Mr. and Mrs.

A picture from the rehearsal, until I can show off the real ones.

Mommy and daddy are married.

I have a new last name and a husband. I now have the same last name as my daughter. I'm a wife. I'm wearing a wedding ring. I have a new sister, mother, and father-in-law, along with a whole host of new family members.

Other than that, not much has changed. Jason and I have been committed to each other as if we were married for years. When we reunited after some time apart two years ago--three months after that he proposed--I already knew this was my life partner, officially, forever. We were already living together. A few months after the proposal, we found out about Adelyn. We already knew we were spending our lives side by side, for better or for worse, and Adelyn pretty much sealed the deal.

Way back when we got engaged I signed up for those pesky monthly newsletters from TheKnot.com. Doesn't every overly-excited girl do that? And let me just tell you now, I used those things about as often as I use our fancy bottle warmer. Never. Yesterday, a day after the wedding, I got an e-mail with the subject line "Congratulations!" It was the first one I'd actually opened from TheKnot. And all they wanted to tell me about was this thing called "post-nuptial blues."

Geez. Before we'd even opened our gifts I was being warned about this new mind-altering, depressive state.

So. I'll just say that I, for one, am not all that worried about depression right now. Sure, the wedding's over, and part of me feels a twinge of sadness at that thought, just because I want to relive it again, and again, and again. I see now why people renew their vows, a practice I always thought was sort of superfluous. I get it. They just want another night of dancing and gifts and seeing everyone you love under one roof. If Jason and I had the money we'd renew our vows every year, fly all of our friends in and get all dressed up and stand up in front of everyone to tell each other how amazing the other is.

Sunday night was the best night of my life. Period. Coming in a close second is the night Adelyn was born, which was, I guess, more profound in a lot of ways, except I was on zero sleep and nurses were pushing on my belly until I was screaming in pain after I gave birth. Luckily there was no such practice after we said "I do."

This weekend was also the first time in years that all of my best friends have been in the same place at the same time. The bachelorette party and rehearsal dinner are entirely separate stories for later. There's just too much to tell.

From left: Elise, Crystal, Meagan, Alex, Erin, Morgan, me, and Jasmine.

On Thursday, I brought Adelyn to my parents house to hang out with my sister. On my way back out to the car, I was leaning forward to put Adelyn's DEARGOD so, so heavy car seat in its base when I stepped down at the wrong angle and my ankle twisted all the way inward. The pain was so intense it almost didn't register immediately. I got in my car, put the key in the ignition, and drove back to my apartment, my entire foot and ankle throbbing with each press of the gas pedal. Jason was waiting for me at home, recovering from food poisoning. He'd been up all night throwing up. Thankfully, his crisis was ending just as soon as mine was beginning. I called him from the parking lot of our apartment and asked him to come carry Adelyn. I couldn't walk. I sat in my car, trying to put weight on my foot outside the door, and it just wasn't happening. The pain was too intense. Jason got Adelyn inside and then came back for me. He carried me inside, got some ice for my already-swelling foot, and listened to me sob for an hour about the devastating fact that I would not be able to walk down the aisle. Of course. Of course this would happen, the day before my bachelorette party and three days before the wedding.

Jason used to be a sponsored skateboarder when he was a teenager, so he's no stranger to injured feet. In fact, he's an expert. He's broken, sprained, and twisted those ligaments so many times his feet are completely flat. (Sorry, baby. I still think your feet are the cutest feet ever.) So a few hours after the catastrophe that was my ankle twisting, Jason had me walking around the apartment. I was walking like an idiot. I was sobbing. I was dragging my foot behind me like a zombie. It hurt almost as bad as labor. (Keep in mind I got an epidural and the pain stopped when I was dilated to a four.) But I was walking, albeit walking while enduring excruciating pain. And this, Jason told me, meant that I would be fine. If it was broken or even sprained, he said, walking on it wouldn't even be an option, pain or not. So I went to bed that night hopeful I would wake up and the throbbing would be gone.

