Details…
November 10, 2009
So I’m dividing up the photo-caps of the wedding by the galleries the photographer divided into.
Simply because it’s easier for me.
And it’s logical.
And right now both of those things are super sexy to me.
Today is the details – little tiny things that just catch your eye.
Not all of them, because there were tons.
But some.
I'll give you three guesses on who set this particular shot of my wedding ring up...
Gotta show the family loyalty - even on the big day.
Okay. So I was slightly nervous...
Buh-lingity bling.
Flowers my girls carried.
Flowers I carried.
Because they are gorgeous, more of the girls' flowers.
The traditional cry for help - that the boys neglected to tell Nick about...
Every groom needs a little reminder on his wedding day...
Krista made sure to help out with the decor...
And all I wanted was some awesome champagne and cake!
The day was gorgeous.
And little things like this are what really made it.
Plus.
The cake really WAS good.
I want cake.
Wedding Recaps: Day Before – Family Photos
November 9, 2009
The day before the wedding.
I’ll be honest, I was a nervous, cranky wreck.
Panicky, even.
This was a BIG deal, after all.
And while I loved seeing Nicholas, I was still as shaky as I could be.
That’s why it was so awesome to get out and hang out with Abbey, Nick and the photographers.
Having to hug and cuddle and love made us giggle self-consciously, but we secretly loved every minute.
Here are a few of my favorites for your enjoyment…
I have many favorites of the photos total, so this may take a few days…
(all photos taken by Lemin Studios)
Aren't we some cool cats?
We are very awkward subjects and while Abbey can flirt with the camera with the best of them, Nick and I felt VERY odd to be the center of attention.
LOVE.
It’s okay. Abbey loved us both anyway.
Yep. They're crazy!
Abbey thought she was hot stuff with her flirtatious eyes. Nick and I liked the hanging back and pretending we like each other part, too.
Awww. My new family.
We’re a good looking bunch, aren’t we?
I love the way that photo looks against the screen. She was having so much fun – they both were. All of us were.
I’m definitely glad I chose to have a family session the day before – it relaxed us a little bit and made us all remember we like each other.
One of my ALL TIME FAVORITE pictures of my daughter.
Abbey was so loving that day. Some pictures, like this one, didn’t start out being posed at all, but simply us hugging each other like we normally do and being caught in the act.
At the end of the day, I was back to thinking Nick was a rather yummy sort of man.
And he thought I was all right too.
That’s love for you.
Don’t worry – more to come… mush included.
A bit o’ marital honesty.
November 7, 2009
It’s wedding day once again in the Sparks Labello household and so the running around has commenced.
Okay.
It’s not MY wedding and that’s all that matters.
These kids are getting married at 18… the same age my parents got married. Which really makes me wonder what the HELL they are thinking.
Not that I’m against young marriages.
I just think they’re fucking retarded.
I think it must come with the age. MY age. And the fact that I’m the parent of a child only 5 years younger.
And I’d lock her in a kennel if she thought of doing something so totally life-altering and idiotic.
Life is a battlefield.
November 6, 2009
I’ll be honest.
I’m slow to anger.
Quick to get over it.
I always have been.
The idea of holding on to something so tightly that you keep those negative feelings with you is so alien to me – but I realize that it’s quite natural for some people.
Some people wouldn’t have a clue how to get past things even if they tried.
Because they don’t come very natural to me at all, I’ve always thought grudges were a waste and unhealthy.
I still do, but apparently, at the moment, I am the object of one.
Rather sad, considering the person who is angry with me – not someone I’d ever want angry with me. I love them dearly.
And I’m also flabbergasted.
The event that happened – and I’m not naming her or the event – happened on my wedding day.
Some things I don’t remember about my wedding day, especially the beginning of it.
I remember being so nervous that I was throwing up all morning.
I remember feeling as though I were moving through a fog.
I remember the constant phone calls, giving directions, answering questions, getting last minute decor and items to where they needed to go – or at least delegating that part.
Some things couldn’t be found.
Some things STILL have yet to be found.
One of those things lost on that day (but found a few days later) is at the root of this problem.
A gift that this person put TONS of hard work into. Hours you can’t even imagine.
I chose not to mention on the day of that this item was missing and in doing so either made the impression that it didn’t matter or she wasn’t appreciated.
I’ve apologized days later when I realized (as my brain calmed down) that I hadn’t before.
To no avail.
She’s a grudge holder.
