Happy Anniversary...

Four years ago today, I got hitched!  Yay!  Happy Anniversary, Husband.  To be completely honest our wedding day was a total bust!  We live in Kansas, but somehow the hurricanes that were breaking land down in the Gulf managed to make it monsoon on my wedding day all the way up in Kansas!  Boo!  So everything was wet, thankfully we had a ballroom (or what we here in SEK call a ballroom - hell it's the closet thing you are going to get to a ballroom anyway) where both the ceremony and reception was held.  But my dreams of outside pictures walking down the middle of our main street in town and jumping up and down and getting the "mid-air" photos were quickly washing away down the gutter with the rest of the rain and trash in the street.

The rain did let up enough that we did end up venturing outside with black umbrellas!  Cute idea, right?!  Thanks Momma Nan (my mom)!  The rest of the day was a blur: outside pictures, inside pictures, family pictures, wedding party pictures, actual wedding, reception, cake, food and lots and lots of booze and blaring music!  I remember telling the DJ that I wanted to to be like we were "up in da club" during the reception and that if I heard YMCA or the Chicken Dance he would be fired on the spot, but forced to leave his equipment.  We didn't do all the traditional Father/Daughter and Mother/Son dances.  I loathe that part of weddings when everyone just wants to drink and dance, but yet we sit watching slow dances for an hour!  But you better bet your ass we did the $ dance, Boom!  I'm greedy like that.  We did do our first dance together, but our wedding party quickly joined in and eventually almost everyone had switched partners and I don't even know who I ended the dance with (in my mind it was my back-up hubby, Greg, he is one of the Husband's best friends and a total HOTTIE - can you say yum!?).

I know you are thinking, this doesn't sound SO bad, right?  Well here's the kicker!  Two months after the wedding I get a call from our photographer, I assumed to tell me we could view the proofs online, instead I was told that "Something went wrong with the disk in my camera and I've sent it out to two different data recovery places and they still can't pull anything off the disk..." silence...crickets....and more silence... I finally replied with, "so...." and that's when I heard the tears start falling on the other end of the phone!  In the end we ended up with ZERO, yes that's right, ZERO pictures from our wedding day - the whole day (well except candid that's friends/family took which absolutely count, but not enough).  She said she would refund our money - you bet your ass you will refund our $ - and offered to do a free studio shoot and then make us some story book and give us the rights to get the pictures wherever we wanted instead of paying her ridiculous prices.

After the shock (I had to let her go before I screamed and made her cry more) wore off, I was like well what's done is done - let's get what we can.  I had to have my dress clean, which was still in a ball on the floor from when I took it off and it was nice and dirty mind you (it was monsooning remember) and we had to go buy the Husband a new black suit, tie, shoes, shirt, etc.  Now for the shocker - by the time we went for the studio shoot 2 weeks later I was already 10 weeks pregnant!  Yeah, that's right I got knocked up on my honeymoon (or that's what I like to say - doctors said it was probably the week of the wedding, mid-week to be exact based on my cycles, but I digress)!  And my dress...my dress was a tight, all lace, no poof dress - uncomfortable didn't even begin to describe it!  But in the end, we got some decent shots - even though I'd already gained like 10 pounds since the wedding (half honeymoon food and half baby bloat).  I hope you enjoy them as much as I do, but it still would have been nice to have some authentic wedding day pictures...