2014: the year we got married

2014 was a pretty great year for the Brayden-Schow family - we traveled internationally, explored New Mexico, accomplished some great personal goals... oh, and we got married!

That was pretty big. And it's been on our minds a lot this week, since we've been looking over our wedding pictures and picked some to put in a frame (which is maybe the most adult thing we did in 2014). And we watched our wedding video for the first time.

A whole lot of the last year was spent planning our wedding - in fact, a year ago today we were sleeping in the back of Eric's truck across the street from the Hyde Memorial State Park office so we could reserve our date before anyone else. And once we had our date and venue, we started planning in earnest, and kind of didn't stop until the day before our wedding.

During the planning process, I tried to downplay the wedding's importance in my mind. I was sure that things would go wrong and didn't want to be disappointed when they did, so I kept my expectations low. I was really upset that some of our friends and family couldn't make it, so I told myself that it didn't matter because it was just one day of our lives. I rejected the idea that the wedding would be the best day of our lives - and doing so made it hard for me to feel excited. I mean, there were lots of moments that I felt excited about our wedding and some parts of planning that I enjoyed, but I definitely didn't love the process. And what I looked forward to most was seeing lots of friends and family and never having to plan a wedding again.

So it is kind of incredible how nothing went majorly wrong and our wedding coordinators made everything run so smoothly and how we both enjoyed the day so much. And how the wedding was so meaningful and still is three months later. While I still don't think the wedding will be the best day of our lives - hopefully we'll have a ton of amazing days in our marriage, that's kind of the idea - it was definitely one of the most joyful. And while we are both relieved to be done with wedding planning, I'm also so happy that we had that day, and so grateful to everyone who was there, and so glad that we could start our marriage with such a joyful celebration. It turned out to be more important than I could have imagined.

We're always going to remember 2014 as the year we got married. I'm looking forward to seeing what we'll remember about 2015.