Weddings comprised most of the excitement of 2011.  My own eleven-month engagement took prime focus for most of the year, in addition to serving as a bridesmaid (or rather, matron?) for dear friend Bridget in November and enjoying Adam & Kate's wedding on 12/30/2011.  2012 will bring high school friend Lauren's wedding in March, Monica's Hawaiian elopement in May and Jake's wedding in June (with Greg serving as Best Man), as well as plans for my sister Sarah's wedding to take place on 4/13/2013.

Is this the time of life during which a lot of folks wed, naturally?  Mid-twenties seems to be all the rage for matrimony, nowadays.  However, our parents' generation may have exchanged their vows from age 19 to 30.  Do young people nowadays just consider 24-27 to be the best time to settle down with someone? 



Wedding!

Soooo... I got a wedding dress!  I will probably post a photo of it soon, as I'm sure Greg will never read this blog.  :o)  To my surprise, I'm finding that Mom adheres to all sorts of wedding traditions and superstitions.  "There will be no face-smashing of cake.  Each couple whom we saw do that at their wedding has been divorced."  Oh my!  She has also expressed the necessity of the "something old, new, borrowed, blue" tradition.  I read in a wedding magazine that the poem ends, "And a tupence in her shoe."  How am I to come across a tupence?  Will an American penny get the job done?  Furthermore, I had been looking up stock photos of wedding gowns online, which I showed Greg to ask his opinion.  Boy, did I get a chastisement for that!  Even the samples!!  However, I will obey the, as we call her, Incident Commander.

Engagement

Greg and I are finally engaged, after having been a'courtin' for the past three years.  Yay!

Family celebrations ensued at the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, with many toasts and much story-telling and support from everyone.  I think the wedding will be a great, fun party with all these excited family members, plus good friends from home, summer camp, church and college.  We are very excited!

Even more exciting is the fact that we have a place booked.  Yes!  In the most difficult month to find an available venue, my parents succeeded in nabbing a catering place with a beautiful hall, great yard with many pine trees and a kind and detail-oriented catering lady.  We're stopping by her open house today to sample cakes.  This will probably be the most fun part of the wedding-preparation process.  Yum.

Besides that, we've got my parents' church reserved for the early afternoon on our special day, which I think will prove just perfect for the size crowd we'll have there.  Next up:  starting pre-marital counseling with our pastor, planning the ceremony with him and our Camp Hill pastor and a church wedding planner, picking out attire and flowers and making invitations and whatnot.  Oh boy!  I'm actually sort of excited to finish our Save-the-Date postcards, and later, make up our lovely printed invites; it's been a long time since I've dedicated myself to a design project of any sort.

What a  busy time!!  I'm glad we still have eight whole months to finish working on all this stuff.

And now, off to brunch and taste cakes!

Mating Season

Typing seems to be faster than handwriting, so this place on the internet seems to be the best place to journal my weird thoughts. Here is another:

It is spring. I ran this morning and enjoyed the cool air, wet pavement, green grass and bright daffodils. All signs of April in Pennsylvania.

Going past one well-manicured lawn, I saw a pair of cardinals zipping around: a red one chasing a brown one. The male has bright, crimson feathers & a fancy hat; the female is a modest, soft brown hue.

I've noticed that this is often the case in birds: the male is more visually attractive than the female. Girlie birdies are beautiful in their own ways, but the colorations on the males are specifically designed to attract the eye.

Consider: a red cardinal; a green-faced mallard; a blue-green peacock with magnificent tailfeathers. On the other hand, the female cardinal, the female duck, and the peahen are each a duller brown color.

This is less often true in mammals. Buck & doe rabbits look the same, dogs of the same breed look the same; porcupines, raccoons, coyotes have the same appearance between genders (except size, sometimes). Deer have the functional difference in that the bucks have antlers they use for fighting over the females. One case I can think of is that lions have great big manes, and lionesses do not.

So anyways, I was looking at these cardinals today and thinking about how (most often in birds, I guess) the male is the "pretty" one, using his physical appearance to attract a female mate. With people, it's quite the opposite: women are the beautiful ones. In societies where courtship is practiced, the men each seek out a beautiful woman and woo her.

Boy-birds woo their lady-birds with their looks, while men woo women because of their looks. I don't know if there's any theology/philosophy/biological reasoning behind that, but I've observed this a few times before, and I wonder why our Creator chose to give women beauty rather than men, while the reverse is true in the animal kingdom. (I'm open to anyone's thoughts or answers in this)