One Year Ago

October 10, 2012 One Year Ago

One year ago today I married the love of my life, my best friend, my soul mate, my Steven. Sure, it’s cheesy, but it’s true. I realized that I’ve never shared our story or the story of our wedding day on here and I figure that now that I’m shooting weddings too that you all would like to hear about mine. Gear up for a long blog post, settle in with a cup of coffee and enjoy our love story, wedding story, and my thoughts on our first year of marriage.

Our Love Story

Steve and I met in 2004 when I was a high school intern at Oak Crest, a local retirement community. I had an internship in their closed-circuit television studio and Steve was one of the full time employees there. At this point, our 4.5 year age difference was much more significant than it is today, and neither of us ever thought of the other as anything other than a coworker and a possible friend. As a matter of fact, after working together for a few months we quickly became good friends, and shortly after that even best friends. At Oak Crest we also had another best friend/coworker named Josh. To this day, Josh is still our best friend. I say “our” best friend and it’s definitely an “our” kind of thing. When I thought of my “best friends” I always thought of Steve and Josh. We even had a nickname for ourselves: Stoshna… for Steve, Josh and Breanna. When Steve left Oak Crest I gave him a framed photo of the three of us at Josh’s wedding with a custom engraved frame that said “Stoshna” on it. It now lives in our house. :)

After 4 years of being just friends and never being single at the same time, I realized that I had feelings for Steve. He had recently gotten out of a relationship and was starting to date. I figured that I should seize the opportunity and take matters into my own hands. Late one October night in 2008 I sent him an email that was both forward and incredibly cryptic at the same time, because what’s the fun in being forward if you can’t make the other person work for it? He responded almost immediately asking what I meant by the email to which I responded “read into it what you will, I’m going to bed.” Hah! Anyway, I get a LONG drawn out response from him not that long afterwards where he said that if I meant what he thought I meant, then he was on the same page, but if not, then he just put his foot in his mouth and we could pretend it never happened.

A couple of weeks of flirting later we decided to give the dating thing a go. We decided to keep it secret since we were best friends and there would be major collateral damage if it didn’t work out. After two weeks we decided to reveal our relationship to our best friend, Josh, and his wife Jamie. We all got together for my birthday at Cheesecake factory. This was a totally normal occurrence. It wasn’t until after we had gotten seated that we broke the news to them… with a kiss. The shock on their faces was amazing! We still talk about the big reveal today :)

Steve is the most amazing, loving, even tempered person I’ve ever met. We have such a beautiful relationship and it’s always been effortless. I’ve never had to pretend with him because he’s always known who I was. He had seen the good the bad and the ugly before we ever started dating. We never had a “getting to know you” phase at the beginning of our relationship because we already knew each other as only best friends could. We just simply fell in love and became closer.

On December 16, 2010 our relationship was taken to the next level at the place where it all began. Several months earlier I had gotten a phone call from Josh, who still works at Oak Crest, telling me that he wanted to coordinate a reunion show where former studio employees would come and be interviewed on the set as a “where are they now” piece for the residents to watch. When we worked at Oak Crest we spent a lot of time not just doing the behind the scenes work for the channel but we also spent a lot of time on camera, so the residents came to know us and our faces. I worked there from age 16 to 20 so a lot of the residents felt that they had watched me grow up in a way. Anyway, I was excited about the idea of the show since we had done something similar when I worked there and I couldn’t wait to be a part of it.

Fast forward to December 16th. We show up to the studio and we’re greeted by Josh and the other employees who still work there along with several other former employees who we had become friends with over the years. Each person was interviewed one by one. Then it became our turn. We went on as a couple. I thought that this was my idea and I thought that it would be cute to reveal our relationship to the residents. Josh interviewed us both about our jobs and our lives since Oak Crest and I got a little emotional talking about how working there wasn’t just having a job, but it was having another family. Josh asked Steve if he had anything to add and that’s when he addressed me directly and asked me to marry him (don’t worry there’s video of this and I will post the link shortly :)). It was a beautiful, intimate proposal, as the only people in the room were Steve, our best friend Josh, myself, and one person to operate the camera. Everyone else was in the control room. BUT at the same time, it was so much more. Our closest friends and family were also there, down the hall in the banquet room for our engagement party, where they had watched the proposal live on the projector! We walked into the room to a standing ovation and right into our moms’ arms!

It was such a huge production and such an amazing and memorable proposal. I still can’t believe all of the work and the secrecy that went into it and how he pulled it off with it being a complete secret! I honestly had no idea that he was going to propose, let alone do it in such a huge way with 50+ people in on the secret. Included in this 50+ was my boss. Steve proposed on a Thursday and got my boss’ permission to let me off work the next day so we could start our vacation (we were already planning on going snowboarding that weekend) a day early. I was on cloud nine and in complete disbelief until it finally hit me a day later when I cried happy tears in the jeep on the way to Seven Springs. Remembering that day still puts a huge smile on my face!

Here’s the video:

Our Wedding Day

My parents got married in the rose garden at Balboa Park in San Diego on a Tuesday and the only person present other than the minister who married them was my dad’s best friend and brother, my Uncle Tom. I always thought there was something incredibly romantic about eloping and I guess because it was so familiar to me it was what I had always wanted, only in my mind I wanted it to be somewhere tropical, preferably Hawaii. At our engagement party my mom informed Steve’s mom of my wish and I was bombarded by them both saying that if we were getting married in Hawaii they had to come too. Of course I couldn’t say no to that, so it seemed that we already had a plan! Get married in Hawaii with our parents present. Steve loved the idea of not having to wear a tux and to be able to get married barefoot. I had definitely worried that he would miss out on having his family there since  he has such a huge family, but he assured me that he loved the plan and so we went ahead! It was just a matter of choosing an island and planning the trip!

