How It All Began: The Romantic, The Terrible, The Hilarious

This week, my beloved husband and I will celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. I told you here how we met and about our engagement.

Let me just say that too many people focus on the wedding as the big event, but it is actually the marriage that is the event. A wedding is just a celebration of the beginning of what is truly important. It saddens me to hear of brides paying on the wedding long after the marriage has dissolved.

Another common sentiment that I have found to not be true is the "first year the hardest" theory. I guess the idea is you are getting used to each other and you have a lot of adjustments to make. We were so excited to be together that trying to "get through the first year" was laughable to us. We thoroughly enjoyed that year and every year since.

So are we special or did we do things exactly right in order to make it this far? Of course not. Only by the grace of God my husband and I are more in love now than we were on our wedding day. Putting two stubborn firstborns together who enjoy getting their own way could be a recipe for disaster, but God has been with us every step of the way, gently leading and correcting when the need arose. We are looking forward to what He wants to do in our lives for the next 10 years!

I'm not going to tell you every detail of our wedding day and those leading up to it, but I will tell you a few of the highlights and post pictures later this week.

The Terrible

• One of our singers got laryngitis the night before the wedding!
• I almost blew my blusher veil into the flame while blowing out the unity candle!
• Everyone who stayed at a local hotel conveniently disappeared at checkout time leaving my poor groom scrambling to find them in time to get to the church (and wondering if he was going to have to pay the bill!).
• Our car broke down the first weekend of our honeymoon so my parents had to deliver a part to us and my new husband spent some time underneath our car so we could get to our next destination.
  

The Hilarious

• My younger brother and sister got into a water fight in the bathroom while I was at home getting ready for the wedding and my parents were decorating the reception hall. I had to break it up, and did NOT think it was hilarious at the time!
• In my husband's desperate attempts to find his absent wedding party, he called our house and I answered the phone. The first words he spoke were, "I'm not supposed to be talking to you!" We had agreed to have no contact on our wedding day until I walked down the aisle.
• Since we spent every moment together on our honeymoon and had the same experiences, we had the same dream one night. A little freaky, but funny none-the-less!
  

The Romantic

• My husband-to-be left our house just before midnight the night before the wedding but not before scraping the bottom of my wedding shoes so they wouldn't be too slippery the next day.
• Jeff had my one red rose delivered the morning of our wedding along with a sweet note.
• I was "carried over the threshold" twice--once into the place we stayed our first night and once into our first home.