It's been a long year..

Whew, I know it's been quite a few weeks since my first post but what I failed to mention in that one is that I was planning my wedding. Tripp and I set our wedding date in July 2013 so when my brother unexpectedly passed away just 15 short weeks before our date, we were forced to make some decisions that we had NO clue we would have to make. When planning a wedding one section that people forget to mention to you is, what if an unexpected death in your family happens? While that is super depressing, it is very real for us and caused a lot of hurdles in the last few months of our engagement.

I want to be as transparent as possible on this blog and that is what I plan to do. My goal is not to be super hateful or super depressing on here but to talk about some things I've experienced or am experiencing in hopes that someone who hasn't been able to relate to anything before may find this relatable. My main passion in life is to help the lonely, no not the lonely for a soulmate kind of way but someone who feels that their situation is completely different from anyone else and who goes to bed at night feeling completely alone in what they are going through. I've had that feeling too many times and I never want to know of someone having that feeling when I could help in some way. So I hope that this blog brings about some kind of comfort for someone.

That being said, like I stated previously Tripp and I did not have unexpected death in our wedding plans, for financial sake or emotional sake. Our engagement was one of the toughest things I have ever been through, it had extreme highs and extreme lows and I am grateful for all of the persevering that we have gone through because the Bible says that God blesses those that persevere. It was not easy and we did not always handle it right, simply because we had no idea how to handle it, nor did we have it in our plan. In the end, we did what we needed to do, what we had to do and what we felt led to do, no matter how hard it was.

Tripp and I do not come from money and we make no bones about it that we are simple people that were both brought up on hard times. When we got engaged, we were overly excited and exceeded our budget fast. We were quickly brought back down to earth in January and tried to make do with what we had and also had some help from our parents which we greatly appreciated but like I said, we do not come from wealthy backgrounds which I feel is the normal thing for most now. We both have student loans and paid for our own bills at the time we got engaged. We did not have some grand savings to pull from and literally started saving aluminum cans from the second we got engaged. We lost a lot of wedding weight doing the ramen noodle diet and learned that life could still be complete even if we got rid of cable. We both made a lot of sacrifices for the wedding and trimmed down our idea of what a grand wedding would be. (All that being said, I was OVERJOYED with our wedding in the end and it perfectly fit the couple that we are!) When we first got engaged, we had a huge venue picked out, a huge guest list and a huge wedding party. Well life happened which brought our idea of the perfect venue down, as well as, eventually our wedding party became smaller. Some of you may be wondering what this has to do with me dealing with my brother dying but it was so close to our wedding and financially, my parents did not have a child's funeral and a child's wedding all saved up to happen in the same year just weeks apart. Around 7 weeks after Micah passed, Tripp lost his job. So with all that had just happened, we had no choice but to continue to trim on the wedding that was in just a few weeks and while the wedding party did not understand at all what we were going through financially or emotionally, the show went on. Everyone said that we would find out who our true friends are during these hard times and we truly, truly did and I am so thankful.

During all of the financial hardships we were being hit with I was still trying to comprehend having the worst day of my life and the best day of my life so close together in the same year. It was hard and I wanted and tried to talk Tripp into eloping more than a handful of times. He did not want me to have any regrets, which now I am so appreciative because our wedding was exactly what I needed. It was hard to have family pictures and it was hard to see him have pictures with his siblings. As we were on stage during the ceremony, at one point I did glance at the groomsmen and think of how in a perfect world Bub would be standing up there with them. Micah loved Tripp, honestly Micah wasn't the type of brother that would be the big bad wolf. He would've said, "Screw everyone that has not tried to make this time easier on y'all, including myself."

After all the hateful words, hard financial times, people not understanding, sadness and anger thrown our in our direction...our wedding and honeymoon was so perfect for us. It was really a day where I didn't care how ugly anyone acted to me, if the flowers were the wrong color or if my cake was falling apart from the humidity, Tripp is mine and I am his.

A few wedding pictures: