We're getting married in exactly twenty days!
Dang.
It's difficult to figure out what I'm the most excited about. Being married (well, duh I guess). Spending time with friends and family. Sarah Dunne putting flowers in my hair.
Oh boy.
Also exciting--Stephen and I signed a contract with a middle school in South Korea. We're definitely doing this thang, and in one of the tiniest apartments in one of the biggest cities in the world. Incheon, South Korea. October, 2009. This. is. awesome.
7.24.2009
Tattoos and Wristwatches
Stephen and I went to the tattoo parlor today so he could get his wedding ring tattooed on his finger. It looks awesome. I get really queasy around needles, so I tried to excuse myself before the process began…then I heard “for better or worse” ringing in my ears and so I stayed, pretty reluctantly to be honest. But I’m glad I was there for it. Steve was very cool. He didn’t cringe or anything. (I did. A lot.)
The result:
We went to Buchroeders, a local independent jeweler (BTW, no conflict diamonds sold there, guaranteed) and I got to custom design my wedding ring! (yeah, no flesh wounds for this girl. Surprised?) It was really fun, and not to turn this into a Buchroeders advertisement or anything, but we got great service. When we walked into that squeaky clean place full of well-dressed people with good posture, I immediately realized that I actually had dirt on my legs, I hadn’t showered in at least three days, and Stephen had holes in his white t-shirt. If they couldn’t have guessed it already, we told them we were cheapskates (during our consultation I eavesdropped on the couple next to us–Their price range was like two grand–just for the bride’s ring! agh!), and our guy, Craig, gave us all the time and attention I imagine he would have given to a woman with diamonds and jewels all over her hands. It really makes you appreciate the midwest. I remember in high school when I went to New York City for the first time–I stopped inside a Tiffany’s or something on 5th Avenue just to check it out, and those people glared at me, not indiscreetly. Anyway, I’m losing track of my digressions. It took us a while to figure out what I wanted, but we discovered and fell in love with smoky quartz, which is a brownish stone that, according to Wikipedia, is formed through the natural (or artificial) irradiation of aluminum-containing rock crystal), and, according to Craig, is the substance they use to make watches tick. So I’m going to have a little white gold band with ten or so tiny smokey quartz cuts set into it. No engagement band. The one I’m wearing now belonged to Stephen’s great Aunt Clara. Stephen’s mom is letting me wear it as an engagement ring, and we all thought it would be nice (especially since I don’t want anything that protrudes too much) to give it back to be used again by one of Stephen’s siblings. It’s a really pretty ring…I’m starting to get attached to it, but I think I will be ready to give it up when it’s time.
I’m not sure if I’m just way more tuned into it than normal because of my own approaching nuptials, but there are soooo many weddings this year. Not even just this year, but the month of August in particular. One of Stephen’s best friends, Rob, is getting married two weeks before us, and so are like four other couples that I don’t know, but you know, friends of friends and stuff. Plus, our friends Chris and Mo got married in May, and we got to be in that wedding, which was really fun! So all of that is really exciting. 2009 is a good year.
Stephen and I have been running around like a couple of chickens with their heads cut off the last few weeks. And speaking of chickens, Stephen’s parents have some in their backyard! And they are some of the funniest animals I’ve ever seen. I was too chicken (har har) to try this, but I watched Stephen catch a chicken, and.. whatever. Whoever came up with the expression about chickens running around with their heads cut off was really dramatic or something, because those animals run around like crazy with their heads attached–no beheading necessary (Stephen is telling me how they don’t have sensory input when they’re heads are cut off. K).
I met the chickens around the beginning of this month when we began the process of moving our belongings to “the apartment” or Stephen’s parents’ guest house on their wonderful little piece of property in Independence, MO. Steve and I are planning on moving to South Korea pretty soon after the wedding to teach English, so his folks are being kind enough not only to let us keep our stuff there while we’re gone, but also to let us sleep there until we’re ready to go. So we are very grateful to them. By the way, the Varners have lived on this property since Stephen was pretty small. It’s a wonderful cottage-style house with lots of land (for a suburban house) where they have a barn (which currently houses five small kittens who were born recently after Stephen’s mom started caring for a stray kitty. Surprise!), a couple of basset hounds named Duke and Daisy, and an amazing garden, plus the chickens. It’s no surprise these folks come from farm families.
Steve’s parents lived in the apartment for a few months or so while they were waiting for the family from which they bought the land to vacate the house. Steve was a baby during this time, so it was Joan, Michael, little Mychel (Steve’s oldest sister) and baby Stephen. (Later, Steve’s parents had two more kids–Stewart, our best man, and Amanda, who is the baby, like me!) Mind you, the apartment is a super charming little building, but it’s tiny for four people. One bedroom, one bath, a living room area, and a sort-of kitchen. So the Varners are troopers. Throughout the years, the apartment has been guest house, band practice locale for Stephen’s high school-era band, and Stewart’s dwelling-place in his last years before army. And now we get to live there for a short period of time, which is pretty neat.
