"The Plunge"

It is getting so close so quickly! I have to say we have been touched by all the words of love and support that we have received from so many of you.

I can’t believe that just one month from now I will have the blessing of becoming Mrs. Shannon McGraw. We are really looking forward to our Florida Ceremony with all of our extended family – and trust me, this is one large, extended family!

And we are going to be starting the work on our Wedding Celebration back here in California. It won’t feel like it is complete until we have the chance to share our joy and celebrate with all of our friends and those closest to us.

So, as this exciting journey is about to begin, we want you all to know how much your thoughts and prayers, help and support have meant (and will continue to mean) to us.

All Our Love,
Shannon (and 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