dripping with passion

happy thanksgiving eve! i’ve been trying to hone in this week especially on the deep gratitude i feel for so, so, so many blessings and joys in my life. as i’ve considered the things i am very most thankful for, i’ve realized that the core of my gratitude is most certainly about relationships. truly, the best part about life is people, and the immensely beautiful and sweet and unique and wonderful bonds that we form spirit-to-spirit. and so today i went through some wedding photos, looking at the faces of those humans i love most – and i was brim, brim, brim with acute gratitude. i am so thankful for each member of my family. look at these faces! {missing a few here – there are indeed eight more shining faces that i feel so much gratitude for.} and i’m so thankful for each member of the second family that the boy gave me. i love these people so very much. i am so thankful for my incredible parents, and the incredible parents of my true love. i can’t even wrap my head around the mag...

i’ve spent countless hours the past few weeks on shutterfly ’s website digitally creating a book of photographs from our wedding as a gift for the boy’s parents, and another as a gift for my parents. it has been a ton of fun to reminisce on our incredible wedding day and the magic of all the connected celebrations. i designed the book pretty much from scratch, so it took a lot of time and thought, but shutterfly made the process easy and i loved how customizable everything was. when we got back from our roadtrip, we were soooo excited to see this box on our doorstep!: we opened it up (it’s now on its way to the boy’s parents in texas) and were totally blown away at how awesome it turned out. the quality of materials and construction is seriously amazing and it just looked so good!we were freaking out as we stopped all unpacking and any other activity to flip through it on our couch. we can’t wait for both of our sets of parents to get their book!! i wanted to share a few glimpse...

the boy and i have been married for four months and two days. holy cow, it has been a wild and wonderful one hundred and twenty five days! every once in a while i just take four minutes to watch our wedding video and it still makes me tingly all over and so very, very happy. Charity & Ian // Wedding Highlights from Jordan Melendez // West End CG on Vimeo . we will forever be grateful to our amazing videographer jordan melendez for creating this treasure that captures so beautifully much of the joy and love at our wedding. jordan is not only incredibly talented, but outrageously sweet and just a totally sparkly, lovely person. i can't recommend the experience of working with her highly enough! jordan's new vidoegraphy/design company, west end creative group , just launched their website, and everyone should check it out! every few days, i say to ian, "seriously, wasn't our wedding just the best ?!?" he agrees :) i have learned a lot over the past...

if you're sick of pictures/words about my wedding, i'm sorry. and also, a warning: i'm going to post (a lot of) images from our official photographer soon as well. it's just that, well, i'm not over it. and i kinda hope i never will be. i just want to keep hold (so tightly!) of all the memories of those truly glorious days of love and celebration -- and the crazy days leading up to them! i want to remember everything and frankly a significant purpose of this blog is to help me remember! so for today - some memorabilia from the wedding planning days -- 1. texts from my mom: she's an angel, and she ran all over creation picking things up and trying things out and texting me photos since i was two states away the majority of the months leading up to the wedding. these are only about half of the pictures she sent me over that time - everything from linen colors to costco candy choices (for the kids' area at the reception) to food serving ideas. bottle...