love is blonde

Holy cow. I just ordered 1,268 wedding photos from Kodak Gallery. That’s one thousand two hundred and sixty eight photos. My brain hurts from all the uploading!

I am finally doing this five months after my wedding, just when I thought I was fully recovered from a rough case of Post Nuptual Depression (PND). Talk about bringing back my symptoms:

• Failure to thrive in non-tropical environment, check!
• Extreme pangs of loneliness from missing friends and family, check!
• Feelings of worthlessness over lack of things to stress out over, check!
• Unending desire to repeat the past like some sort of Groundhog Day-esque stunt, check!
• Sense of hopelessness that no other life event will ever compare and the best of life is now behind me, check!

The only cure is to share more photos.

Did I ever mention how we did this really cool canyon zip line thingie? It was great bonding for our guests so that by the time the actual wedding came we were all BFFs

I miss my college roomies

My bouquet fell to the floor, but was rescued shortly thereafter

Me and my dad, after burning 67,000 calories dancing and taking, uhhhh, several tequila shots

My blog got a shoutout in the toast by the best man, which is why I look really embarrassed here

This is how we spent our days, aka Why everyone should have a destination wedding:

When I die they are going to write this on my tombstone: “Do I have anything in my teeth?”

Everyone should have a honeymoon once a year, AT LEAST

Whew, that was fun! Only 1,259 more to go…. (just kidding, I’ll spare you the rest. I have to go back into PND rehab anyway.)

With only two,
Just me and you
Not so many things we got to do,
Or places we got to be
We’ll sit beneath the mango tree now
It’s always better when we’re together

I can’t believe it was only one month ago that we said our vows on a gorgeous beach, stuffed ourselves full of delicious mexican food, and danced our pants off. (Some of us did that more literally than others!) Newlywedness has been good too us. Lots of canoodling and other over-the-top sweetness, several bottles of wine and champage, a few indulgent dinners.

I don’t have any grand revelations about marriage. Andrew and I were already sharing our lives. Now we share a last name and a bank account and get to fill out the little box on forms for “spouse”. But I’d like to think it’s a little different anyway. A little sweeter, perhaps? A little more romantic for now at least. I like it this way.

Forgive me readers, but I happen to be in a bit of a post-wedding slump. It’s not that I’m bored, because I have plenty of items weighing down my To Do list, it’s just that none of those things are Plan Wedding or Get Married or Lay on Beach in Bliss for a Week.

I don’t think my lack of exercise or my quest to eat every processed/fattening food in sight has been helping, so I’m trying to put an end to that ASAP. It’s just that on the first night of my new healthy lifestlye plan, I skipped the gym and ate Frosted Flakes and red wine for dinner. Dammit.

So let’s just forget about all this real life crap and go down memory lane….all the way to about two weeks ago. The reception started off about like this…

But due to things like this…

Moved rapidly on to this…

Damn it was fun.

We’re finally back, all the way married, wearing 50% more bling, and completely and utterly depressed that our dream wedding and honeymoon had to come to an end.

I’ve thought about what I should write here about the wedding about a hundred times. I’ve considered doing a “Wedding Story” the way the mommybloggers do a “Birth Story.” I’ve considered just throwing up a zillion photos and not even trying to piece it all together in words, because it was Just. That. Amazing. (Not to mention the most complicated sentences I’ve constructed in the past week have been, “Rocks, yes, salt, yes” and “I love you, my husband, ahhh I have a husband!”)

The best stories are still trickling out. For instance, I learned on the last night of our honeymoon that Andrew went skinny-dipping in the ocean after the reception! I allegedly knew this at the time, but was too happy (and drunk) in the swimming pool to remember.

Amie had to hitchhike to the wedding rehearsal.

My friend Katie felt so lovey toward her new boyfriend (whom she had sadly left at home) that she did the international version of the drunk-dial and drunk-emailed him saying that she wanted them to be together “4-EVA!”

Andrew and I ate enough Mexican food at the reception to fuel us through a three-hour dance marathon during which I absolutely could not be peeled off the dance floor, not even to eat cake or do tequila shots with my dad. We danced to Shakira, Beyonce, and Andrew’s favorite wedding song of all time, The Humpty Dance. There was some Def Leppard and air guitar somewhere in there too.

The ceremony was perfect (duh, we wrote it!) and Amie had a beautiful reading. Random surfers and doggies joined in to watch on the beach, but I was oblivious to the uninvited guests because I was staring lovingly into Andrew’s eyes. Incidentally, Andrew claims that I looked nervous enough to “bolt down the aisle the other way” but I don’t think that’s true at all.

Actually, the only time I was nervous was during our first dance (song: Ben Harper’s “Forever” – thanks to whoever suggested it!) when I had a little fit of OMG OMG EVERYONE IS STARING AT ME PANIC PANIC DO MY ARMS LOOK FAT OMG. Solution: Have a margarita or two or three.

The most amazing thing is that people came from literally all over the country to celebrate with us. Vermont, Ohio, Boston, Washington, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, California, Colorado, and I know I am forgetting some. It was great to have all the people we love (minus one or two) together, becoming friends with each other outside of us. We felt so loved, and so lucky. Cheesy, but true. I don’t even know how to thank people for coming, not to mention our parents for hosting everything. Just thinking about it all boggles my brain.

Eventually, sadly, I guess it had to end. We spent the week relaxing on the beach and reliving all of the fun moments, confessing to each other many times that we wouldn’t have changed a single thing.

And then today, it was back to the real world. Grocery shopping, unpacking, laundry. We even cleaned out the fridge. If I can’t be obsessive about the wedding, I have to be obsessive about something else instead, and today it was the freaking refrigerator.

I spent the other half of the day uploading photos. You can see the latest flickr set here, and I may post a few more throughout the week. I’m not quite ready to be done being a bride, and I’m going to squeeze out every last ounce of it that I can.

I realize it’s totally insane that I am posting from my honeymoon, but that is just how loyal (or, crazy!) I am to my readers! The wedding was amazing beyond belief. I really can’t put it into words. Also, I have slept less than 15 hours total in the last three nights, so I am completely exhausted.

Enjoy the pics! These are not the professional ones — those come Tuesday. These ones do not include footage of the crazy drunken antics that happened later in the evening, the details of which will probably provide material for many future blog posts. We look so calm and well-behaved in these pictures but once we had a few margaritas, it was a totally different story. SO. MUCH. FUN.

Hopefully these can hold you over for a little bit, cause I’m gonna go snuggle with my new hubby now!