One Year Later, Life's Moving Too Fast

Do you ever have those days when life is moving too fast and where you just want time to stop and slow down for a moment? It's been a year since our wedding, I'm six and a half months pregnant, and I feel like time is just flying by so quickly. In less than four months, I will be a mom and I feel completely unprepared. This past year has been exciting, challenging, and full of twists and turns. It has definitely been a learning experience.

Here are some of the highlights from this year:

A week after the wedding, we moved to Fayetteville, NC from Columbus, GA and as soon as the boxes were placed in the house we left them unpacked and spent a week on a honeymoon. We found a new church which I now work at and made a great group of friends! In May, we found out that we are expecting a boy in January so, we moved again into a new house earlier this month to make room for one more! Brendan completed his first job as a rifle platoon leader and been assigned a job as the Battalion Mortars Platoon leader.

Although Ranger School is over, we've had our share of separation this year too with Brendan's training schedule, including Brendan being gone for five weeks over the summer. It seems like every time we get into a routine, he leaves for a week! Adjusting to being married, and especially being married to someone in the army has been difficult. Sometimes I wish he could just come home at a normal time, not get called into work on the weekends, and just ignore his telephone. Sometimes I get insecure and on my worst days, I feel neglected and that Brendan is actually married to the army and not to me. There are weeks where even when Brendan comes home at night, he's so exhausted that he eats and goes straight to bed and I miss him, I just want to wake him up in the middle of the night and talk his ear off. There is an old saying that "If the Army wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one," and sometimes during the long days or weeks it feels true. I see time flying by and I just want the clock to stop and slow down. At times I think I hate the army for stealing my husband away, but then I realize that the army is part of Brendan and it's part of why I love him and why he's my hero.

Brendan loves his job and he's good at it. He cares about his soldiers and their future as much as he cares about his own, I hear it in his voice when he talks about them and I wonder how I married such a noble man. When he was applying for schools he applied to military academies and schools that had ROTC,  I asked him why once, and he just replied that he can't imagine doing anything else, and that's how I know that as much as I sometimes can't stand the army, it's a part of him so it's a part of us now. When I married Brendan I decided that my job as his wife was to support him, not hold him back from doing what he feels called to do. It's not always easy for me to actually follow through and do that, but the bottom line is the reason I get jealous of the army is because I love Brendan so much and I miss spending quality time with him. I see time slipping by, the weekends seem too short and I just want to absorb every moment. So, in an effort to go back in time, I'm sharing my favorite photos from our wedding!

Our wedding day was one of the best days of my life. I was never really the girl who planned her wedding ever since she could remember. In fact, I had no idea what I wanted my wedding to look like, until I met Brendan. I met Brendan and suddenly I found myself daydreaming about marrying him. Six months after we met, Brendan proposed and I stopped daydreaming and started planning what our real wedding would look like! We had decided from the beginning to have our ceremony in the church I attended growing up, and after dragging Brendan around to several venues near my parent's house in Connecticut, we decided to have our ceremony at The Owenego Beach and Tennis Club in Branford, CT. Over the next year, I planned the wedding from Georgia, and then re-planned it when Brendan was unable to make the first date (I think of it as a little "welcome to the Army" present from Ranger School).

When the day finally came, our friends and family traveled from Ireland, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Alaska, Texas and other places around the country. I spent the morning with my bridesmaids getting ready and drinking some champagne, then we went off to the church. After that, everything just sort of blurs together... in a good way. We had a great time dancing and celebrating with our friends and were even able to get on the dance floor!

My favorite part of the weekend was that the Owenego has a Bed and Breakfast. So while our guests had a room block at a hotel a few miles away, we decided to stay at the Owenego because we knew that if we stayed at the hotel we would just hang out with our friends all night and we wanted to spend some time with each other. The morning after the wedding, we went downstairs through the hall that we had just had our wedding in and had breakfast outside on the porch overlooking the water. That was my favorite moment. The world stopped spinning and we were able to just have coffee and sit and be married. Those are still my favorite moments. Sitting with Brendan having coffee or on the couch and just being married, and as long as we keep having those moments, even if they're not as often as I would like, I know that everything will turn out just fine.

The day after the wedding