And I love her dearly and hate this negative feeling that she holds. I hate it for her.
Especially since she does have a reason to be hurt and angry. Had I explained on the day of, perhaps this would have been taken care of.
The situation itself was one of those things – not planned, but regretted – that happens in our lives.
I couldn’t have taken upon the responsibility of finding the item that morning.
And those that tried couldn’t make heads nor tails of the chaos the day brought.
I have no idea where it was during the search or how it ended up at my apartment afterwards.
But my apology was sincere.
I do sincerely regret that she was hurt.
I am actually very selfishly regretting the missed photo opportunity, which I’ll be honest enough to admit upsetted me on the day of more than most anything else. The gift is gorgeous and I’m materialistic.
I’m not sure if I could do more to make up for it.
But grudges are unfamiliar creatures and I can’t battle the pathways of one and come out sanely.
So I’ll sit back and wait for her to work through whatever one has to work through.
It hurts though.
It was my wedding day.
And I’m frustrated enough to note that she never asked about said item nor brought up afterwards that she was upset with me.
I don’t think that’s fair – not after this many years of friendship. I think that’s really unfair.
But honest enough to know that admitting organization fault immediately should have been my first choice.
I don’t want to count this heavy cloud of awfulness as a memory on my wedding day – a pall on it.
But I suppose it is/will be.
Have a lost a friend for good?
I don’t know.
It would seem very silly if that were the case.
An absent-minded bride is hardly an unusual thing.
If sincere regret and apologies don’t help, well.
I have no weapons to fight this battle with then.
I suppose I’ll have to retreat and regroup.
And wait for her to make the first move.
What would be on YOUR list?
November 5, 2009
Thirty Things to Do While (and maybe slightly before) I’m Thirty.
1. Go on a REAL honeymoon. That means more than a weekend.
2. Exercise to the point where I can run a 5k without stopping.
3. Volunteer during the holidays.
4. Pay off my school loans.
5. Learn to ride a bike on busy city streets.
6. Start – and hopefully finish! A Real Career search. Find out what it takes to get there. Start.
7. Go camping with my family.
8. Become comfortable cooking on a gas stove.
9. Cook more vegetarian meals.
10. DRASTICALLY cut down on cooking/eating with unhealthy materials or in unhealthy ways.
11. Convert the house to majority recyclable materials… AND RECYCLE THEM.
12. Have a regular family night every week.
13. Go on at least one date with my husband every month.
14. Finish making a blanket of my own.
15. Train the dogs to be better-behaved.
16. Encourage my daughter to find and keep a hobby outside of school that doesn’t involve social time on the computer or cell phone.
17. Take cooking classes.
18. Finish Christmas shopping before my dad’s birthday.
19. Learn to make Granny’s cornbread dressing.
20. Try one thing a month that my husband suggests without arguing.
21. Make 3 wedding albums – one for us, two for our parents.
22. Print out and make picture albums of the photos I love from Flickr and the photos I already have stored – organized and fun albums!
23. Go to another big drum corps show.
24. Keep my house totally organized so that my family can be relaxed in their space.
25. See Nick play softball at least once.
26. Make at least 1 good new friend in Minneapolis.
27. Eat an entire apple without getting sick.
28. Get up every morning ON TIME for at least one week without hating everyone on principle.
29. Make my bed every morning.
30. Send one handwritten letter/note a week.
Happily Married.
November 5, 2009
It seems that most of my posts revolve around marriage at the moment and that’s fine.
There’s not much going on elsewhere – questions about where I am and where I should be that constantly pop up in an adult’s mind as they go through life.
For instance – I’m supposed to move back in with Mom and Dad in order to save up money for a house down payment – after all, Nick can’t move in with someone else so we’re not paying for two residences… there’s no one there!
So that burden falls to me.
Not that it’s really that much of a burden. I love having my own space – mostly the pain is giving up that bit of mental freedom and feeling of responsibility and self worth that goes along with it. I suppose it won’t disappear – I CAN support myself and my daughter. I just am choosing to sacrifice to have a better option for my entire family later on.
I need to remember that.
So I need to pack, to make sure that my lawyer still believes what I’m doing is okay, and I need to do it before December.
Ah. this hurts.
I want so badly to be in a home with my husband and child before Christmas, to celebrate my first married Christmas with them as it should be.
But life is life is life.
Ben’s lawyer quit on him a few weeks ago. The reasons are known but shall remain unmentioned on the internet, as my battle was never with her. Though I didn’t think much of her class considering her strategies.
