one year ago today…

…I married my love.

And I'm increasingly convinced that it was an excellent decision! He is my best friend…the one I can trust with everything. The one who makes me laugh until I can't breathe. The one who holds me when I'm crying for no apparent reason, without trying to fix me. He provides for me, and helps me, and fixes my car and eats whatever I cook without complaining.

Babe, you are a treasure. Thanks for marrying me. I'm looking forward to many anniversaries to come!

For all of you who are not my husband (he's seen the photos a few times!), here are more pictures of our wedding day. With some explanatory notes.

Note: all images courtesy of SoulCam Photography. More info on Scott and Robyn at the end of the post.

The "free" dress. Also a great example of how strong command hooks are.


Me wondering if they could just drop it over my head from here.


my shoes were a ten dollar bargain, with vintage clip-on earrings that kept falling off. Hot glue gun to the rescue!


Thanks to my amazing friend/hair stylist/makeup artist, most people probably didn't realize that I was sick. Another friend/bridesmaid recommended several supplements/herbal remedies and such, so I was drinking weird teas and extracts and really really hoping I didn't sneeze on my groom.


Here's my handsome man…not the slightest bit nervous, he says. Being in the Air Force, he's used to pomp and circumstance and ceremonies & such.


I loved my flowers. I had seen an all-green boquet at a wedding years ago, and it had stuck in my mind. Looking at it now, I still love it, but it maybe doesn't go all that well with everything else. Oh well. It's dried beautifully into shades of cream and green and brown and sits in my dining room. The necklace was my "something borrowed." The friend who lent it, along with a beautiful pair of earrings, also jumped in at the last minute and took care of all those weird details you don't even think of until that day. Like fixing all the bridesmaids' necklaces (magnetic clasps and chokers don't mix all that well!) and handing off payment to the espresso bar guy.


I loved the bridesmaids' bouquets! Those silvery gray ball things…I never knew anything like that existed! that's really a living, growing thing!


Since it was January, we had a snow girl, rather than a flower girl. I found silver snowflake confetti, and she scattered it down the aisle. From what I hear, she was bound and determined to scatter ALL of it, and stood at the end for a bit, trying to empty the basket!


Good thing she didn't dump all of them, though, as the remaining ones gave her something to do during the ceremony!


We said our vows, poured our sand and sealed it all with a kiss. or two.


I think I started to relax as we walked back down the aisle together. The important part was over, and at the end of the day, it's the ceremony, the vows, the things we said to each other before God and all those witnesses that really mattered. From this point on, the soup could be burned, the chairs could collapse, the heat could not work, but we would still be married.




At our first meeting with the wedding coordinator, when she and I were gabbing on about trees with white lights on the stage, and silver branches and snowflakes here and there, and where everyone would stand and who was walking me down the aisle and prelude and postlude music and all that, Dave was mostly concerned with what time he had to show up, and where he could get his uniform on. I know there are some grooms who are very involved in the look and feel of a wedding, but Dave was happy to let me handle most of those kinds of details! There was, however, one thing that he was insistent about. I was informed early on in the planning that we would have a "McCracken Cake" for our reception! Betty is a friend of Dave's family, and has been baking cakes for them pretty much all his life. It was as delicious as it was beautiful!


The photographers have this fun thing they do called the crazy booth. We failed to have it announced early on in the reception, so we don't have as many random photos of the guests as we may otherwise have had, but it made for some really fun shots as things started wrapping up.

I am much more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it!


the brother and his wife


the other brother and his wife


my girls :) I could write entire posts on each of these girls and the unique relationship I have with every one of them. I love them each dearly…and am so very glad they were all able to be there for this day. I also really love their outfits! I bought enough tops for me to have one, too, and I've worn it several times since then.


another group of ladies whom I love.


I met our wedding photographer almost 20 years ago, when I was a student at Word of Life Bible Institute, and he was the staff photographer there in the upstate New York headquarters. We didn't stay in touch much, but a few years ago, in one of my phases of googling people from my past, I came across his blog and found that he and his wife were really stellar wedding photographers! I loved the idea of someone I knew doing our photos…and knew that we would get some great images of our day with Scott and Robyn on the job. I'm so glad they were willing to travel, toddler and all, and I really love the images they captured.