Boy howdy, am I glad that dress fit.

It's more of a reason than an excuse, but Excuse #3: Your parents got married, so now you're legit! We got hitched on June 25th, and anyone who has ever planned any sort of substantial event (by themselves or otherwise) will know that it is a genuinely all-consuming task. Compound that with the fact that the school year ended the week prior to the wedding, as well as the ongoing impact of excuse #2 as well, and this may have been the most substantial distracting/excuse-generating factor.

I'll be a little brief, despite this being a massively important and significant event, so that I can move on to the entry I'm burning to write about sharing your existence with people. Basically, we worked our butts off for about a year to put together a wedding that was simultaneously practically affordable and creatively luxurious, and this meant a ton of hands-on work. While your father was definitely less involved in researching the minutiae (I probably clocked more hours on Etsy than on eating for a stretch of time), he did an almost startling amount of hands-on work on invitations, flowers, centerpieces, and other assorted paper goods. It was truly a team effort, and it felt amazing to finish things up and see a finished product that (to be perfectly modest and honest) kicked total ass.

It does bear mentioning, however, that I spent the almost six months prior to the wedding doing exactly what I promised myself I wouldn't do (and no, I'm not referring to getting knocked up). Television is doing a good job of convincing women that a pre-wedding diet is necessary, the internet is no help either, and even books are just making things worse. I was not crash- or fad-dieting, however: I was simultaneously trying to get ready for you by establishing (gasp! shock! recoil in surprise!) a balanced and healthy diet, and working to shed the few pounds that I needed to for (OMG!) the sake of being healthier. Sure, I knew it would be nice to slide perfectly into that dress, but I already knew it fit, so any actual weight loss was incidental to the benefit of being healthier. Then you came along, Batman. I dropped a nice chunk of weight before figuring out the whole morning sickness thing, then promptly began putting it back on when eating became a matter of finding something - anything - that I could stomach putting into my mouth. Sadly, some of my most reliable stand-bys included take-out burgers, pasta, bread, other pasta, different bread, and occasionally rice. Between you and the "eat basically anything" diet, it was a small miracle that my dress zipped.

Add to all that the fact that your Uncle Cameron and Aunt Julia were in town for three weeks after the wedding (and only left today, in fact), and this whole wedding rigamarole is easily the most pleasant of the three excuses for not writing more lately. Yay! Requisite wedding related update complete! You'll hear stories and see pictures aplenty, so let's move on to more specifically Batman-related matters.

There's such a thing as good stress, right?

This morning was the first time I was obviously panicked about our wedding without being in the middle of discussing, organizing, making something, or otherwise directly dealing with it. I was driving to work, and (given that I have an hour commute - balls) listening to a book on CD. This time around, it's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, which I have been very much enjoying. In the book, the Kingsolver family throws a 150 person party for Barbara's 50th birthday. The whole premise of the book is to document a year of eating only locally-sourced foods, so catering this event is tricky, but - in the same vaguely smug fashion in which every meal in the book comes together - they manage to do so with only a normal amount of effort and yield a glorious result. Apparently elderly relatives were still cutting up the rug come two AM, and everyone was happily fed and entertained the whole night through.

For those of you who don't know, either because you're currently non-existent (lookin' at you, Batman) or a reader who doesn't know me personally, I am getting married in (holy crap) thirty-six days. That's thirty-six days to prepare to host close to twenty close friends either in our apartment or a cabin we're renting, to magically manifest a chunk of money, to make a crapton of decorations and other accoutrements from scratch, to organize the logistics of everyone's travel, and to somehow figure out what the hell I'm doing with my hair and makeup (which are things I typically give about five minutes of consideration to on a given day).

Don't get me wrong: I'm pretty good in an isolated high-stress situation. Lost a kid on a field trip? I will OWN that search-and-rescue operation. Stranded on the side of the highway with a flat tire in the middle of nowhere in a torrential downpour? Let's change that mother-fucking tire. Suddenly noticed a massive overdraft in a bank account? I will shuffle my finances like a boss. Working continuously on a month-long project that has a humongous impact on a final graduate class grade? Er...I think I'll go curl up in a corner, vomit, clean that up, then go back to the corner to cry in a fetal position for a while. Put simply, my short game is excellent, but my long game could stand some improvement.

Planning a wedding has been amazingly fun - don't let my ranting convince you otherwise - but goddamn has it been hard. While I was listening to the description of the Kingsolver's torturously successful undertaking, my brain was just chugging away: how the hell do they manage to stay so calm, cool, and collected through logistically assembling a 150 person party in their yard, catered entirely by themselves, with live music, a bunch of people camping on their land, and a working farm to tend as well? I melt down with more than a single DIY task to complete in an evening! Am I just that much less capable than a bunch of Appalachian-dwelling farmers?

We've got just over a month until our wedding, and rather than blithely wondering whether our neighbors will be providing us with delicious home-raised lamb or chicken, we're frantically scrambling together the last HUGE chunk of money, tracking down missing RSVP's, and realizing how many DIY projects are as-yet incomplete. I'm starting to lose sleep and find myself distracted by wedding minutiae at odd times, like while showering (WTF are we going to do about towels at the rented cabin?), during my morning commute (I feel awful that people will need to pay so much for gas to get here!), and while indulging my lower bowel's needs (can our bathroom handle more than six people using it in a night?).

So what. There's nothing I can do about most of these things but lay my plans as well as I am able and cross my fingers for the rest. I guess the lesson about stress here is to just let it happen and move on. A panic yesterday about how to display our 200 some-odd cupcakes yielded a gloriously simple solution (upcycled Goodwill plates on chunks of PVC cut to different heights), and everything else will fall into place...or it won't, and we'll just move on. Batman, don't let the stress get to you, and if you do, try to find a way to laugh at yourself good-naturedly. When I started to panic about shower capacity while pooping...I mean, do I need to say anything more?