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.

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