I woke up around three in the morning, and it was worse. I didn't want to wake Jason up again since he was on Adelyn-duty that night, so I crawled out of bed. I crawled down our stairs, through our living room, then to our kitchen. I reached for some Tylenol and gulped it down. And then I crawled back upstairs.

When I woke up, I could walk. My foot was bruised and it still hurt, but the intense throbbing was gone. After that relief, knowing I'd be able to walk at my own wedding without crutches, the rest sort of flew by me. I stopped worrying about all the little details and just enjoyed it. I guess it was a sort of blessing in disguise.

I wanted to write yesterday about this weekend but I didn't know where to start. The highlight was probably the cliche moment when I saw Jason for the first time walking down the aisle, because how can you top that? You can't. But then there was my dad's incredible speech. My best friend Meagan's toast, where she reminded everyone how we met fourteen years ago debating who had the higher reading level. It also could have been Jason's dad serenading us to Elvis (I made him promise he would do this a year ago, and he refused. Guess the wine made him rethink it). Or my oldest friend Melissa performing "At Last" a cappella. Beautifully. Maybe Adelyn's aunt Erin carrying her down the aisle. Jason's mom getting down on the dance floor to Kool and the Gang. My best friend Morgan grabbing the mic to welcome Jason into our close-knit group of friends. My pregnant best friend Elise shimmying on the dance floor while holding her belly. My mom gripping my hand as we walked down the aisle. Our photographer and my good friend Justin breakdancing after he put the camera down. The dance contest for the bouquet to Beyonce's "Put a Ring on It." It could have been Jason smashing the glass after we said our vows, and it also could have been when I accidentally dropped and smashed my wine glass from dancing with just a little too much enthusiasm. Or when I went to check on Adelyn upstairs and found her sitting in her great grandma's lap, stripped down to her diaper because of the heat, snoozing.

And it might just have been the end of the night, after Jason and I finally got in our getaway car, both drowsy from too much champagne and excitement (we weren't driving), when I laid my head on his shoulder and we sat in the quiet and held hands, peaceful, content, and finally married.

Adelyn didn't even make a peep during the ceremony. She sat on my mom's lap, watching her parents say their vows to each other and watched with a happy smirk on her face. I couldn't have asked for more.

For now, I'll leave you with our vows. Nothing else could really sum up the weekend better.

Mine: I, Sarah, take you, Jason, to be my husband. I take you to be my forever friend, my faithful companion, and my constant comedian. I vow to love you every day, on the days you’ve gotten enough sleep and even when you haven’t. I vow to listen wholeheartedly and with true excitement to the details of every new passion you discover. I vow to let you play guitar every day, all day, if that’s what you want, and to sing along always. I vow to be the best mother I know how to be to our daughter Adelyn, and to never, ever forsake her or you and to always place my family first. Above all else I vow to love you more with each passing day, and to never forget the happiness I felt nearly seven years ago when I met you and realized I found my soul mate. I give you my hand, my heart, my soul and my self, as long as we both shall live.

Jason's: From the start of our first date I knew one day we'd be standing right here. In the past six and a half years we've both been swept away on a crazy journey, constantly turning and forging onward. And with those turns and life's many surprises we've always found a center in one another. A center that is real, constant, and will always feel like home to me. I vow to always be your center, no matter how far or fast life turns, to be right there with you. To always remain faithful and to honor you with each passing day. To be a partner, a friend, and a soulmate that you can rely on. And to never let you forget just how much you mean to me. I'll give you my unconditional love as long as we both shall live.

(Get ready to be inundated with wedding pictures as soon as I get them.)

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Oy Vey.

About a year ago, Jason and I got engaged. It was a long time coming, probably; we'd been talking about getting married since I was 18. Six years later we decided it was time to take the plunge.

I dove into the whole wedding planning thing pretty quickly after that. I thrive on that kind of stuff--any excuse to get me all stressed out over details and color schemes and design and I'm all over it.

Three months after the proposal, though, came the baby apocalypse. And the wedding planning sort of went under the back burner for, oh, almost a year.

