congrats from across the world.

This afternoon Jeremy sent me a sweet comment from our wedding video that took us here...

11.6.11 from Joachim Wemel on Vimeo.

I left a comment and later got this email from Joachim & Ayco- "We are together for almost ten years now, and have two wonderful kids. We had been thinking about getting married for years, but it wasn't until we saw your video that we really made up our minds to do it this way. Thank you for inspiring us, and giving us the courage to do it. We're so happy."

I am not anti big weddings, but I am appreciating the practical weddings and elopements more and more. I know my feelings come from being in the industry and seeing what kind of cash people drop, but more than that- it's the shift in focus of what a wedding commitment really means and how it's handled. Don't get me wrong- I see huge elaborate weddings that still maintain romance and sanity, but so many times the bride and groom are far more zoned in on the way a table is set than the time they spend together on their wedding day. Bums me out.

I've asked myself a couple of times this year "hummm... maybe we should've done the wedding thing?" But seeing Joachim and Ayco's video makes my heart race and reminds me of all the reasons why it was right for us.

In other news, I am 7 years old when it comes to my love of a water slide.

happy half anniversary, jeremy.

Remember those two crazy kids in this picture?

That ran off to San Francisco 6 months ago today, picked up some flowers, then a cake and went to City Hall and got married?

I love those two.

They make good decisions.

I will never regret a single day or experience that brought me to 11:23 a.m. (look how happy!) on October 18th, 2010.

Cheers to the best days of our lives.

disclaimer: we're newlyweds. we're allowed to be this cheesy for the first year.

wedding invite.

Just realized that I never shared our amazing wedding invitations... which turned into wedding announcements. I just loved them so much!

and then the announcement. still not totally accurate... with the boots, and kitties and farm scene, but like hell I was going to watch the money invested in the illustration go totally down the drain.

the internet is funny.

So yeah... the internet. how weird is it?!

so on friday when our little video was posted on design*sponge, i was fairly freaked out. it wasn't so much about a lot of people seeing it, but the fear of strangers saying mean things about us.

ridiculous, right? or not really? i mean, who wants people they don't know talking shit about them? no one! but at the same time, i'm not so sure why i assumed there would be haters. after all, it wasn't a video of us tazering epileptic kittens. it was a video of love! the happiest day ever!

maybe my fear was just a natural feeling of protection. i hold my relationship with Jeremy so dear, that sometimes I feel too protective over it. regardless, all of a sudden we were out there in the weird internet world, in our most personal and venerable moment for the world to view and comment on. and get this- the internet stranger world was NICE! Really super nice!

"To April & Jeremy: Thank you for sharing this with everyone, and thanks to D*S for bringing it to me. As a woman who has had her fill of big fancy weddings, I know that I want something smaller and more intimate. My friends disagree that anything that involves City Hall could be beautiful or romantic. Thank you for restoring my faith that every person knows what is right for themselves, and that City Hall can be beautiful when the two people involved really want to get married."

(that comment was the one that made it all worth it, by the way)

And then something I didn't expect happened... people started sharing it on their blogs... and then I REALLY freaked out. I mean I had some control knowing that design*sponge would not publish mean comments, but ohhhh shit- now the internet had free reign! so there i was on friday night, outside of a soup and salad restaurant in the suburbs of Denver, having trouble breathing and asking Jeremy why the hell we agreed to post it. Thankfully, sweet Jeremy just took me into the restaurant and calmed me down with a build your own sundae station. Yesssss.

But you know what? Not one of those 160 other blogs that shared it had one negative thing to say. Not one! Perhaps I need to give the internet more credit.


And then there's this: Kazakhstan! Which is my favorite part of it all.