Gratitude, Six Years Late

It's our anniversary today, so Matt and I watched our wedding video tonight. After we shooed Truman out of the room because he WOULD NOT STOP ASKING QUESTIONS ("Where am I? Where AM I? WHERE AM I? Am I sleeping in heaven? Why are some people born in this video but I'm not?") and settled in to watch, I was overwhelmed.

For one, we were so young. I mean, it's only been six years but I feel like I look so haggard now. Mothering small children will do that to you, I guess!

Beyond that, as we watched the rehearsal dinner I started to get uncomfortable with how long it was - not that I minded watching, but I was embarrassed at how long we tortured our families with tributes and slideshows and the like. Then at the end I realized, when do you get to hear yourself essentially eulogized? Your funeral, that's when. Or in our case, our wedding dinner, which we have on video and can watch whenever we want.

So thank you, families, for sitting through all that. Those tributes and memories are priceless to us. I loved hearing advice out of Grandpa Washburn's and Grandpa U'Dell's mouths, since we've said goodbye to them since then.

Thank you Jon for videoing all the advice. Thank you, Bry, for letting him abandon you and one-year-old Seth so our wedding would be immortalized on film.

Thanks, Dad, for the amazing food and paying for the perfect wedding. Thank YOU Mom for, well, everything else about that whole process.

Thank you, Paul and Jill for so much work and food prep for the second reception, for grinning at and bearing with and welcoming me. And thank you, of course, for raising the man of my dreams.

Thank you Alisa for the lovely pictures. I wouldn't have wanted my day captured in any other way. 

Thank you people who traveled from so far to be there, who didn't mind that they got only three minutes of one-on-one time with us during that weekend.

Thanks to everyone who cleaned up the aftermath while we went blissfully on our way.

I'm more grateful for that day now than I had the capacity to be then. I was youthfully oblivious, too, to the insane amount of work and cooperation it takes to pull off a big event like that.

I'm more in love now, too, than I had the capacity to be then. Matt looked at me tonight and said "It's funny to remember that panicky, butterflies, high-school-crushish feeling. It's just so comfortable now. I like it better."

Amen, my love.