Before we knew about Adelyn we'd already picked out a venue and a date. (That date was pushed back a month post-Adelyn-revelation.) There was a little back-and-forth at first about whether or not we should just make it a rush-job and get married before she got here. It was never a morality issue, though. But as my mom said, after the baby comes, everything--wedding included--will be about the baby, not about a wedding.

I said screw it, though. I didn't want to get married when we were 18 because I wanted to be able to drink at my wedding without any raised eyebrows. That wasn't about to change just because I had a bun in the oven.

So we waited. And my mom was right--baby took over. Planning for Adelyn trumped any thoughts of our wedding (and rightfully so). Luckily I bought a dress when I was barely showing, an adventure in and of itself. That, the venue, the menu, the date, and the fact that I will be drinking without hesitation are decided. The rest? Pretty much up in the air.

Turns out planning a wedding in three months with a wailing newborn on your lap isn't the easiest thing. Before she got here, I had grandiose ideas of customizing the event; I even wanted to make one thousand paper oragami cranes to hang in the trees in honor of the Japanese marital custom. Now, I could maybe fold one of those things before Adelyn poops her diaper.

Oy vey. I guess the details will just have to wait, probably indefinitely. It's already taken me the entire weekend to finalize our guest list and even just start getting together addresses--let alone putting together and addressing the invitations. Did I say "oy vey" already?

When we were in the hospital I really, really wanted Adelyn's nursery ID card to have Jason's last name on it. Because it would be her last name, too, after all. But because we went and refused to get married, it has my last name on it. When they gave it to us before our discharge Jason remarked that Adelyn would now always know we weren't married when she was born, because he knew I was gonna frame that thing.

He forgot that she'll be seeing pictures of herself, at 4 months old, posing with us in a white dress and tux. Guess the jig is up.

(That reminds me--I have to find an infant's dress suitable for a wedding but that doesn't resemble an exploding cupcake or make me want to gag. Add it to the list.)

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Six years and two days.

It's amazing how different things look in the morning.

Freak out over.

Have I mentioned recently how lucky am I to have a partner like I do? We celebrated our six-year anniversary on Sunday by driving an hour and a half to Monteagle, Tennessee, to a restaurant Al Capone built for his mistress. Before we left we promised each other we'd drop the baby-convos for the night, but ten minutes into the drive we both had a hand on my stomach feeling her kick. It's pretty much impossible these days to focus on anything else.

Jason and I have been through a lot to get where we are. There's still so much, though, I don't know about what makes some relationships work and others fail. But I do know that I'm marrying someone who listens to me cry and rant and only makes me feel uplifted and supported. He runs me a bath when my back hurts and goes to the store to get me ice cream just because my pregnant-self wants some. And when he comes home from work and I'm freaking out about where the hell my life is going, he helps me remember that we don't have to figure it all out right now.

First, I'm going to have a baby.

P.S. She has the hiccups right now, and I can feel them all the way down to my butt. Hiccups in your butt, folks. The things they don't tell you.

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Pregnant Girl Shopping for a Wedding Dress.

I'm still recovering from yesterday. My mom and I spent hours upon hours shopping. We got lost on the way home. I wore heels for more than twenty minutes, and my feet are still swollen. I tried on countless dresses. I paraded myself in front of complete strangers, watched a dozen eyes look at me looking at myself in mirrors bigger than my bedroom, and spent more money on one item of clothing than I probably ever will again.

But I bought my wedding dress, so none of that really matters.

I knew when we got in the car yesterday that I was coming home with a dress (or at least the promise of one). My stomach grows more every day. My pants feel tighter each time I force them to button. Even my flowiest of flowy tops are starting to cling to the beginnings of a bump. I needed to get a dress before my stomach undeniably morphs into a convex fessel.

So my mom and I drive to a store in Lebanon, about 45 minutes away from Murfreesboro.

The second we walk in, I feel, for the first time, like a real bride, in the cheesy, romantic comedy sense of the word. And a pregnant one, natch.

Inside, there are three mirrors in a semi-circle, sitting in the middle of a bustling room, dresses lining the walls. In front of each mirror, a stepping stool for the girls to stand on. Behind it, a bench for the mothers, the friends, the grandmothers and their compression panty-hose.

