I said in my post yesterday that twenty-four was a banner year, but twenty-five ranked right up there with it.  We spent the better part of the year planning the wedding and the honeymoon, getting details worked out and being generally happy and excited and everything else that is good.  At Easter, I was confirmed in Seymour’s church after completing the RCIA program.  That was one of the biggest decisions we had made thus far in our life together; his family is devoutly Catholic and mine is Presbyterian.  My family didn’t seem very happy about my decision to convert, but it’s not like I was changing religions or something.  I simply changed my denomination.  After all, Catholics and Protestants do worship the same God, do believe in the same afterlife, do read more or less the same Bible.  It’s not like I joined a cult or something.

However, the difference did pose an interesting question: Where do we have the wedding?  Our priest had some rules and requests that we disliked to the point that we considered having the wedding elsewhere.  The conversation that followed is one of my favorite wedding-related memories. We were going somewhere with Seymour’s folks – probably out for dinner before an afternoon of shopping – and we were discussing the situation with his mom:

Me: “Well, I suppose we could just have it at First (Presbyterian).  The carpet would even match our colors!”
Ma: “Where’s that?”
Seymour: “It’s a Presbyterian church in Grundy.”
Ma: “Well, okay, but you’ll have to tell Grandma.”
Seymour: “Uh-uh, I’m not tellin’ her!  You tell her!”
Ma: “Uh-uh!  You tell her!”
Seymour: “She’s your mom!”
Ma: “It’s your wedding!”

Oh, we laughed!  We still talk about that conversation. 🙂

When we weren’t planning for the wedding, though, we were packing up to move.  We wanted our family to grow and the house we had didn’t have enough room to accommodate our plans, so we found one in town that would.  After a summer spent showing our house and praying someone would buy it so that we could close on the house we desperately wanted, we finally found a buyer and got everything arranged.  But after a series of screw-ups with our banker, the closing dates got pushed back into September so far that we ended up moving the week before our wedding.  Talk about stress!

Mr. and Mrs. Kauffman!
Photograph by Minson Photography

But we had a gorgeous wedding and reception, and the stress I had felt over everything else quickly evaporated.  September 26, 2009, was the date and we couldn’t have asked for nicer weather.  The sun was shining, the leaves were in beautiful fall color, and the temperature was just right.  Seymour had told me that he wanted to give me the wedding of my dreams, and he kept his word.  I couldn’t have had a nicer wedding.

But the fun didn’t end there.  We jetted off to Las Vegas for five days of fun in the sun and boy, did we ever have fun.  We had so much fun, in fact, that we came home with a surprise souvenir.  You know, the non-returnable kind.  The kind that take about nine months or so to develop fully and arrive screaming and in need of diapers.

That’s right, we came back with a baby.  But we didn’t know that.

Well, we didn’t know it when we came back.  We found out about a month or so later and began telling people at Christmas.  Never in our wildest dreams did we actually believe we would get pregnant right away.  We wanted more kids and had planned to start trying right away, but we never thought it would actually happen.  Guess y’all can just call me Myrtle.

Okay, even I thought that was cheesy.  But I like cheese, so…I’m just gonna leave it at that.

My first prenatal appointment was that December and Cricket scared the daylights out of both of us that morning.  The doctor couldn’t find his heartbeat, so an ultrasound was ordered to make sure everything was okay.  Everything was fine, but we had to wait two hours before the ultrasound appointment and once we got in, the tech didn’t realize that we didn’t know everything was okay, so she just did her job like normal while we tried not to freak the eff out.  Of course, this has nothing on what Thumper would do to us eighteen months or so later, but we didn’t know that then.

If we had, I wonder what we would have done.

But speaking of Cricket and Thumper, it sounds like naptime is over.  Join me tomorrow for a reflection on the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge!

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