Bryan and I's favorite month.
If you've known me long you know I'm pretty into Thanksgiving. I crazy love Turkey.
Yum… turkey…
Besides turkey, November is the month Bryan and I got hitched and became parents.
Elliot was born the day before Thanksgiving. AWESOMENESS!
It's a pretty big month for us. :)
Each November we also re-new our vows. We have had a ton of fun over the years and as we make new friends we confuse them to pieces when an invitation to our "wedding" or when talk about our "wedding" coming up.
It's an odd tradition. Some think it awesome. Some Romantic. Some super weird.
I only had one person tell me, "Oh you still do that? Aren't you over that silly thing yet?"
Nope. We are not.
When Bryan and I got married in 2007 I wasn't really a planned-my-wedding-since-I-was-seven kind of girl. I made quick decisions and didn't treasure a lot because I was very eager to start the marriage and the wedding day was a step in my way to that.
Also when I got married I had just returned from working at Disney and I had a whopping one friend.
Seriously. I had just come out of a twenty year slump of selfishness that prevented me from making lasting friendships because they figured out I was a tool… so… yea…
Discounting those things… our wedding day was beautiful.
It was romantic and stunning and it made us one. Huge success in my book.
Yet, as our one year anniversary approached I started to finally get into weddings. Like in how they looked and what you could do and I also had a few more friends. Bridesmaid worthy friends.
While I didn't regret our first wedding I was starting to realize I should have jumped on the wedding planning bandwagon much sooner… like before I actually got married.
Bryan: "Why don't we just get married again?"
Me: "Can we do that?"
Bryan: "We can do whatever we want."
So, we decided to re-new our vows on our one year anniversary. We would make it our tradition and do fun and crazy things so that I would never look back on my real beautiful wedding with, "Oh I wish I would have done that…"
While it may have started out with silly fun reasons our tradition started taking on a mind of it's own.
Marriage is an amazing union that not enough people celebrate.
Anniversaries are just as bad. Jokes mocking husbands who forget it and wives so wrapped up in kids that it just becomes another day on the calendar all take away the beauty and majesty God intended for marriage.
While it does sometimes take a lot of effort to pull off these weddings each year, it's effort we put in because to us it is important.
Our marriage keeps us sane. Without Bryan, I'd be in a Disney Asylum somewhere and he would be one grumpy old man without me.
God brought us together to grow with one another and work for His glory together.
Nothing to us is more important than our relationship. Not even our three amazing boys. Or I should say Especially them because without our relationship they wouldn't exist.
We also love reminding people that their marriage is important! That it isn't crazy to celebrate it in understated or over the top ways as long as they DO celebrate it!
It matters.
So, now you know how it started and each year we get more reasons to KEEP doing it then to ever stop. Now let's take a look at our weddings!
I'm going to spend this week highlighting each of them.
We have had six Anniversary Weddings so far starting with the one below:
Year One: The Cruise Ship Wedding
We decided about a week before we went on a family vacation with my parents and little brother that we were going to do this "re-new our vows every year thing".
I called my mom up:
Me: "Hey, Bryan and I decided to marry each other every year. Would daddy marry us on the ship?"
Mom: "Um… ok."
It was small and lasted about ten minutes. Dressed in matching Hawaiian outfits my mother-in-law had gotten us from their recent trip to Hawaii we found a quiet deck on the boat as we sailed out of Orlando. (It was a Disney cruise… obviously…)
My little brother walked me down the make shift isle while my mom took photos.
My dad looked at us both and gave us his charmer smile as he pulled out the vows he had written for us to say on an airplane barf bag. Yep. My awesomeness was hereditary.
We laughed as my dad made Bryan say vows that he would let us go on vacation with my parents every year and get me a bigger diamond ring on each anniversary.
Then we smiled as he reminded us why we said "I do" in the first place a year ago before.
It was fun and cheesy but completely us.
God Bless and Much Love,
Jessica
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