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little love letters

Today, like every other day, I'm in love with the world, so it's a day for little love letters:

Dear little sister,

 First of all, you kicked butt in your senior volleyball game last night. It's so crazy to me that my baby sister is finishing up her last season of high school volleyball, and so will end an era of sitting in stinky high school gyms, cheering "Go Hilton!". I'm so excited to see where you go to college and what you do with yourself in the future. You're so smart and capable of any damn thing you set your mind to, so don't sell yourself short. Go make a name for yourself. I'm proud of you, kid.

Dear apartment,

  It seems you have two temperature settings: A Thousand Degrees or The Arctic. Can we please just find middle ground? Going to bed sweating is no bueno, but neither is waking up with icicles on our noses.

Dear pencil skirt,

  You helped me rock my important interview yesterday afternoon and today, you're just accompanying me to my normal job, but that's important too. You make me feel skinny and classy and I like you.

Dear autumn,

  You're gorgeous. The drive to said interview yesterday was breathtaking with all of the changing leaves on the trees and blue skies and green grass. God really knew what He was doing when He made you. Thanks for being so darn pretty.

Dear Benny,

  You always get out of bed to close the closet door for me, you try to keep us afloat with this dumb budget we made, and you kiss my forehead every chance you get. Plus you're hot. You're the best roommate I could ever hope for and God knows how blessed I am that you decided to marry me too. I'm excited for our date day tomorrow!

the words

I had planned to share pictures from around our apartment on here today, but that's just not going to work. I love our place and am super proud of it, but it just doesn't translate well into pictures. it's like that awkward girl in high school that's pretty in real life, but has a talent for making the weirdest faces right when the camera shutter opens [me].

so today is for sharing the paintings of our vows, done by sweet Alana. we got frames for them yesterday and hung them up last night, but there are no pictures yet. I've been too busy just laying on the couch looking at them.

Ben and I wrote our vows together a few nights before the wedding. we grabbed a blanket, headed to a park, and sat on the grass talking about what we wanted to promise each other and how we should say it. we each wrote our own, but kept reading the drafts to each other, and at the end of the night, we knew we were finished when we read them to each other and cried.

that night is one of my favorite wedding memories. and then a few days later when I walked down that aisle and we read them to each other for real, with all of the weight and the promises behind them, with all of our loved ones there to hear them too, well that one is a memory that I will hold in my heart forever.

little love letters

on this beautiful June day, i've decided that it's time for more little love letters: 

dear Rochester, 
  i'm loving this heat wave, but when it's 80 degrees before 10 a.m, you make it a little hard to get a good run in without feeling like i'm going to die.

dear scammers,
  when you pretend to be interested in buying my old wedding dress and then naive me finally realizes it's a scam, it bums me out. you're mean and dumb and nobody likes you.

dear little sister,
  you're done with your junior year of high school!!! hooray for passing all of your tests and hooray for now being a senior! now, for the hard task of celebrating by laying in the pool all day...

dear summer,
  i'm sorry we've been neglecting you. i've been holed up inside doing wedding things and ben has been working on base for the past 2 weeks! but this weekend, we start really enjoying you: going to the Rochester Jazz Festival, celebrating at graduation parties, going to the beach, all that.

dear immediate family,
  tonight, we're having family pictures taken! they'll be the last official pictures we have together while i'm a Swanson too. so weird. here's to coordinating outfits, so many inside jokes, and maybe an ice cream cone or two afterwards.

dear blog friends,
  you really are the best. thanks for making me feel so loved when my real life friends are all miles and miles away.

and to my dear benjamin, who always gets the last letter,
  only 22 days, sweetheart! i'm so thankful to get to marry such a good man like you. i can't wait to find and move into our first apartment together, the one that i'm sure we'll refer to as "that crappy place we lived when we were first married". we'll make it a home and we'll be there together and that's all that matters. i love you around the universe, even when you watch episodes of HIMYM without me.

but especially when you play your guitar.