Ten months after we got engaged we were married on the south side of Maui on one of the beautiful beaches in Makena. We started our wedding morning off by driving together to the marriage license office and picking up the license! We also picked up my dress (which he didn’t see) and then parted ways at the hotel. He went kayaking with his dad, I went to get pedicures with the moms, and my dad and Steve’s step-dad had a morning round of golf at the Makena Beach and Golf Resort’s beautiful course. Shortly after that it was time for getting ready where the always amazing Jennifer Smutek met us to start capturing the day.

After getting ready we met in the hotel atrium for our first look. These are some of my favorite photos from the day because Jen and Jimmy really captured the joy in this moment. Steve was so adorable when he saw me for the first time and I’m so glad that we had that moment even though our wedding was untraditional and we couldn’t have realistically had that moment otherwise.

We got all of the family photos done in the atrium and then took advantage of the beautiful hotel grounds to get some portraits of the two of us before we headed out to the beach for the wedding.

Our officiant was Dennis DeRego, a minister on the island of Maui. He did such a sweet and silly ceremony. I love that he was so laid back, it kept us at ease.

His ceremony also kept me laughing. I swear, I’m laughing in almost every picture from the ceremony.

And then we were married! We got a couple of quick photos on the beach with our lovely parental units and then we let them get a head start to the restaurant for dinner while we spent more time with Jen getting my absolutely favorite photos of the day.

I adorned my bouquet with my Uncle Tom’s dog tags from when he was in the military. He lost his battle with cancer a couple of weeks after we got engaged, two days after Christmas. The last time we saw him was on Christmas day. He normally spent Christmas at my parents’ house but he wasn’t well enough so we went to his apartment to visit him. He also wasn’t well enough to come to the proposal, so it meant a lot to be able to show him the video. Steve pulled it up on his phone and we let Uncle Tom watch it on the iPhone and listen to it with the earbuds. He had such a huge and joyous smile on his face while he watched the video and he even asked to watch it a second time. We always had a close relationship and in many ways I was the daughter he never had. That day he told Steve to take care of me and to make me happy and Steve promised that he would. It was important to me that even though he was no longer with us in body, that he was still honored as a part of our wedding day.

And this next beautiful image is framed as a 16×20 in our house. We love it! Jen- YOU ROCK!

Our wedding day was seriously a dream. It was so low-key and perfect. There was no drama, no nervousness, nothing. Just love, laughter, and family. I wouldn’t have traded it for the world! We got the best of both worlds with our wedding too– we had the low-key intimate small destination wedding, and then we had a large party with our friends and family at the Hunt Valley Marriott a week after we got home. Neither of us really like being the center of attention so this allowed us to do things our way and our “at-home reception” was just as much about our friends and family as it was about us, and there was a lot of pressure taken off the day since we had already been married for two weeks at that point. Our wedding day, as low key and pressure free as it was, was still surreal to me, much like our engagement was. I was smiles and laughter all day long, totally in euphoria. However, once the true beauty of the day hit me the following day as we started our drive to the other side of the island to kick off our honeymoon, much like during the drive to our vacation post-engagement, I cried tears of joy. That week in Hawaii was the most perfect week of my life. I’m also glad that the moms ambushed us and invited themselves along at our engagement party. I couldn’t imagine not sharing that with them.

Thoughts on our first year of marriage

I have heard many times that the first year of marriage is the hardest. If that’s truly the case then BRING IT ON, marriage! We’ve got this! We bought a house right before we got married and that was by far the most stressful thing we have ever been through in our relationship. If we had waited until after we were married our first year of marriage may have been difficult. But at the point that we got home from our wedding it was smooth sailing! The wedding was over, we had a beautiful house, we adopted an adorable and hilarious cat a little over a month after we got married, and we just were living life and loving it. By marrying Steve I not only got an amazing person to add to my family and to go through life with, but I also got an amazing mother-in-law, father-in-law and step-father-in-law. I couldn’t be more lucky with the amazing family that I married into, and Steve feels equally lucky (or so he says ;)) by gaining my parents. We hosted Christmas last year and it was truly heartwarming to see both of our families coming together in our new house to celebrate Christmas together for the first time.

Every day we say how thankful we are for how amazing our life is together. Even when things aren’t perfect, there’s no denying that we have an amazing life. We have so many things to be thankful for, and I’m glad that we have that perspective and we say it all the time. It sounds silly, but we vocalize it on a daily basis. We look around our adorable 1926 house that we purchased from a wonderful couple who put their heart and soul into it, and we wonder aloud how WE got so lucky to get such a perfect house. We take pleasure in the little things like “family cuddle time” where Sherlock settles in on top of us when we’re snuggling on the couch watching TV, or eating a home cooked meal at the dining room table and talking about our days. Among other things, Steve is my voice of reason and he keeps me positive. I couldn’t imagine a better person to spend the rest of my life with. Thank you for an amazing year, my love! Here’s to many more.

:)

Comments

comments