Wedding planning, made easy.

I can see how people go crazy and turn into Bride-zillas with all the planning and decision-making involved in the production of a wedding. Especially when one is trying to make all the "stakeholders" feel as though they're having their fair say in things. Thus far, most of our stakeholders have done a really good job of restraining themselves when I'm sure they'd love to jump in and plan the whole thing, and I appreciate that. There have been a handful of minor-ly stressful moments (mostly attributable to lack of sleep and/or overwhelmed-ness with other facets of life), but all in all, the planning is going, well, really well.

I got my dress (which is sort of hilarious, as I bought it without being positive about the size or the design... it fits perfectly and is so beautiful that I can't imagine a more perfect dress for me). That took... oh, about a week.

We booked the venue (one we found on the very first day of looking at venues, after deciding neither of us was really willing to convert to Catholicism in order to get married at Dubina). Granted, we booked it more than a month after we found it (we found it a couple of weeks before we were "technically" engaged), but anyway, that was pretty easy.

Actually, finding Josh turned out to be pretty easy, too. It seems crazy, and at our first pre-marital counseling session, our counselor (Jammin' Judy) even said, "So, realistically, how do you think it sounds when you tell me you've only known each other since April and now you're getting married?" Yeah, yeah, Judy; it sounds ridiculous. But like I've said before, I just "knew." Josh says he knew on date #2 (which, incidentally, was at Dubina, thus the desire to have the wedding there). In a recent de-briefing with Jenny, I said, "Jenny, we haven't even talked about what you think about Josh since you met him!" to which she replied, "Friend, we don't even have to. Of course he's great! I knew you were going to marry him after your first date!"

So, yeah, so this whole wedding/marriage/life-partner/teammate thing, well, so far, so good. :)



(PS- I have a beautiful new niece who is pretty much the cutest little snuggle bug of all time. Lexi-lou [actually, it's Lexi Suzanne] was born on 7-16 and she and momma are doing quite well, thank you very much.)

Extra, extra, somebody's getting married!!!

Yay! Josh and I are getting married! It's now officially official (though it's been unofficially official for at least a couple of weeks). I could go into lots of detail on the back story of how we met and fell in love, but for present purposes, I'll just give our engagement story. :)

So, Josh and I have known that we wanted to get married pretty much since we met. Actually, I knew on the second day we exchanged e-mails. But THAT is another story. So, we made a definite decision on the ring last Saturday and went ahead and bought it then. They needed to size it down for my tiny fingers and told us it would be ready on Tuesday afternoon. The original plan was to make sure the ring fit on Tuesday before it was shipped off to Josh's mom in New Mexico. With the ring out of sight/out of mind, Josh would get his wish of surprising me and officially/formally asking me to marry him. To me, he was [and is] my surprise, so I was sort of ambivalent about the whole surprise-official-proposal-business. Well, we both got exactly what we wanted (both in each other and in the proposal process).

So Monday afternoon, Josh called and told me that Kruger's called and that my ring wouldn't be ready until Wednesday morning. In another phone call, he told me that since my mom would be in town, his friend LyAnna had arranged a tour of the capitol dome for us Tuesday morning. The dome has been off-limits to visitors without special permission since 9/11. With the recent fiasco at the governor's mansion, we were told that it's strictly off-limits. So, the fact that we got to go up into the dome at all was pretty special (many thanks to Mark, the state trooper who came up on his day off to lead us up into the dome).

We met inside the capitol around 11:00 am, took the elevator up to the 4th floor, and then had to call for permission to go above that. Mark led us through a barred and locked door on the 5th floor and we began the twisty ascent upstairs. After climbing hundreds of stairs, we got to a small room at the top. If you've been in the capitol, you've probably seen the star with TEXAS surrounding it on the top of the dome. We were eye-level with that star. Above that, there is another windy staircase to the very top. Josh said, "I want to go all the way up. You coming with me, Babe?" I replied with some witty comment about descending into the tomb of Thutmoses the III and then having the electricity go out (in Egypt; yet another story), and that I was surely climbing all the way to the top of the capitol. Mom was complaining about her knee, and LyAnna claimed to be afraid of heights, so they stayed behind while J & I headed up together.

I was completely oblivious to even the thought that Josh would be asking me to marry him when we got up those stairs (probably because it was so hot and we'd been doing so much climbing). However, as soon as we got up, he turned me around, took my face in his hands and said, "OK, Babe, now it's just the two of us up here," and THAT'S when I realized what was going on.

I'll leave the details of that conversation between us...

However, I did, of course, say yes, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Please check out our photos on Picasa. We're very happy and excited! Thank you for all your well-wishes!