Love notes, fear, bunting, and programs.

Hello! 


It's a dreary, rainy Sunday here in the Atlanta metropolitan area; I've been cooped up for the better part of the day, but it's given me an opportunity to work a bit more on my visa application pack. Today's task has been to print off the messages between Rich and me that have been passed through facebook over the years. It's a B-I-G job, there were over 13,000 messages, can you believe it? It hasn't been very exciting because it's a lot of ctrl+c and ctrl+v and ctrl+s. I've also been reformatting every line it so that it takes up less space, and deleting some of the conversations that go something like, "I'm making a grocery list, do you need anything?" It's repetitive and tedious, but it's made my heart so light to re-read all of our messages and letters. In my mind, it has been the best way to spend a rainy Sunday. 


I keep thinking that when we have babies, and they are old eough to be interested, it'll be really nice to have a great deal of our love affair documented and organized in a nice little package. The development of our friendship and then our relationship was so warm and lovely--I'm actually tearing up because our letters and notes are so touching. We tell eachother that everything is going to be okay...a LOT. It's a recurring theme. I even bought him a book called "Everything is going to be okay". 


It hasn't only been heart warming to go through our messages today, it's also been encouraging. There are times when I am nearly crippled with fear and doubt about this visa. I find my mind wandering into this horrifying territory...what will happen if I'm not granted my visa? What if our wedding is stopped? What will we do? What on earth COULD we do? I look at every chink in our armor, I especially worry about being judged for not having enough money. We might not have much money, but we are very resourceful--we don't need much money, and we certainly don't spend more money than we make. But what if we can't project that in our application? I have this unhealthy and unshakeable thought about how unfair it is that some couples our age get married with lots of debt, when we haven't got any at all, but those couples don't have anyone asking for their bank details or employment records like we do. I go in search of reassurance almost everyday, praying for peace of mind, and asking for the heart of whomever reviews our application to be softened. It was nice to find some peace today through our own once-spoken words. 


So that was my day, spent in front of a computer screen and collating 69 single spaced, double columned pages of love notes. Rich has ben working hard in front of a computer screen, too! He's finished our wedding website and it looks i.n.c.r.e.d.i.b.l.e., he did a great job, you should go see.


I finished cutting, sewing, turning, and pressing our yellow and blue bunting...we've got enough now to decorate the marquee, but Rich suggested that we also make some to string between two trees or something of the like. All that's left to do is sew them into some bias tape so that we can hang them up.

A lot of the material I already had, the blue floral is a flat sheet that I've had covering my closet door since I was a teeneager, the plain blue is cut from pillowcases with no matching sheets, and the yellow gingham is from a set of curtains that were in various babies rooms as we were growing up. (I was in a little bit of trouble for destroying/appropriating those.) The other material was all 30-40% off during various Christmas sales--apparently the time to buy fabric is Thanksgiving through New Years. I don't think I paid more than about $15 for the material to make these, and it'll make 150 feet of bunting. Insane!

I also cut out two thirds of our program covers last night. 

I went to lunch with my dear friend Faith yesterday and we swung by a few places--one of those places was Michael's. I've been shopping around for decent rubber stamps--one bird and one repeated geometric pattern--and also some yellow paper for a third of our seventy two programs. I was really looking for yellow chevrons (I'm obsessed with chevrons right now) but I fell in love with the yellow paper above. Faith purchased one sheet for me, bless her! I started with just one to make sure it was the right size, I'm the world's worst estimator. My father took me back last night to buy five more sheets. (I get four pieces out of one sheet, so I have twenty four pieces now.) Thanks to Faith and dad's generosity, I still haven't paid a dime for our programs, though I'm still on the prowl for the final paper design.

...I guess technically that's not true, I did buy the blue paper, but I bought it from Old Navy before I even graduated highschool. It's decorated my walls for years, and now it's being repurposed to give me twenty four (basically) free program covers! 

To whomever has read this, thank you, and I hope you checked out Rich's handcrafted website. I'm so proud of him! Please give a shout if you have any bright ideas for us.

Goodnight,

Laura