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.

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