...or a couple of mornings in this case, and i feel like a sore little wreck! but happy!
it's monday morning and i helped with a wedding on saturday. it turned out beautiful and i couldn't be happier for our friends Brad and Lence who are happily honeymooning at the moment. but today....today i ache everywhere. today i am reminded that i may have over done it just a touch. just a smidge. i'm 33 weeks pregnant, and i, well, i may have run around like i was not pregnant at all on saturday. really though, i had lots of help and the excitement and the adrenaline kept me hopping and motivated.
i had been sewing the table runners for the wedding for about a month. i'm so thankful i listened to my very wise husband and that i didn't put it off till the last minute. i made 7 of them. 6 of them were almost 12 feet long and 1 was about 4 feet long for the sweetheart table. thursday i picked up the flowers and put them all into water so they could open and be beautiful. friday the mother of the groom and her sister came over for awhile and helped me finish up the balls of flowers, decorate mason jars and the other jars that would be hanging from various places around the garden. it was wonderful to have their help! friday evening i made the bouquets and then i went to the "rehearsal" dinner and to the actual wedding site to go over everything with our friends. matt was going to marry them so he stayed home and finalized his message and i went to go over the details with the bride and groom. we know our strengths and weaknesses. haha!
they got married in the garden of a local bed and breakfast. the garden is beautiful in and of itself, but we made it look even more gorgeous! there was a fountain in the center of the garden that the owner was able to turn off and drain a little bit so that i could arrange flowers in it. then we set up all the tables so that it was family style. 6 long tables. it made it look like a wedding as soon as we rearranged the tables. we also hung things from the trees, put up white lights, draped the tables with tablecloths, the runners, and various sizes of mason jars with candles. i also bought a box of moss and spread that around on the tables to break up the runners and make it look a little more garden-ish. the original plan was to get married by the fountain, but we switched it to under a tent that we peeled the original top back on and brad's family helped me hang cream sheer fabric up on it. this created an ethereal place for them to exchange vows under.
the bride and i had discussed all of the details frequently over the last several months. she created all kinds of cute DIY things and combining those with the things i had made, well, it all came together in the end. it is truly amazing to see something you have been thinking about be actualized. i will post pictures when i get some from the photographer. i was too busy with everything else to carry my camera around all night. i will probably regret that, but oh well.
on to matt's message...can i just say that i am married to such a gifted man! his message was on trust and i wish that i could print the whole thing here for you to read. (if you really are interested in reading it, email me and i would be more than happy to forward it to you!) so trust...there are a few lines that i want to quote here....
"I contend this evening that without trust, we are sentenced to a relationship of fraud and isolation..."
"I truly believe this is the hardest lesson to learn regarding a successful marriage let alone relationships in general. To trust each other, trusting that someone else cares, that someone else is truly concerned about you, that someone else will take care of your needs…this is the hardest thing of all.
It’s hard because we are trust hoarders, collecting and storing all of our trust for and in ourselves. Left to our own devices we are the inwardly lonely, and emotionally emaciated selves. Ironically and somewhat paradoxically, the big secret is that Trust is something we are to share with others, it’s something that opens ourselves up to new relationships and experiences…and on a more cosmic scale I believe trust in someone else is exactly where we find God’s tangibility in the world, hidden in plain sight as it were. "...
and this is when i started to cry...
"But let’s face it, trusting even the one’s most near and dear to us is hard enough, trusting a God you cannot see taste or touch is even harder. That is why I think God blesses trusting relationships, and in this case marriage. He knows we need time and experience to recognize Him. Like everything else in this world, doing hard things takes practice. In marriage we choose our mate to be the one person we practice trust with more intimately and consistently than any other. And in this practice, this commitment we set ourselves on a path toward developing the eyes to see and the ears to hear what in fact makes us truly human. Trust. Trust that our spouse will never abandon us. Trust that there is someone in the world -if no one else- who cares for us. Trust that God will pour out His grace upon your relationship to make it possible to forgive each other when you betray –and you will. Trust that at the end of this life you’ll survey a wedding, a home, fights, jokes, a reassuring smile in an uncomfortable situation, timely hug, thousands of nights spent in arm and leg tangled sleep…and declare “We have loved each other like no other in trust and grace.”
Brad and Lence, I’m not really sure – mostly because I never really asked – how much you trust that God cares about you…and to be honest I don’t really know how much I really trust His love myself. But what I do know is that God has loved me like no other through my wife Lydia. He speaks to me through her love, speaks words that I could not hear, that I would not believe if I didn’t trust her, if I did not trust Him."
it was truly beautiful! and meaningful and ...sigh...really very special. i learned this weekend that though matt and i are oil and water in many ways, we compliment each other. we were ourselves. we didn't bury the talents God has given us. instead we used them to show our friends how much we care about them. and how much we love and are learning daily to trust each other.
the baby of the house turned three yesterday and so, i guess, officially loses her title of "baby of the house". yesterday morning we woke up bright and early and gave beatrix her first present. i knew that this present would get used all day long. grandma and grandpa harrison sent her a new swim suit.
she loved it!
after a breakfast of cinnamon rolls, friends of ours, who were visiting from michigan and happened to be staying with us during beatrix's birthday, went swimming. then we got dressed and went to the turtle sanctuary. i wanted them to see the sea turtles and i thought it would be fun for beatrix since her birthday theme was turtles and thomas the tank engine. (we had a T party) i did not take my camera because i have taken pictures of the kids at the turtle sanctuary many times. however, when we arrived we were told that they were releasing one of the turtles back into the ocean at noon that day. so i have no pictures of that (bummer!), but it was an incredible thing to witness and a pretty special memory for bea's 3rd birthday. we also played around on the beach afterwards for an hour or so and we all got burned. the sun felt wonderful!
we had lunch and matt put the kids down for a nap while our friends' kids went swimming. while our kids were napping i made bea's cupcakes. i saw a picture of these on a site called pinterest and knew i had to make them for bea. it was micah's idea to use the graham crackers as sand.
she loved them!
the sign i made had thomas colors (from her party hats) and sea turtles.
a cooking set from auntie dajana and uncle peter.
a jewelry box from pastor shirley and mr. jim.
and a thomas matching game from grandpa and grandma harrison. my parents also sent beatrix a big box of all kinds of treasures like halloween pencils, straws and bubbles, flash cards, suckers, a coloring book, and a card with $10 in it. i forgot to take a picture of her opening it because we were outside by the pool. sorry mom and dad but she loved it!
our friend ashlea came over for cupcakes too and she had a card for beatrix. after bea opened the card ashlea took beatrix outside to her car. all the kids followed like little ducks to see what bea was going to get. ashlea had been planning this for months. she got to the car, opened the door and handed bea the largest....
...turtle float ever! you should have seen bea's face. she gasped!
it was a wonderful day! beatrix couldn't stop smiling and it was a day full of taking in the moments and enjoying every second. matt and i were sitting on the beach watching her and i said to him, "i never want to forget this".
