And Just Like That

Christmas was over, but the excitement was still in full force!

Having been married before, taking a year to plan the wedding, spending every penny we had and every penny my parents had, stressing on everything from the guest list, to the gown… causing severe family conflict, that which I am not proud of, we decided we were not going to go that route. Neither of us wanted a big wedding, in my opinion it is nothing but a big waste of time and money, and for what? I get that a big wedding is what most women dream about, being princess for a day… but trust me when I say it isn’t worth it, the stress alone may just kill you before you even get a chance to walk down the aisle, and remember this is the start of your new life, it isn’t supposed to be the finally! Jim had also been married before, and from what I can tell his “big wedding” went as well as mine did… So together we decided when it happened we were going to do things our way, cheap, easy and stress free!

We had been together for a few years, which already felt like a life time. We have conquered all of the hard stuff, family death, addiction, trust issues… anything bad you could imagine happening in a relationship, happened in ours. With the bad came the amazing, our beautiful baby girl, sobriety, travel, and love, real love. I don’t believe you can really love someone until you’ve seen their worst, probably why we both failed our previous marriages, though we both fought hard to keep them, it takes two and we found ourselves losing that battle…. which lead us to each other, where we became close friends for year before entering into a relationship. In our hearts we were already married, though not in Gods eyes, and so we needed to make that right, we never would have made it this far without him and so the time had come!

Christmas Day it had been decided, why not start the New Year our right? 5 days to plan a wedding, no problem! I called up my girls to borrow a dress, something simple of course, Deanna, Jim’s mom got us an amazing Pastor and Jim came up with getting married by the tree in the park, planted in honor of his grandmother. Friday we headed to Santa Barbara to get our marriage license, what a fun day that was!

Now I’ve lived in this area my whole life, I’ve been to Santa Barbara more times than I can count…. in fact for years I was there every night for work…. I had no idea how beautiful the court house was! It got a little awkward when having to swear under oath… at the same time, I’m glade they didn’t deny our marriage license because we were a bit out of sync! We enjoyed our day without the little, sucking up every moment, thank you Nana ❤️

Before we knew it the big day was here, January 1, 2019! A quick shower, a little makeup… a good 30 mins on curling my hair, which I’ve never done, and will never do again… by the time I got to the living room the curl was already gone… threw on my borrowed dress, my old boots, new earrings… and instead of blue I went with turquoise… after all it’s a shade of blue! We all headed down to the park, where Jim’s cousin( and best friend) was waiting with his beautiful wife, Jim had no idea they would be there, but I’m so glad they were! The pastor came, and against my will made me cry, it was beautiful and I swear I saw some tears in his eyes to, he’d never admit it! With our baby girl running a muck, and our parents by our sides, we had the most beautiful wedding I could ever dream of!

And just like that, we were Mr. and Mrs. ❤️