Still, doing your job isn’t the same thing as having a flawed character, most of the time.
So I wish her the best in her uphill battle.
I don’t know if he’s gotten a new one yet.
I hope that the new lawyer is less effective at upsetting my parents. They’ve given Ben and I so many chances that it seems entirely unfair to put them through such hell when the consequences may end up being not great for Abbey and my family.
The guilt.
I’m questioning my career. I think the people you work with change how you feel about your job. And it occurs to me that working with women is not necessarily what makes me happy.
I don’t tend to like working with women much. They’re rather gossipy and the judgmental attitudes! Empathy seems to be an endangered species here.
Men, however. Men I can work with. If you do your job they tend to get along fine with you. In the south they tend to treat you like a queen as well.
I like that.
So maybe I need to find a job that challenges my mind and allows me to work with men. Real men, not metrosexual office boys who worry about their hair and get manicures.
Abbey’s convinced her dad is having an affair again. I never entirely know how to respond to her when she brings this up. Knowing Ben and hearing things around town makes me think it’s likely. I just don’t want to speculate and cause my daughter more problems. Things have been relatively benign on that front and I’d like to keep it that way.
Abbey still complains, but for the most part she’s been handling the chip on her shoulder more maturely – or, more likely, confiding to her friends instead of her mother.
I can’t fix that though. Could never fix Ben – am too disinterested in the effort now to even try. It won’t work. He won’t change. And why waste my breath when I have a wonderful family just waiting to make sure her needs are taken care of?
Still, she clutches every single second spent with her father to her as thought it were a crown jewel – his greatest weapon in this battle as well as his achilles heel.
As far as Nick and I go, well, we’re happily married.
It’s hard not to be when you’re this far away.
Our conversations are fewer. Arguments about wedding plans are nonexistant, so what do we have to talk about once the day to day catching up is over?
I feel very solid in our relationship. Happy. I feel like things are unfair that we can’t be together right now. I’m ready for that portion to start. Scared of that portion starting and more than anything, I pray every day that the three of us will end up in the same household.
I deserve that and so does he.
But mostly, Abbey deserves that example, that effort and that stability with ME – the person she already uses as a mark to define her life and her surrounds and sense of self worth.
That’s a lot of power I hold in my hands. A lot of responsibility.
And nothing on Earth seems as worth it as that job title.
I believe with me is best. I really do.
But the whims of a 13 year old weigh in. And I’m a guaranteed person in her life. Her father is not.
I don’t know how to compete with that.
Love is a lot, after all.
But love without a foundation, without realistic expectations of a person and a relationship, well,… it’s doomed for disappointment.
Ben’s not going to be more of a father because she might choose him.
But there’s that hope.
She knows what she gets with me.
still, there is something to be said about stability.
The difference of the M word.
October 30, 2009
I’m not going to lie.
I never wanted to be married. I don’t mean I hated the idea, just never thought about it being for me – about it being something I just wanted to do. Never dreamed about what it would mean, never danced around pretending to be a bride – none of the silly things I’ve seen my sister and my daughter do.
I was convinced of two things when I was heading to the church on my wedding day. 1, that my life was about to change forever and that was scary as all hell and that 2, this was going to feel like some transformation and a giant light was going to go off inside of me and blink ‘married!’ over my head the minute the deed was done.
Okay.
Maybe not that, but I expected to feel thunder and the earth shaking – something that big surely needed a physical announcement of the change, right?
Only.
Nothing really felt different.
Oh sure, I was supposed to feel mega in love on the day of and I did. More scared beforehand. But after, I felt much love for my husband. I didn’t feel like crying, just felt like smiling.
My wedding was full of smiles and that’s the way it should be.
But I felt much the same for my husband after as I did before. I bit in awe of his awesomeness, a bit frustrated at his pigheadedness, a bit o’ lust for his attractiveness and mostly happiness at just being around him, which is something rare in a long distance relationship. Something we’ve been stuck in for 3 years.
But different? No.
At least, not right then.
I didn’t feel the need to dance in his arms all night, other than the general love of having him near.
I wanted to smile and dance and act silly with EVERYONE that I love and I did.
And that was fun.
But no, the differences had nothing to do with the wedding. I didn’t feel it then. Nor in the next few days that I got to spend with my husband (a word I LOVE using ) when we hopped around souvenir shops and lusted after each other – oh yeah, I SAID it.
But. It hit me when he had to leave to go home.
