Skinny Mom started posting daily inspirations to encourage others to #sharemorelove, which inspired today’s Wedding Wednesday post. After all, what relationship doesn’t need more love?
Lately, I’ve been thinking about new/better ways to show sweet Queso** how much I love him. With me going to school full-time and working part-time and him working full-time and going to school part-time, our schedules stay pretty packed; it’s easy to get stressed and to let that stress seep into the relationship and expand. So lately I’ve found that the best way for me to combat this is to stay positive, be encouraging, and pray a whole lot! That’s why I chose these sweet quotes to display for today’s WW.
Hopefully they serve as reminders for us to be kind to our significant others, whether we’ve just met, been dating for a while, are engaged, or have been married for what feels like forever. They’re the one, right? Let’s strive to love them best (after God, of course), and treat them with love and kindness.
Can you tell that I needed a gentle reminder in this area this week? I’m by no means perfect or even good at it, but I believe that life is a process–we must continually seek truth and goodness and strive towards that.
**That’s what I call Cason about 40% of the time. It’s ‘Case’ about 50% of the time and Cason only about 10%–usually when I’m upset!
By now, I’ve probably read every article there is about getting married and changing your name. Who knew it could be such a process just trying to decide what to call yourself.
Do I drop my middle name, keep my maiden name, and add his last name? (Apparently this is the Southern thing to do.)
Do I drop my maiden, keep the first and middle, and add his last name?
Do I forego the name change altogether?–um, no.
Well, after plenty of thought (and maybe too much), I’ve decided what I’m going to do. I decided to share it here for two reasons: the first being that EVERYONE has asked me what my new name & monogram will be, and the second being that it’s Wedding Wednesday, and well…why not? So without further ado:
I’m keeping all of my names. Yup! All of them. I go by my first name–can’t get rid of that. My middle name is unique–not doing away with that one. And there are no more boys to carry on my maiden name–so I’m keeping that one too.
Then I will get a wonderful, new last name! Yes, I’m taking Cason’s last name. No, there was never really a debate about that.
So here’s the question: what do you do with your monogram when you have FOUR names?
Well, I decided that I’m just going to use my first, middle, and new last name in the monogram. I don’t really have a good explanation on this one, besides the fact that it’s just easier to switch the “big letter” than to move all of the letters around. So there it is!
How did you change your name & monogram when you got married?
Hey, it’s Wedding Wednesday again! This week is the official debut of our wedding website, becomingthestones.com. Yes, we are super cheesy and we love it. Feel free to click the banner above and head on over to the site. We would love, love, love for you to fill out the online guestbook so we know you stopped by and checked things out.
Just a quick post this week, but I do hope you’ll hop on over to the wedding website and let us know what you think!
For my first Wedding Wednesday post, I present to you, our ENGAGEMENT PHOTOS, done by the lovely Sammie Culpepper! It was so much fun working with her, since all we had to do was be ourselves! We are so thankful for the memories and the photos that we now have to share with our family and friends. If you haven’t yet, check out Sammie’s website, and look forward to meeting her at the wedding in January!
A few things to note:
I was having a really, REALLY good hair day, if I may say so myself.
Cason was the cutest, sweetest, funnest Cason on this photo shoot. Had I not started getting hungry/grumpy, I could have taken pictures with him all day.
You can click on an image to make it larger–then you should be able to scroll through the larger versions of the images.
Family & Friends: If you would like to see the full album or order photos, feel free to text/email me for the link!
“I want a marriage more beautiful than my wedding.”
This week in all of my wedding planning, I came across the most recent volume of Southern Weddings Magazine. I was so thankful for their view on weddings and their belief that, “planning for a wedding means planning for more than just one day; that there is nothing on this earth more important than family; and that while details are nice, true love always, always wins.”
Throughout this planning process, I’ve found it difficult to express how important planning for our marriage and joining our families is to me, and it is nice to see that people understand. People get it. And while we may get caught up in the wedding planning as a process, I’m thankful for understanding friends and family who know that marriage is beautiful and sacred–that a wedding is a tiny glimpse into the joy that is to come.
