Man Food

There's a hungry man in my house, and his hunger cannot be satisfied with my old singlehood favorites like grilled chicken and lettuce.  Heck, I used to eat chips and salsa for dinner. Hungry man calls that half an appetizer. I've got to change my ways.

When I inherited hungry man, he came with a pantry full of disjointed ingredients that I feel I must use because I hate wasting food. 

I was staring at said pantry around dinner time and picked up and stared at a bag of lentils for the eighteenth time when hungry man happened to walk by and said "I love lentils!"

I heard that marriage was all about compromise, and now I believe it. I took his beloved lentils and I made chick food out of it that was so good he tweeted about it and volunteered to do the dishes. 

I bring to you: the Mighty Lentil Burger

Ingredients:

• 3 cups cooked lentils
• ½ tsp salt
• ½ medium onion, diced
• ½ tsp pepper
• 1 tsp soy sauce
• 1 fresh clove of garlic, pressed
• 1 tsp worcestershire sauce
• ½ cup rolled oats, finely ground
•  ½ cup bread crumbs
• 1 egg

Directions: Sauté the onion in oil until soft, about 5 minutes. Mix the lentils, onions, pepper, egg, garlic, soy, and worcestershire sauces in the large bowl, then mix in the ground oats and bread crumbs. Form the lentil mixture into patties and cook em up immediately in a frying pan with some olive oil. Dress it up real nice like I did down here. Eat up and love your life. 

all this beauty

It's been an eventful month here in Wheaton.
Tim and I have been shooting weddings every weekend, getting the house in order, cooking seemingly healthy meals, and trying to have as few newlywed mishaps as possible. This includes not elbowing each other's faces in the middle of the night, not hurting each other's feelings with careless humor, and not accidentally dumping each other's wallets in the washer along with our clothes. It's going fairly well.
We're living the delectable life of people who work from home on our own schedule. I won't tell you how late we sleep in every morning because I just can't bring myself to admit it to the world.

My work is getting better. I feel less like a wedding crasher and more like a competent photographer with every wedding. Tim exuberantly gushes over my good photos every week and slides past my failures like they never existed.
Here's a few of my favorites that I've taken so far:

Tim handles of all the important moments and poses while I catch the details. This has to be the easiest way to learn this gig. I can't believe my chance at 1) getting this guy to fall for me 2) convincing him it was his idea to let me shoot with him and 3) learn the technicals at my own pace while he takes care of the hard stuff.
We are completely blown away by all the love and support we've received through wedding gifts. I wade through them every day on my way to the coffeepot (which is also a wedding gift) and I just can't believe how nice people are. Everything around me in my house was given to me. I didn't have to work for any of it. Such grace!
Tim's incredible friends are becoming my incredible friends too, and each time I grow a little closer to them, I get all choked up at how sweet and kind God is to put me in the middle of such good people. They threw us a party the other night, because we got married a thousand miles away and they couldn't handle the non-celebration any longer.

Do you see how fun they are? No, let me show you more.

Whenever I move to a new town, and it's happened plenty of times in my life, I expect a certain level of anonymity for at least the first couple of years. Not so here in Wheaton. I know the barista at the coffee place from bible study, I run into so and so's Mom at the grocery store, and this girl down here has figured out I've got the stash when it comes to dresses and comes over to borrow them and we hang out. I am known already. 

It's a good feeling.

I don't know why I've been given this good life. It's all ice cream and chocolate cake right now. I don't know when it's going to get hard or which parts are going to evaporate without warning.

But anyhow, enough of that.

Honeymoon

Door County, Wisconsin

And when it was over, we got to come home to this sweet, comfortable, colorful, musical work in progress:

Life is beautiful

convinced.

One week ago today, I married the right person.
I am so at peace knowing this for sure. For all the worrying and dating and agonizing and waiting and over-analyzing of every relationship decision I ever made (and I made several wrong ones) this might be the greatest relief of my life; to know beyond any doubt that I chose the right husband.
I knew we were compatible before he proposed, I confidently said my vows before God and many witnesses at our ceremony, but then on the day we got home to Wheaton my heart nestled into a place of incredible security that we did not err on this decision to be married and the vows we made to stay together until death separates us.
I am Tim's wife, and I was never supposed to belong to anyone else.

We did it

a little bitter and a lot of sweet

How are you supposed to feel 4 days before your wedding? I keep asking myself this. We've had a crazy week around here.

Nine days ago, while on a mission trip to Guinea, West Africa, Tim's brother Marc started having terrible headaches. They progressed to the point that the team there decided to send him home to France. This was a terrible worry for Tim's family because they were not in France to welcome him home, they were here in Florida getting ready for our wedding. It took 5 hours in a bush taxi,  an overnight stay in a national hospital in Conakry, Guinea, a flight to Paris, and an 8 hour train ride to get Marc to the hospital near home in Grenoble where he was diagnosed with a form of hydrocephalus. Due to a hardened and malfunctioning valve that regulates cerebro-spinal fluid levels inside Marc's skull, fluid was building up pressure to dangerous levels and causing him terrible pain. He had to have emergency brain surgery to drain the fluid and release the pressure, and his family was an ocean away from his bedside.

This was heartbreaking. A mother's worst nightmare, to say the least. Marc made it through surgery and woke up with great relief from pain, but the doctors were not satisfied with the results and fear they will have to go in again to implant a permanent shunt inside Marc's skull to continue to drain out the excess fluid.

After much deliberation and agonizing, Tim's mother decided to fly home to France to be with Marc. On Wednesday morning, 7 days before our wedding,  Tim flew into Tampa and got to spend one hour with his mom in the airport terminal before her flight left for France.

To say that we are sad that these two precious family members will not be at our wedding would be an understatement. I can't even talk about it without crying. We grieve the loss of their presence even in these preparation days, but that grief is little compared to the relief and peace we all feel that Marc is not alone.  

There will be two empty chairs at our ceremony, and no one is allowed to sit in them.

A wise pastor of mine once said that in these hard situations, we are not to ask "Why, God?" It's not our business to know His reasons.  Instead, we should ask "What are you doing? How can I join in and be part of your plan?"

I keep asking this, and for now all I know to do is to marry Tim and have the sweet little beach wedding we've been planning. So today we wrote our vows and I picked up my wedding dress and Tim's ring and then we took the families down to the very important beach to scope out what our ceremony time will look like.

It should make for a nice backdrop, no? We're getting married here because decorating stresses me out and I figured the heavens could do it for me instead.

So that's what wedding week looks like here. Our first guest arrives today and it's all madness from there. Here we go.

the only good use of a Nicholas Sparks novel

I loathe Nicholas Sparks for his crimes against women's emotional expectations of romance and healthy relationships. So I'm destroying his book in order to create these flowers for my wedding. How's that for romance, Nikky?