so cute

This right here is just the most adorable moment. Tim's grandmother, affectionately known to her family as Mamie Suzanne, turns the corner into her 80th birthday party, shocked at the huge crowd gathered in a little church to celebrate her.

Mamie Suzanne is the matriarch of a community of Christians living in Grenoble, France. Her son (my father in law) now pastors the church that her husband planted in 1967, and the congregation loves and respects her so much.

At her party, everyone who wanted to share got up and told stories of how Mamie Suzanne had blessed and encouraged them over the years, and helped them to better understand the love of God. She's already left such a great legacy in her wake.

I love grandparents. I have four of them, which is unusual and incredible and a huge deal on its own, so I can't believe my fortune to have another sweet grandmother in my life now. I will meet her for the first time this Christmas when Tim and I get to France to celebrate. Parties!!

my coffee snobbery knows no bounds

One of the things I miss most about Kansas City is all the delectable coffee shops I had within 10 minutes of my house in midtown. I'm talking about the kind where the good folks behind the counter were career baristas and barely thought me worthy of a second glance unless I dropped a fiver in their tip jar, and I never had that much cash. I knew my place in those shops. I'd smile and order something easy, knowing that even the spare drips from their high end espresso machines could stop me in my tracks as I scampered out of their way with my Americano to find a table just so I could keep breathing in the rich coffee air and let it infuse my clothes for a pick-me-up later in the day.

I would say it's my one guilty pleasure, but I have lots of guilty pleasures, so I won't.

There is nothing of the sort here in Wheaton, and that's usually fine. But sometime I get a hankering for expensive espresso and Caribou and Starbucks just can't deliver. Woe is me. My life is so hard.

Tim and I have an unspoken rule that whenever we do a photo-shoot in downtown Chicago, we get a date in the city afterwards.  Last week we stumbled up Caffe Streets, and melted a little inside.  

It was this good:

Thank you. Thank you. And once again; I thank you. Latte art is the way to my heart.

Chapter 1: October 25th, 2010

Today is a marked day for us. I wasn't going to write about it or tell the story for fear of the general public thinking our decisions over the past year were brash or unwise, but all day I've been marveling at  the beautiful changes in my life that started one year ago today,  so I guess opinions don't really matter.  On this day last year, I found Tim.

On October 25th, 2010 at 4:39pm, I was doing what I do a lot; browsing a photography blog. The Smiley Face Collective had a beautiful post and I left a comment.  

After I submitted the comment, I glanced at the other comments in the box and saw the name "tim tab" above mine, and I thought that was very odd. When people use funny internet aliases instead of their proper names, I just think it's dumb. So I clicked on the dumb alias to see who this person was. It led me to another photo blog. 

The pictures were exceptional, so I looked through a few posts. Pretty soon I started seeing wedding pictures from France. This really grabbed at my attention because I grew up in France and I have never seen particularly good photography of French lifestyles. I haven't been back to France since I was 11, so my memories were in a time warp and these pictures were opening up a new understanding for me of how young people do life and weddings in France. I was fascinated, so I expressed my appreciation through another comment on this Tim Tab's blog (this timestamp is an hour off,  I really left the comment at 4:47 pm)

After that, I switched over to the photographer's profile to find out who this person was. 

I had to read it a few times to fully grasp that there was a real person living on this earth who had that resume of life experiences. This guy was around my age, worked my dream job, went to the same university that my dad graduated from--which I had been hearing about my whole life--to study the same degree that I got, and he grew up in France, just like me. Besides that, he appeared to be a highly motivated, hard-working person to own his own business at the age of 24. He seemed very down to earth, and had a goofy sense of humor that made me chuckle condescendingly. And he was very, very cute.
I sat back from the computer screen and wondered what was going on. It was all very strange and frustrating. This little bio was the most fascinating one way conversation I've had in my life: he had laid out the basics of his story and there was no way I could respond. He lived 8 hours away and we had no friends in common (although I found out later that we did).
I decided that the best thing to do was forget those 20 minutes of internet snooping because they would only drive me crazy. Tim Tab, whatever his real name was, was a figment of the internet and not anyone I could actually meet, so that was it.
Later that evening,  I went to hang out with Amy and Natalie. We made pumpkin cookies, ate way too many, and then had a "pute hang" where we sat around in their living room on our computers, browsing and chatting. I checked my email and my heart about stopped when I opened this:

He was flirting with me. I just knew it. He must have followed the link I left to my blog and figured out that we had everything in common and surely he was just trying to start a real conversation. Amy insisted that he was doing nothing of the sort (and she was right) and even though he was a really good photographer, he had way too many typos on his website to be the man of my dreams. I told her, adamantly, that she was wrong and she rolled her eyes. Then I started a reply to him, smiling at the screen with my hands poised over the keyboard, not knowing what to say. This went on for about 5 days until I finally wrote him back a simple one liner, asking him what his story was and how he got to Chicago from France.

The rest is a long story, and I may tell it in a few more pieces over the next few months if anyone wants to hear it. Some simple math can tell you how fast our relationship moved: we've been married for two months already.  Our families and friends supported our decisions to get engaged after 5 months of dating, and married after 3 months of engagement. I wouldn't advise that pace for anyone else, but it was good and right for us and I wouldn't give up this precious time of already being married or the peace I have in our marriage vows for anything.

Today in honor of this anniversary (and because it really needed to be done), Tim and I changed the text and pictures of his profile to reflect the current state of Tim Tab Studios.

timothee martin

Sometimes we will be doing some very mundane task, and I'll look over at him and be struck all at once by how incredibly handsome he is, how I love him so much it scares me, and how I'd die without him if he was gone. I couldn't possibly love him any more than I do at this moment.
But I will tomorrow.

done!

We are on day 9 of a 10 day long trek from Chicago to San Francisco (to shoot a wedding) to Sarasota for my sister's wedding back to Chicago.  We are tired, and so ready to sleep in our own bed tomorrow night.
This last leg of our trip was really sweet.
My sister always looked forward to her wedding in a completely different way than I did. I mostly saw the wedding as a huge roadblock standing in the way of me and my married life, I couldn't have marriage without hassling through the wedding. I resented a lot of expectations culture placed on my wedding and broke the mold as much as I could. We had a 3 month engagement. I wore an old wedding dress. We had our reception before the ceremony. We got married on a Wednesday. Our bridesmaids and groomsmen were our siblings. We didn't have programs. I figured if we had to have a wedding, we were going to do it our way, and so we did and it was beautiful.

Megan was different. She loved the whole process of a long engagement and wedding planning. She loved picking out the cake and the bridesmaid dresses and decorating the church. I know how much she looked forward to her wedding and so it was a joy to be with her on her wedding weekend, buying her lingerie and having a bachelorette party, attending the rehearsal dinner and telling stories, carrying her cathedral length veil for her and taking her pictures.

And since I'm all about the videos these days, here's one highlighting all the special moments we had together. I shot this on my iPhone, people, so don't expect much. And the music is by Ben Rector. I forgot to site it in the video. Sorry, Ben! Love your stuff!

This season of both of us being engaged and getting married has been really eventful, and as exciting as it all was, I'm really glad that it's all over and we have the memories now. We can settle into this new season of being sisters in the same situation; newlyweds figuring all this out together.

honeymoonin'

Here's a little diddy I put together about our honeymoon to Door County, Wisconsin.
We relaxed it up and saw some pretty things. Enjoy.