"The Plunge"

We’ve been in the sunshine state since Monday morning and it has been nothing but beautiful weather, warm ocean and great fun with family and friends. Shannon was out this morning with her mom picking up a few last minute items. Matt and Ethan have been swimming in the pool and searching for shells on the beach! Photos soon!

Blessings,
Matt

I just want to take a second and tell all of you, our loyal readers, how awesome my sweetie is. She has been working so hard on this wedding. In what can only be described as the pinnacle of spousal devotion, she has fearlessly taken on most of the details of the wedding planning, leaving me to focus all my energy on my job and my coursework. What a selfless act of love!

She has even embraced this high-tech platform for blogging and communication with all of you. A few weeks back we discussed using the Blog for our RSVP system and I installed the software and gave her like 5 min of instruction on how to use it. I just logged in here and checked and she has entered ALL THE GUESTS! She is just so amazing. I love her so much!

Thanks, Shanny-Girl, for being an amazing woman, and more for being my amazing woman. I love you!

Love,
Matty

Greetings Blog Readers!

I haven’t posted much here besides technical blog info.  I am taking this opportunity to write a short note about how I’m feeling and what’s going on with me as the wedding approaches.

For the most part, I am ecstatic!  I am so madly in love with Shanny and I can’t wait to start our life together as a family.  To some degree, I already feel like our life together has started, but I know dating and being engaged is different from being husband and wife.  I am so excited to be Shanny’s husband.

I am also feeling very overwhelmed.  My life is stretched these days between wedding planning and work and school… I feel a little thin… and not in a good, more attractive, fit-better-in-my-clothes kind of way.  However, I know that the Lord is Good and that He has this whole process in His plan.  The conflict comes when my head knows but my emotions/heart forget.

So, pray for me… pray for us… as we walk this path together toward our wedding and our future life together.  Pray for peace and for blessing and for stamina.  But mostly, give thanks to the Lord our God for all the blessings we already have.

Grace and Peace,
Matty

Hello all,

You may notice the site is a little different today. There is a good reason for this! I initially set this site up as a blog at wordpress.com and forwarded the “ourwildwedding.thestrangeland.net” address to it. I did this because of several technical reasons which I won’t bore you with here, but I also did it because I had no idea if anyone would visit the site or if Shanny or myself would really be excited about blogging the wedding. Turns out, people are visiting the site and my dearest is an awesome writer.

So, I migrated the site to our domain, “thestrangeland.net” and we are now hosting the blog ourselves. Among the technical upsides are the two “widgets” you can see in the sidebar to the right side of the screen. One is a countdown to the wedding day and the other is the current weather in Clearwater Beach, FL where we will be getting married.

I hope you enjoy the redesign. I am hoping to have an RSVP system set up here as well so you can indicate if you are coming to the wedding. Stay tuned for more information on that.

4 mo/23 days

Matty

Hi!

For those of you on Facebook who got to this blog from somewhere other than Facebook, here is the link to our Facebook group: It’s Official… Matty and Shanny are getting hitched!

I have just created an event in the Facebook group called “The Wedding… Part I”.  Here’s the deal with the wedding.

We have decided to do a small, family and “friends so close they might as well be family” ceremony in Florida on June 13, 2009.  We want to keep this small and we chose this location because Shannon and Matty have most of their family East of the Mississippi… and because, who doesn’t want to get married on a beach, right?

However, all is not lost!  “The Wedding… Part II” will be a no-holds barred, all-day ceremony and party somewhere in the SF Bay area sometime later in Summer 09!  We are going to be inviting EVERYBODY we can think of, so stay tuned for more details on that event.

I also wanted to say a word or two about the purpose of this blog.  I foresee not only using it to communicate news and information about us and the wedding and dates and stuff like that, but also an opportunity for Shanny and I to share our excitement and our fears and our “i’m-going-absolutely-bonkers”.   

Thanks for coming on this journey with us and please leave comments when you can!  I know there are people reading and I would love to have commenters… not lurkers!

Grace and Peace,
Matty