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From my wedding vows, seven years ago:

Seven years we have been together. And they have gone so fast, and every year has been so different, and so fun, just thinking about how fast it's gone almost causes me to panic. I know another seven years will go just as fast, and then another seven; and one day we'll celebrate our 25th anniversary, and one day it will be our 50th. I want all my years to be with you, and I shall love you always.

I've now been married to Damon for as long as we were a couple before. In fact . . . Damon and I have now been a couple (married and not) for as long as we spent as arch enemies. (14 and 14 years.)

It goes really fast.

:)
r

P.S. I dusted off our wedding cartoon for the occasion. (Click here if you don't see a video embedded below.)

Created by the super talented Tony Wang. This originally framed the slideshow that played at our reception.

Cheers, Everyone, :)
(d &) r

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This weekend has had great story arc, emotionally, but without any content. It's me and D's fifth wedding anniversary.

(Thank you.) Damon and I aren't big on anniversaries in general, but our wedding was a big deal, so we like remembering that. This year, for our five-year, I thought, wouldn't it be great if we finally finished that photo album I started—oh, five years ago—of all the pictures our friends and family took??

Groan . . .

I’m not talking about our professional album. That’s done; it’s awesome. This is a side album I've wanted to make. An album of the people. The only album we would have had, had we had never hired a pro. (Vernacular photography, if you will.)

We're lucky to know a lot of talented photographers—like AJ, who has actually worked, professionally, as a wedding photographer—so this would be a high quality "album of the people." (Mostly.) Still, I don't think Damon understood how large a project I had set up. Back when our wedding was new, I had printed and ordered literally thousands of photos from everyone's digital files and negatives. Then we'd moved and the whole thing had gone into boxes, never to come out again.

Until two nights ago.

As I began to despair, Damon became very determined. So, on the evening of our fifth anniversary, we sorted photos. For hours.

When we stopped for the night, we watched our wedding DVD. We skipped most of the ceremony (save the mush for the 10-year) in favor of laughing at our guests—especially on the dance floor—as captured by Damon's Uncle Willie. People dancing with their thumbs. People messing up words to songs. "Blackmail material," Benji calls it.

That is good stuff. If you were there, I guarantee you you are in this video, and we have been laughing at with you.

“It’s nice to see everyone so energetic," Damon said after one particularly hysterical shot of all our out-of-town relatives.

I thought he was going to say happy. His comment spun my mind in new, more sobering directions.

“This video is a gift," Damon declared toward the end. “This video shouldn’t even exist. Uncle Willie forgot his power cord, and the camera battery wasn’t supposed to last that long, but it lasted all night."

“Wow,” I said. “That’s just like Hannukah.”

Which, I guess, is why we watch it every year.

This morning, as we resumed sorting photos, I made a move to play some music. Before I could put in a CD, however, Damon hit PLAY and our wedding DVD came back on. “Oh, look what’s in here,” he said, and we sat down and watched the dancing again.

After that, I watched our wedding cartoon six or seven times in a row, followed by a mini slide show of our lives. Not the 11-minute slide show from our wedding. D's uncle made an abridged, under-three-minute version for this DVD, in which we grow up even faster. I watched that six or seven times in a row, too.

Damon and I and our friend Benji originally made this slide show to send out the message Damon and I were the bestest, most lovey dovey couple in the world. Now the one getting suckered was me. It was better than the AT&T commercial that made everyone cry in the 90s—the one where the two 80-year-old best friends call each other right after we've watched a montage of their entire, lifelong friendship. "Reach out and touch someone!"

Now I’m a big ball of mush.

Sitting back down to tackle the wedding photos, I feel completely different.

But, I guess, nothing has changed.

r


The photos in this post were taken by Irvin; Uncle Joe (x2); Michael & Hanh; Andre; and wedding guests using disposable cameras. Thanks, everyone!! You're the greatest!

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Oh, girls love their unicorn books, don’t they? I came across two unicorn titles in quick succession, the first from the library and the second from the publisher. Let’s take a look.

It’s possible that the beginning reader book Unicorn Wings, by Mallory Loehr, is not very good. But who would notice when each page has fanciful pictures of unicorns and rainbows and roses and butterflies and bluebirds and castles and swans and moonlight on the ocean? If you’ll ever get a sugar high from a book, this is the one.

The unicorn — who for some strange reason in this ultra-girly book is a male — has a horn that can cure, but he really wants wings. He tells the butterflies and bluebirds and swans how he wishes that he had wings. But none of their wings are right for him. Boo. Then he meets a beautiful pegasus, cures her broken wing, and magically gets wings too! Hooray!

My seven-year-old daughter looooved it, even though the text is for a younger reader. It’s a beginning reader book that desperately needs a sequel. Not for me, mind you, but for my daughter.

I’d put Unicorn Races in the same camp. I don’t know that the story of the book is all that it could be, but the illustrations are very sweet. And very purple. Lots and lots of purple. There are other colors too, like blueish purple. (Okay, there are other colors in the book.) Is it because it’s from Purple Sky Publishing? Hmmm.

The story follows a little girl who waits until her mother thinks she’s asleep, and then she beckons her flying unicorn to take her to the magical place where she is the princess of all the fairy creatures. There she oversees the lovely unicorn races and crowns the winner, and then they all have lots of cake and sweets. (Actually, this may be the leading sugar high book.) Then the girl goes home and goes to sleep.

I found the text a little choppy in places, sometimes stilted and formal (though by design), which made the reading awkward. But I don’t know if it even matters, because my daughter looooved this book too. The pictures and story are the stuff of little girl dreams. Little girl princess candy-coated dreams.

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