Random Happiness!

Y'all! 16 days from the wedding and I finally got this door project done that's been in the works for a year! 😆

You can see in these links to old posts where I was working on this door in March and where we stripped the bay window for the room last October. Proof that I have indeed let this project be drawn out for waaayyy too long!

In my defense, I've had a few obstacles with the wood molding when some paint stripper must have soaked in too much. 😳

But ya know what?! It's done now and it feels amazing that I did all the work myself. 

Stripped several OLD layers of paint off, bleached the wood, sanded, stained, and "polyed" it! 👍🏼👍🏼

Another random thing that makes me happy... 

My friends came up over last weekend and helped me string lights for the reception and we worked up the strawberries to serve at the wedding! 

(Their help was amazing!!!)
But...

There was a lot of extra juice left, so I made a tiny batch of jelly and canned a few jars of delicious strawberry juice for our new home. ☺️

So glad today has been a productive day! But Thursday's have always been productive for me. I LOVE Thursdays!! 🤓

-MarLeahJoy

25 days

It's finally time to bake the cakes for the wedding! When I was researching how far ahead of time you want to make and freeze cakes for a wedding, they suggested 3 weeks. At that time it seemed like a "far away distant land", but it's here!!!

My dress... check!

Decorations done... basically!

Guys clothes ironed... check!

Gifts for helpers wrapped... check!

My belongings packed up... check!

One more family vacation... check!

Last weekend we rented a house close to Lake Eufaula and spent time with Marvin and Ranelle :)

We had three little jet skies tooting around the lake, boy was it fun :)

With all of these things checked off, I'm finding I need to find a renewed motivation... because right now I'm finding there are just a lot of tiny loose ends to finish up. 😏

The other day I was procrastinating on writing lists for my servers and helpers, so I made a video of something we did in West Virginia... hehe. I know I really don't have time to be doing something non-related to the wedding, but it was a nice break! :)

You can watch it here. My favorite part is the last 30 seconds... I love the beautiful mountains! <3

-MarLeahJoy

We Need Each Other

I've been saving up pictures through the last few months of things I've done and made for the wedding in hopes of sharing them along with wedding pictures later. Honestly, just to brag on myself for what a good job I did in creating my "homemade wedding."

Some of my desire to sew my dress, sew the bridesmaid dresses, make the cakes, arrange my own flowers, etc. could go under the label of industrious and saving money. But the bulk of it, honestly would go under the label of "MarLeah's pride." I've heard many times before that you want a wedding to be simple and not show off how much money/prestige you have. I'm finding out that it's really easy to get caught up in the same pride of making everything perfect, not with money, but with my own doings... however that may display itself.

Well, I've been learning a lot the last two weeks how much I can't do this wedding. At least not by myself. 

Ive been told over and over that I need to learn to delegate and let others help me. And boy does that look like a mountain to me. A HUGE mountain. First of all, I don't know the very beginnings of how to let people do things for me. Second of all, it hurts my pride that I have to obligate someone else and imagining in my head that others are thinking, "she wasn't superwoman enough to do it on her own". (I know people don't view it that way, but I wanted to be that way!!!)

This evening I was getting a little overwhelmed thinking about it, and I just took some time to pray. It seemed like the Lord wanted to show me that he doesn't want this to be "MY homemade wedding," he wants it to be a lesson on how to trust people and how to allow people to help me... he wants it to be a "We need each other" wedding 😊

With that, I'm going to share some pictures of things I have done with OTHER people for the wedding, not the things I have done myself. ☺️

...

That's right, I don't have any 🙄🤔

But that should be changing soon!!!

-MarLeahJoy

Chopping Sorghum

Tyrel and his dad were chopping this field yesterday when the 20% chance of forecasted rain dumped... I mean POURED all 20% right in the field. 😭 So this morning we were all hoping and praying it was dry enough to go through the chopper without clogging it up.

They spent quite some time this morning pulling all the damp silage out.

As they were going along I took quite a few videos, and once I stationed myself up on the top side of the bed. Tyrel warned me that I might get blown on... I didn't think it would hit me enough to care, until Keith of course angled the shoot right at my face. The only thing I regret was that I didn't get the last part of the video where he was shooting silage at my face because my phone ran out of storage. 😩

This is my last time in West Virginia before we get married and I'll be living up here, and boy am I ready!

Only a month and a half of final wedding preparations and packing all my belongings into a trailer... 😊😄

-MarLeahJoy