I have never really enjoyed roller-coasters. When I was a kid, I could tolerate them, but did not enjoy them. When the family would head to Canada Wonderland or even during our trip to Disney World, my mom and brother would venture onto the craziest of rides while my dad and I sat quietly watching our crazy family members. To this day, I do not understand the thrill and can no longer even tolerate the beasts. But I go on them every once in a while to make sure my dislike of them is still valid and every time I do, I come out a little worse for wear, but alive. To say that the last few months have been a roller-coaster ride with all those dizzying highs and nauseating lows, barely even begins to cover it.
For just under the last two years, Dave and I have been planning our Fall wedding. Since it was a long engagement, we ended up having this vision of our wedding being way off in the future of Fall 2012. It was beautiful and awesome all at the same time, our friends and families were having a ton of fun and Dave and I looked amazing in our wedding clothes. But, it was still way off in the future, something we could enjoy planning and looking forward to, but nothing to worry about. It was 'round about 3 months ago that I realized that it wasn't way off in the future anymore and that we needed to step our planning into high gear.
For whatever reason, there was absolutely no slow period at work and as a result, we ended up working very long hours at the office and trying to squeeze our regular gym appointments and now all the new wedding meetings/tasks into the mix. It resulted in a lot of stress, some of it inevitable, while some of it was completely avoidable and yet wasn't avoided.
Next came raise time at work. This was at first abysmal but after some very good conversations with my boss' boss, it got resolved for the better and I was moved from hourly to salary and was given a much more tolerable raise. In fact, as stressful and upsetting as this time was, the actual process, was pretty straight-forward and pleasant as everyone pretty much agreed with my position. But it left me feeling nauseated nonetheless.
The 2 month mark quickly came and I was really feeling the physical and emotional draining that was happening to both myself and Dave. To be able to meet deadlines both in my professional lives as well as my personal life, I had to take some time away from blogging and to be honest, pretty much everything other than work, going to the gym, and wedding planning. There was time for friends and family, but even that was cut shorter than I would have liked due to work and stress loads.
Then, about a month before the wedding, my grandfather was suddenly hospitalized. It left my entire family in an awful state. My mom drove roughly 3 hours a day to visit him with my aunt and getting the updates from her was not only difficult because it was pretty clear that he would not pull through, but also because of the pain and sadness I could hear in my mom's voice each time we spoke.
Two weeks before the wedding, he passed away. There was a private graveside memorial attended by his family and closest friends where he was laid to rest beside my grandmother. It was quiet and peaceful, exactly what he wanted. As a child, you are sad because a family member is no longer around. As an adult, you understand what has happened not only to the one who passed, but to everyone else as well. You can visualize the unspeakably painful day when your own parents become sick and you are forced to deal with their mortality.
Luckily, we have a really amazing circle of friends and family who supported Dave and I through this time and some great co-workers who picked up our workloads so we could take a day or two off to try to cope and spend time with our family.
We returned to our wedding planning and trying to get things settled at least somewhat at work. After a very long last week at work, we had made it - 2 glorious weeks off! We spent the week before the wedding not paying attention to work emails and tying up all the lose ends for the big event. We made lots of ribbon flowers and decorations; managed to pick up over 600 bulbs that we had ordered and get them into our wedding favours a few days before-hand (thanks mom and dad); arranged drop-off times and locations with vendors; finalized and issued schedules for the wedding party and our families; picked up suits and dresses; and did what seems like a million other things. The rehearsal day came, and I was super stressed and a little nervous. Everyone got there eventually and things went pretty smoothly for the rest of the night.
Something happened that night though, as at some point while I was sleeping, all my worries drifted away. When I awoke, I was super calm and stress- and worry-free. I came to the mindset of, if something went wrong, it didn't matter, there was little to nothing I could do about it now and I had done my very best up until this point. I am not sure how I got to this mindset, as that is typically not my style whatsoever, but it was a great place to be for my wedding day.
This post is longer than I had anticipated, so I will not go into great detail here about the wedding day itself, mostly because I feel it deserves it's own post, but let me just say it was amazingly awesome. There were a few tiny hiccups, but nothing that mattered then and definitely nothing that matters now. It was a beautiful day and I came out of it as a wife to a loving and caring man, who I love more than life itself. I am now Mrs. Koning and all of the roller-coaster lows of this summer are made a little easier to handle by this fact. I am honestly and truly happy.
As a reward for getting through this post, I am going to share the following image with you. Dave and I took it on Honeymoon #1 to Niagara Falls. My camera had felt a little neglected this summer so gave it lots of attention during this trip and I hope that the next year of traveling and honeymoons makes it feel loved.