I’m thankful for this week of planning with my friends and family. I’m thankful for sweet vendors and wonderful wedding planners. But what I can’t forget is that I’m also thankful that when I fly back to Texas, I have a loving fiancé to celebrate life and family with. I have someone who gets me and wants to grow with me–beyond January 3, 2015.
I believe the path God set before us did not start with an extravagant wedding day, nor will it end there. However, that day will give us a time to gather with friends and family and celebrate the work that God is doing in our lives together. So while I continue to plan and prepare for that day, I will also continue to plan and prepare for my marriage.
The Sweet Tea Society is comprised of a network of brides, wedding planners, vendors, and Southern Weddings Magazine, united in the belief that marriage is about more than one day–it’s about life and family. For more information, click here.
Cason and I met back in high school through a program called Teen Advisors (TAs). He was homeschooled, but he came to my high school for TA sessions. We knew each other, and we had plenty of mutual friends, but we weren’t close at the time. (Cason says he had a crush on me at one point, but he steered clear because I was dating someone throughout high school.) After I graduated, Cason and I didn’t stay in touch. When I was home from college during Christmas and summer breaks, I went to a young adult ministry called The Door, and we ended up reconnecting through that ministry.
During my sophomore year in college and after a recent breakup, I bumped into Cason at Fantasy in Lights over Christmas break (2011). We chatted like old friends–he asked about my experiences at Mercer and shared about his adventures in Australia. Given my introverted nature, a conversation this detailed, however brief, was a big deal to me. Cason, naturally social and chatty, probably didn’t think twice about it.
The next time we saw each other was during the following summer break (2012). We both attended The Door one evening, and afterwords Cason invited me to Buffalo Wild Wings with him and some friends for his birthday. I accepted his invitation, which was also probably a pretty big deal for me–if you know me, you know that in all honesty, I probably just wanted to go home for some alone time after being with a group of people for two hours. We talked about our travels including one pub in London that we thought we had both visited. After I got home that night, I sent him a photo of the pub that I took during my travels, but I never heard back from him. (Thankfully, we can now laugh about how he never responded to me.)
By the spring of this year, I had graduated college and returned to our hometown to prepare for my trip to China. However, Cason was interested to hear about my travel plans, so he messaged me on Facebook one night and invited me to grab coffee with him. It’s funny because the day before he messaged me, I was feeling pretty bored at home without all my friends. So I was trying to think of people to hang out with, and I saw that he was online on Facebook. I went to message him–opened the chat window and everything–but I got distracted by my parents and ended up not messaging him. (Though it’s unfortunate that the trip to China never happened, I think now it’s obvious that God still had great things in store for me.)
If you ask me about our first date, I would say it was that February night at Starbucks, though Cason will admit that he didn’t think of it as a date at the time. I was quite surprised by how naturally we hit it off, and I remember wondering why we never hung out more in high school. Cason is genuine and very forthcoming about his life and experiences, and I appreciated that very much. I think we can both agree that at that point in our lives we were tired of unhappy endings and playing games with people; we were both looking for something real. I must have seen that right away in Cason because that night after Starbucks, I told one of my friends, “I’m gonna marry this guy.”
Our picnic in the park on the day Cason officially asked me to be his girlfriend.
In our dating relationship, we were very intentional about getting to know each other. (We knew of each other for so long, that it made it easy to transition from the general to the more specific.) Early on, we both realized that we had found what we were looking for, so to speak, so naturally we talked about getting married; we already had the mindset and the devotion–we wanted it to be “official.”
Over the summer, I found out that I got into Baylor, and I was both thankful and surprised to find that Cason was more than willing to move with me to build on our relationship and embark on this new journey with me. Not only was he willing to move 700 miles from home with me, but he also would have married me before-hand, had we not been brought back down from cloud nine.
So we moved to Texas together, and though it has been difficult at times, Cason has been a great blessing to me during this transition. I know that the move has been just as difficult for him, and that helped us grow together and closer to Christ in the process. We’ve found a church and made new friends and just have generally done life together from day one here in Waco. We had talked over the past couple of months about getting engaged so needless to say, I knew that a proposal was imminent.
a thousand new paths 