So we’ve taken a few trips back and forth, slowly moving our things to Independence and sort of arranging the place. Even though it’s not going to be our actual “home together” there is something really wonderful about putting our things together and fashioning some kind of home together, however temporary and however scattered. It makes everything so real, and it just feels really, really good. Plus, it’s where Steve grew up, and it’s letting both of us spend time with his parents and youngest sister, which is great.
All the moving out and getting married stuff is happening at a pretty good time–Both our leases end this month, so we have been moving out, cleaning up, and figuring out our respective temporary living arrangements for the month before the wedding–We’ll both be living out of suitcases, me with some girls, him with some boys.
Exhausting.
I went to get my dress altered yesterday, and man, I really, really like that dress.
-Andrea
Gettin' Hitched
So we decided to get geeky and make a wedding blog. Hopefully this will help us communicate with the people we love and share our thoughts and challenges and whatever else comes along during the wedding planning process.
First, I need to get this out of the way–I haven’t kept a blog since high school. And I haven’t written in my personal journal consistently for about a year. Somewhere along the way, without realizing it, I think I may have lost my voice a little bit. So hopefully this little exercise will help me regain it. Already it has brought that much to my attention, which is a good, though uncomfortable thing. To complicate things, I’m now endeavoring to share a blog, so maybe there’s something powerful about the idea of having lost my written voice, now trying to, instead of just regain it, develop/discover Stephen’s and my collective voice.
But I’m still going to use the first person. We don’t want this to get weird :/
So, wedding! Where to start? Well, we got engaged at the end of March. We had been thinking a lot about marriage already, and the words “if” and “when” had become a source of both excitement and discomfort, as we attempted to balance our delight in the idea of marriage together with some sense of wanting to guard ourselves against making a decision too quickly or whimsically. Marriage is serious. We had to know. And anyway, he hadn’t even proposed yet. No one likes to feel presumptuous.
I had been traveling a bit–I went to South Korea (more on that later) to visit a friend in January, and my sisters and I had a little Los Angeles-style reunion in March. The time away was really hard but it turned out to be invaluable to me. I got the much-needed distance and time for reflection, and besides I got to leave the country and see my sisters. So it’s been a good year so far.
When Steve picked me up from the airport after L.A. we had dinner with my mom (who, by the way, drove all the way to Kansas City from Springfield just to buy us dinner. And then drove all the way back to Springfield at like 10pm. And went to work the next morning. She’s a fantastic lady). After dinner, we sat in the Dish parking lot while it poured down raining and got to talking about Stewie, Stephen’s little brother who is in the army and will be deployed to Iraq in September. Somewhere from that sobering realization something else dawned on us–Stewart has to be the best man at our wedding, in the same way that a helium atom has to have two protons in its nucleus (er, whatever). Wait, our wedding? Ohhh, so those freudian slips when I said “when we get married…” instead of “if we get married…” Okay. So what, we’re like engaged now? Are we sure? What? Of course we’re sure!
Still pouring down rain. We’re sitting in the car, so it’s hard to engage in the sort of dignified embrace such an occasion calls for. That’s okay though, we went to Steak ‘n’ Shake because I kind of wanted a milkshake and it just seemed impossible to spend the next two hours talking about this on the way back to Columbia. I got a side-by-side, and gave Steve the cherry. The waitress told us we were an “adorable” couple, which was super encouraging. I felt like I was on my first date. I was jittery. It was great.
We told our families, and they were wonderfully excited, encouraging, supportive, and amazing. This is the happiest, warmest, most at peace I’ve ever felt in my life.
Okay, here’s where the disconnect occurs, I think. We’d had so many wonderful (and sometimes difficult) conversations about what it means to be married, how spouses should treat each other, philosophies about raising kids (eek!), how a married couple should ideally interact with the world–great stuff. We even talked about finances, and the kinds of meals we’d like to make into family staples. All of this marriage talk was about…marriage, obviously. We were SO ready to be married. Here’s what we weren’t ready for: planning a wedding.
Nevertheless, we were excited, throwing around ideas, throwing out some traditional ideas (the garter? why? that’s really very weird to us), and having a good time of fancying ourselves in pretty clothes dancing and being in love. Ahhh,
It wasn’t my intention to make this a suspenseful episode, but that’s it for me now! More on the craziness of wedding planning soon. (We’ll spare you the trivial updates on flower arrangements and wedding shoes. Promise.)
-Andrea
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