There are at least five girls there trying to find "the one." Waiting for my appointment, my mom and I stand in the doorway, watching each mini-circus unfold. Girl comes out of dressing room, holding up HUGE diamond-encrusted train as she walks, and steps onto the platform. She examines herself, turning this way and that, a glassy, awed expression on her face. The observers tilt their heads this way and that, sometimes nodding in approval, sometimes trying to politely tell her that she looks like a sparkly cupcake. The rest of us, the ones not belonging to that particular party, don't hide the fact that we're watching. We all stare. And when the next girl emerges from a curtain and walks onto a platform, our gazes turn to her.

I get more and more nervous waiting for my appointment. For some reason, every girl trying on dresses this particular day is a size triple zero, and I say this without the slightest hint of sarcasm because I am, and always have been, a tiny person. Thank years of Crohn's Disease for that. I've never been bigger than a size two, and I usually struggle to put weight on. At my sickest, I've eighed under 80 pounds. I've spent most of my life trying to GAIN weight, trying to not look like a sickly 13-year-old.

But in wedding dress world, especially for someone who's just shot up 7 pounds in two months because she's growing a baby, who's middle section now isn't an inch smaller than the rest of her, everything is upside down. The girl you're watching examine her profile in a corseted, Cathedral-style gown, who has the slightest indentation of ribs apparent on her chest, she's wearing a size 12 in that wedding dress. It's cruel.

I already knew exactly the kind of dress that I wanted. I knew it way before I got pregnant, but it just so happens that it'll work perfectly for an unpredictable post-baby body. I want flowy, I want breathable, I want comfortable, and I don't want to look like a cupcake, or a princess. I want to look like me, wearing a beautiful dress.

And then I see it, on a mannequin toward the back of the store. My mom and I walk toward it at the same time, mouths open. I push a dozen women out of the way, all there to watch the same girl try on the same dress with varying train length over and over again. It's perfect. It's the dress I always wanted. My mom spins it around. She digs her hand under the back, sending two of the clips making it cling to the mannequin flying to the floor. She finds the price tag. It's half the price of the dress we'd found pre-pregnancy. It's downright affordable. Of course, at this point, our frantic groping of the mannequin has left the impeccable display in shambles. Once we let go the dress falls to the floor in a sad, crumpled mess. People stare.

I waited to try the dress on last. The sales lady has picked about eight other dresses for me to try, and I ablige. Some of them I like, they fit with my general don't-cling-to-my-stomach theme.

But, of course, because I'm a bride and I'm in a store filled with sequins and tulle, she has me try on at least one that would make Princess Barbie squeal with delight.

I struggled just to get it off the hanger, because ohmydeargod how can one article of clothing weigh 100 pounds? But I manage to wiggle it off and step into its still-erect structure. I pull it up to my chest, holding it in place. When I stepped out of the curtain, I saw everyone's attention focus on me, including my mom, sitting alone on a bench across the store, who shoots me a look of pity because she knows what's about to ensue.

With the back still gaping open, I step (or shuffle, with a train longer than my body trailing behind me) toward the mirror, and let the sales lady start the entombment process. With each pull of the string, I feel a gush of air forced from my lungs. Five minutes of huffing and puffing later, and the sales lady gives up. That'll just have to do, she says, it won't lace up any further. And this dress is a size 16.

I've already wrestled with the decision of whether or not to tell her I'm pregnant. On one hand, it's none of her business. On the other, it might prevent her from pulling on the damn corset strings so demonically tight. But there are people to every inch of me, and surely any admission I could give her would be overheard by someone, and the way it works in rooms like that hardly a minute would pass before everyone would know I was the pregnant one, the girl getting married because she got knocked up, the one in the shotgun wedding.

But I am none of those things. I hate the stigma surrounding marriage and pregnancy. Perhaps it comes from hearing one-too-many horror stories about girls from my high school and their cheating baby daddies, or one-too-many caveman jokes about pregnancy being the best and only reason for marriage. I understand wholeheartedly that having a mother and a father is a good thing and probably the ideal way to be raised (I'm lucky that I can't say from experience otherwise), but the thought of two people forcing themselves into a life together just sounds sad and archaic to me. Birth control would be the obvious solution. I understand there are always exceptions and that wonderful couple exist out there who just happened to rush a wedding because of a pregnancy. But it's not the norm.

