morning of

okay, before the morning-of pictures, this one must be posted and explained. suzanne spent hours turning all of my MILLIONS of ribbons...okay, maybe it wasn't that many, but it was a lot...into bouquets for all 9 of us to carry...see? she worked so hard!! to quote the smooth jennifer glass, suzanne has the talent of "turning chaos into tacky". truly.

this is my beautifully huge and tacky one. it even went with my dress!! blue!! the sad, awful, horrible, devestating news is that the afternoon of the rehearsal, we drove off and left them. see, the problem was that suzanne wasn't with us. if she had been with us, we would have remembered. she was our mom that weekend! i miss you suzanne!!

okay. here's more:
okay i'm in the mood to explain the morning of. it was SUCH a perfect day!!!! i woke up around 6:15 on my own and said "no" and went back to sleep. then i woke up again thinking it was at least 2 hours later, and it was 6:40. again i said "no!" and went back to sleep. i woke up again and thought that surely it was at least 8:30 and it was 6:50. i said, out loud, "FINE! but i'm NOT getting up in the 6:00 hour." so i laid there until 7:00 and got up. it was beautiful! i love it when the Lord wakes me up!!

so i went outside and set up my awesome hammock. i ate some breakfast, read some out of "the mystery of marriage" by mike mason (VERY recommended) and read 1 john (also very recommended - very good book). no one else was awake when i got up that i knew of, but i really hoped that someone got a picture of me in the hammock with the beautiful sun on the water in the background. thank you jency!!! i was out there until about 8:30. man. it was perfect!!!





then we all ate breakfast. it was just 4 of us - the rest of the girls didn't spend the night again. and we took some fun pictures on the back porch together.












then we lost our minds...













seriously...













then we got to the church to find that my bouquet was anorexic. seriously. mom and i played with flowers before we ordered them and 3 oversized hydrangeas was bigger than a basketball. GORGEOUS! what the lady gave me was 3 oversized hydrangeas, but the blossoms weren't open AT ALL. so suzanne and i disected it and my throw-away, combined them with some roses for the flower girls and viola!! believe it or not, it was kind of fun to re-do it. and even though it wasn't exactly what i wanted, it still turned out really beautiful.

jency wore curlers!! i have PROOF!!! :) :) :)

















the reason i read 1 john that morning was that when i was praying in the hammock, the verse "how great is the love that the Father has lavished upon us, that we should be called children of God" came to my mind. so i just read the entire chapter. then, when i got in the room where we were all getting ready, look what i saw...awesome! i cried...