Married!

When Mike and I first got engaged, the outpouring of excitement was almost unmanageable.  Everyone freaked - in the best way possible of course.  I remember my cousin (Emily) telling me to enjoy the engagement, as it would go by very quicky and is a very lovely time.  Several others expressed the same sentiment.  My mental response was one of vague confusion - Mike and I have lived together for several years and have been a couple for quite a few more, so I sort of saw the whole "getting married" thing as not much more than a big party.  No big deal.

Wrong.  If we had gone to city hall, maybe it would have been no big deal.  Nothing is changing now that we're legally married.  We are still the same silly couple we've been for nearly a decade.  However, even though Mike has always been a part of my family long before it became official, and visa versa, things for our families have undergone a transformation of sorts.  Let me back up a minute.  I come from an atypically close knit crew of aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, great aunts, grandparents, grandparents-in-law, etc, and one of my uncles always says that it's not just because we all live close by that we are the way we are; it takes an effort on everyone's part to make time together.  It takes Monday night dinners and Saturday barbecues, and getting on a train to a rained out yankee game together.  Ok, it's not an extra job, it's the best part of most weeks, but it's still an effort. But even with a family like mine, you need a time and space to celebrate the really good things about life, and that's what our wedding turned out to be.  We are a pretty consistently happy group of people (though I can't say I was always on the bandwagon here; the fact that everyone put up with that brat I used to be is amazing!) but at our wedding I saw most of the family happier than I can ever remember seeing them.  Most everyone was already married by the time I was born or really little, so I don't remember many family weddings before my own, and the overflow of joy was truly unprecedented. (Everyone at that wedding really knew how to party, and God bless them for that!)  Of course I was thrilled to be marrying the greatest person I know, but what put it over the top was really the collective love and happiness.  Any bride who seriously thinks her wedding day is only about her is crazy and won't have nearly as awesome a time as I did.

Woohoo!
Photo credit: Uncle Ward Haskell

Everyone says that your wedding day is one of the best days of your life, but it's less commonly talked about that the days, weeks, and months leading up to and following the wedding are also some of the greatest ever.  The engagement is over, the honeymoon is over, and I could not imagine being happier.