Love Story: Part 8 - April

Brandon proposed to me in March of 2007.  We set our wedding date for May 17th.  Between those events was a busy month called April.

To be perfectly honest, I don't remember much about April of 2007. It's because I was incredibly buys. Not only were Brandon and I planning a wedding for the middle of May, but I was also one semester away from graduating from college.  I was taking 12 credits including my Sr Research Project class.  In addition to that research paper I had to write research papers for two other classes.

I often found myself staring at the paper chain that counted down to May 17th.  I'd think, "I still have to wait through all of April until my wedding.  Why can't time go faster?"  At the same time I'd also think, "Thank goodness I still have all of April until school is over.  I need all the time I can get to get these papers written."

Before the month started I realized that I couldn't do it all - and still get sleep.  My work study job would have ended with the school year, but I decided to leave it at the beginning of April. I spent all day Monday through Friday on campus either at class or in the computer lab working on my papers. Evenings and weekends were spent working on wedding plans - if I didn't have any pressing homework. 

I had a wedding planning book that I received at a Bridal Fair.  I put a picture of Brandon and me on the cover and carried that book with me everywhere.  It had a calender in the front so it was kind of like a day planner for me.  I still have the pages from that calender.  Looking back I can't believe how busy I was.  The calender is full of deadlines for school right next to wedding plans.  It's a good thing I had a lot of energy from being young and in love. 

I knew I loved Brandon, but I fell in love with him even more as we planned our wedding.  We discovered that we communicated incredibly well together.  One of us could have a simple idea that would become amazing as we discussed it. The synergy between us was amazing.  We had so much fun dreaming up plans to make our wedding amazing. 

I'd been to many weddings over the past several years and I had lots of ideas and opinions of how my wedding should be.  Brandon was just as excited about the wedding as I was.  As a teenager he'd enjoyed helping his mom and sister plan his sister's wedding.  He'd always looked forward to helping plan his own.   

We had lots of fun dreaming up plans for what our reception would be like.  Before I even met Brandon I decided that I wanted my wedding colors to be pink and yellow.  I loved how happy those two colors looked.  I also knew that I wanted the reception to feel like a party.  Brandon took those ideas and helped me come up with a great plan for a reception.  

We originally wanted to have the reception at my parent's Stake Center in Kearns.  However, there was a scheduling conflict.  So instead we scheduled Brandon's parent's Stake Center in Taylorsville. 

I had two main rules when it came to the wedding plans.  One was that if we weren't having fun then we were missing the point.  The second rule was that no one was allowed to go into debt for the wedding.  I found out later that some people didn't quite follow the second rule, but Brandon and I managed our finances very carefully.  

We used a lot of family resources for our wedding.  My dad works for Temple Square Hospitality so we ordered sheet cakes, table clothes, and chair ties from them.  Brandon's mom made cakes so I told her what I wanted my cake to look like, Brandon's friend Jake's mom sold us our unique wedding cake topper, Brandon's brother Bryan was a professional wedding videographer so he offered to make our wedding video, my dad put together slideshows and other video footage to show at our reception, my mom made the Bridesmaid skirts, Brandon and his dad built our backdrop, and so on.  

I loved every aspect of planning a wedding except one - getting addresses for invitations.  It was like pulling teeth to get a list of addresses from my parents and in laws.  Even after I'd been telling them for weeks that I needed the lists I still had to wait while they got them together.  And after all of that they still had people that they left off.  

The invitations themselves were a lot of work too.  We designed them ourselves and then printed them off at Smiths Marketplace.  They were just a little too long for the envelopes so we trimmed them with the paper cutter at the library in our student ward.  And then we spent an evening at the school library stuffing envelopes with our friend Andrew.  

One thing we didn't have to worry about was finding somewhere to live.  Brandon lived alone in an apartment complex full of married couples.  He'd had some bad roommate experiences his first year of college so he preferred to have his own place. Ever since I first started falling in love with him in the Fall I'd had a secret plan to marry him and move into that apartment.  It was finally coming true.  

I didn't want to worry about moving my stuff over to his place during finals week so we took care of that the second weekend in April.  Bryan and Jake came up to help us move my furniture with Bryan's truck.  

A few months earlier Bryan had given Brandon a giant TV/Computer monitor that someone from his work had been giving away. This was right when everyone started converting over to flat screen TVs.  So even though it was a high quality TV it was basically worthless.  It also had some discolored spots in the middle.  It was a lot better than the tiny TV that Brandon had so he was happy to have it.  As luck (or fate as we preferred to think of it) had it, the giant TV fit inside the armoire that I owned.   There was one tiny problem - there was a shelf in the way. 

We discovered the shelf problem at about 10:30 at night.  Brandon said he could take care of it and pulled an electrical circular saw out of his closet.  I had no idea that he had that tool.  He sawed the shelf into pieces and banged on it with a hammer a few times.  I joked that we were endearing ourselves to the neighbors already.    

As we unpacked my stuff it became apparent that we needed more storage space.  I had many books that needed shelves.  Brandon and I went to Home Depot and bought some wood so he could make me a book case.  It was the first of many piece of furniture that he would build for me.  

  

We went to Salt Lake for the third weekend in April.  Early Saturday morning I went with my parents up to the State Capitol for my bridal photo shoot.  It was their 23 wedding anniversary.  My dad spent about an hour taking picture of me.  

 After we finished at the Capitol we went to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building and took more pictures there.

 After that my mom and I went to a Bridal Shower that Brandon's Mom threw for me.  His Aunts and cousins and my Aunts and cousins were there.  It was really well done and fun.  I'd asked for kitchen and food items to I was given lots of practical things like spices and wax paper.  

After that it was back up to Logan to finish up my research papers.  The Sr Paper had taken up a great deal of my time.  It's title was "Economic Issues Surrounding the Expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit."  I still have the paper, but to this day I am so sick of it I don't even want to think about re-reading it to tell you what it was about.  Basically I created a bunch of tax returns on a spreadsheet and wanted to die for a month.

I also wrote a paper for my political science class about the Peloponnesian War.  (Wow I don't even remember the name of the class.) And I wrote another paper for my Natural Resources and Economics class.  That class was really bizarre.  I called it "the Ground Hog Day Math Class."  I kid you not, the professor worked the same math problem on the board every single class time.  He'd come in and say something like, "I realize that I kind of rushed things at the end last time so I'm going to go over it again for you."  And then he'd spend most of the time reworking the problem.  The next time he'd come in and say, "I think I missed a step last time. Let's go over it again." What made it weirder was that there were only like 6 of us in the class.  We'd just watch him do that problem over and over again.  I'm trying to remember what it was even for, but I think I've blocked it out.  I also can't remember what my paper was on.

(Side note: In my opinion, most of the tenured Professors in the Economics Department at USU were completely senile when I went there.  I spent a lot of class time wondering how the professors found their way to the building each day.  They would usually spend about 10 minutes trying to get the computer/projector to work. It was pretty much a waste of time and money.  After I graduated the College of Business increased their tuition in order to pay for better professors.  I really hope that improved things.)

Anyway, school took up a lot of my time that month.  But somehow I wrote the papers and did the presentations.  By the end of April all I had left to worry about was the final in my International Economics class.  Oh and the wedding of course.

Read what happened in May by clicking here.