How wrong it felt.
How my level of commitment to him had changed irrevocably and how much I felt that my place was with him – in that sheer old-fashioned way that I never envisioned myself identifying with.
Simply put, my life had changed because in one moment, without me even realizing it, my priorities changed.
I became a wife.
A stand by my man, make sure his clothes are clean, support him even when he’s being ridiculously silly, lean on him during the long days, part of a duo WIFE.
I no longer felt JUST separate. I felt like myself – that still hasn’t changed, but I feel a part of him in a way that I can’t even put into words now.
We’re a team now.
And the arguments we may have HAVE to have a resolution – even if it’s simply both deciding it’s not worth fighting for and moving on to another subject.
We can’t just walk away from this.
And that changes everything.
I don’t know what is coming up for us.
We still have some mountains to climb and I’ve no doubt we’ll do it together.
But we have to try living in the same city – living in the same house… something we haven’t even pretended to try for more than 3 or 4 days at a time in the past 3 years.
And we still can’t walk away.
And while that’s scary there is a comfort in that. A solidarity that makes it easier to apologize, easier to give when I would have fought before, easier to decide that I really can compromise on things that seemed ridiculously important before.
Can I tell you how BIG that is?
So while I didn’t walk out of the church feeling as though aliens had taken over my body and my entire persona had changed, days later I can tell you that it did happen, is happening and is so darned cool and scary and awesome that every day brings a new realization of myself, my husband, my family and just where I want my life to go.
I’m loving it.
Absence
October 29, 2009
Just a note.
Swine flu sucks.
Swine flu and strep sucks more.
Every inch of my body hurts.
More non-whining content later.
One of the battles…
October 20, 2009
I think this article pretty much sums up the difficulty that I see before Nick and me in our marriage: “It took me a long time to accept that Ellen’s way is legitimate…”
Legitimate.
Not that I think it’s the best way, but that it is a legitimate and capable way of doing something that I would otherwise have handled differently but that he has chosen to handle in this instance.
And vice versa.
That’s a battle for me, being so in charge of many decisions in my life as I am, and accepting that he disagrees with me on some.
How can he disagree? It works!!!
But he can and does and he’s right.
Not that I’m wrong, but right in the manner that his way of doing things is a perfectly legitimate way of handling things.
What a neat concept, summed up in a sentence.
I hope I retain the idea – my stubbornness is sure to try and erase it from my memory.
Circular Reasoning.
October 19, 2009
So, Monday is in full swing, the week having begun today – and it seems as though I should be used to this return to normal life.
Only things aren’t normal.
I’m now a married woman and while things don’t FEEL different in a conscious way, my reaction to having Nick here for a week and a half and then gone again has let me know that things are, somewhere down deep, totally different.
I’ve hitched my wagon to his and being this far away from him feels new and painful, though I should be used to it. I should.
I’ve started changing my name on things – I’ve gotten some stuff accomplished, others, well… not so much.
Some stuff has to be done in person and several decisions have to be made. Practical ones, the kind I’m best at.
So that’s okay.
I can’t wait until we’re in the same city. Where the petty little arguments will continue, but we’ll solve and/or ignore them as humans in a real relationship. Where the good times can be celebrated just as soon as we get home from work. And where the nights will be spent listening to him snore – a silly thing to enjoy, but after 3 years apart, I say – in all honesty – you just. don’t. know.
Abbey seems to have jumped on the stepfather bandwagon quite easily, though she came home from her father’s last night in quite a mood.
I don’t know what the problem is, but once we were alone she crawled on top of me and sobbed for the longest time. She didn’t want to talk about it though, so thinking that it has something to do with court is just putting the cart before the horse.
I know their attorney quit this past week – most likely due to her painful divorce – but surely they wouldn’t discuss it with her? (will wishing it so make it true? hasn’t worked so far…)
But there is a part of me that worries that maybe she’s just being happy for me instead of happy for us.
Odd, I suppose. They spent so much time laughing and hanging out together that I’m being touchy – overly sensitive because I’m so unnerved at this missing him in this way. Not in the cheesy romance novel way – my body doesn’t long for his touch or whatever other crap they say, but my ears definitely are missing his laughter.
Each burst seems a bit like a gift, as he’s so cute when he’s tickled.
I guess I just keep praying.
That things will work out for us, for all of us as a family.
Logic tells me that she’s better with us. Though I get why everything can’t be based on facts and figures.
Love matters too.
Surely we can find a balance?
