after the wedding, I would say to anyone who asked, “we should have eloped”. I’m pretty sure I’ve said that as recently as a month ago, in fact – and this is almost two years later. I think most of the reason I say this is because I’m still anxiously looking forward to our honeymoon (we’ve indefinitely put it off so it can be really awesome when we finally get to it), and I often think that, while it’s impressive that we only spent less than $2000 on our wedding, that’s also $2000 we could have put toward an elopement in Hawaii or a trip to Europe or something.

But then when I’m in this reminiscing mood and I look back at our wedding pictures, I am really happy we did have an actual wedding, with our friends and family in tow. I don’t think I would trade it even if I could. I don’t think I looked my most beautiful, it wasn’t the most amazing day of my life, and the world did not stop just for us – it was just another day, albeit a day that took months of preparation. I don’t buy into the idea that your wedding day is the happiest day of your life because I just hope my life holds more interesting things than a wedding, but it certainly is one of the most well-documented days of my life so far, and that does make it easy to be happy about it over and over again.

Our wedding day passed by in a blur, and I don’t remember what Trevor said to me during his vows, and we don’t have any copies of my original invitation artwork or his vows left because the hard drive they were on died, but I remember little things very clearly – like crying during the vows, and how Trevor made me stop crying by making me laugh. But I think I cherish most the day we got legally married, which was the week before our wedding, at a judge’s office in Gladstone, with only Trevor’s mom and her boyfriend, my mom, my brother and his girlfriend there. It was short and sweet and we both teared up a little, but neither of us cried, although his mother did – the judge was kind and friendly, and gave us meaningful advice about maintaining a happy marriage, and afterward we went to Claim Jumper for a late lunch, which just added to the surreality of it.

Our 2 year wedding anniversary is in July and part of me can’t believe it’s already been two years, and another part of me can’t believe it’s only been two years – I feel like I both just got married and have always been married to Trevor, all at the same time. It’s weird how someone who was not even known to you 4, 5 years ago is now almost your whole world. Weird and amazing.