Jason and I, though, have been together for six years, and we've been engaged for seven months. This pregnancy is just a little bump in the road (and stomach) of our best-laid plans.

You can't, however, be the pregnant girl in a wedding dress without having that Kill Bill stigma attached, and that's part of the reason I didn't want to marry Jason before the baby. We'll get married when we're good and ready, when we have time to plan it, and when I can get drunk at my reception. The fairtytale we always imagined it, baby or not.

So I didn't tell her. I let her try to fit this size 16 corset over my baby bump, and part of me enjoyed her frustration because, seriously, what part of "I only want flowy, Grecian-inspired dresses" is so hard to comprehend?

When I'm finally able to resume breathing and change into the dress my mom and I had nearly-broken off the mannequin, it was every part the cliche, "this is the one" movie moment you'd expect. I tried it on, I walked onto the platform, I felt all the eyes on me and, for that brief moment, I relished it. The fabric flowed over my bump just like I'd hoped. It was beautiful. Five minutes later, and I'm back in my regular clothes, and we're at the register paying for it.

I finally told the sales girl my little secret. After she pulled out the measuring tape I knew it was coming. My bust and hips measured, literally, TWO TIMES smaller than my middle. She asks if it would be okay for her to write it down on my information sheet, only because her boss "would never let her" place an order for a dress to fit the size of my bust when my stomach called for a size with an extra-digit attached. I say it's fine, of course, because I was getting my dress. The dream one.

I guess it wasn't my fantasy to be battling heartburn and rumbling gas while I tried on my wedding dress, but it was still every bit as special.

Now, my wedding will be a true celebration of family. Me, Jason, and our little surprise.

I can't wait.

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Happy 3AM.

My new work game plan was to try to sleep from about nine in the morning until five or six, because that's eight hours and then I'd at least have the night to spend with Jason before I have to go to work at midnight.

I fell asleep at nine easily. But now it's about two in the afternoon. I woke up at one, and there was no convincing my body to go back to sleep. My body still frustratingly hasn't gotten the hint that sunny outside does not necessarily equal wakey wakey time. Unless of course it's my day off, and then I always have to force the message across.

So now I'm sitting in the living room, eating a microwaveable burrito with a cracker and peanut butter appetizer, watching strangers birth babies on A Baby Story. It's all a very surreal way to spend your three o'clock in the morning.

We're not going to Austin. But it turned out for the best. Jason still gets to do the job, just from Tennessee. He'll be flying down a lot to oversee it. I, however, don't have to worry about moving in between moving while pregnant, so that makes me happy and takes my stress level down a notch. Now we just have to find a new place to live here.

I've realized that I have, finally, gotten over my obsession with needing a cigarette. Just in case I wasn't entirely clear before, I did quit a long time ago. All the writing I've done since then about quitting has been about the still-daily struggle with the urge, and if you've ever been a smoker you know that just because you're not giving into the addiction it doesn't mean the battle is won. I realized at work this morning, after an even more stressful shift than usual, that I hadn't thought about cigarettes or how much easier the morning would be if I could just have one, and for that I was--and am--proud.

I will surely have a lot more to say this weekend. On Sunday, I'm going to Memphis with Jason. We're inevitably going to hang out with his always-drunk and rowdy friends while we're there, so I'm sure that will inspire lots of fun preggo-stories.

And on Saturday, the big event. After three months of ignoring wedding plans, my mom and I are going wedding dress shopping. We went in April, back when my stomach didn't pooch out in a burgeoning baby bump, and I of course fell in love with one way over our budget. Now, things have changed.

I just really need to pick out a dress before I get much bigger, right? It scares me to think I have no way to predict exactly what size I will be five months post-baby for our wedding. So I guess I'll have to settle for something relatively shapeless. Perhaps a white, crystal-studded burlap sack?

I can't wait to be the pregnant girl shopping for her wedding dress. Get ready.

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