A canvas photograph that is from their engagement pictures taken in Glacier National Park....St. Mary's Lake of course!

Linden and Jesse had decided from the beginning to go all out for their reception. On everything. The food was amazing. An italian feast of sorts. Everything was in black and white…gorgeous. They even got the crazy DJ package that included all of the bells and whistles….you know the one with the smoke that comes out on the dance floor? Overall, the DJ was good (would have been better had it not been for the 20 minutes of PURE PANIC when he realized his phone was dead, and “oops, by the way…that is where I have your first dance, father/daughter dance and mother of the groom stored” didn’t happen). Yeah, uh huh…he didn’t get real rave reviews from the fam after that. Simply because that was a bad move at such an elegant affair. Never fear, Adam had the cord he needed in his truck (did I ever tell you the story when I realized I didn’t have any veggies to go with our supper one night and Adam said casually, “oh, I have some canned corn in the car” and went and grabbed me a can”~the guy keeps the strangest things in his vehicles and they always seem to come in hand!

The party was great…we made it to the very last song. My favorite part though was when Linden, accompanied by a grand piano only serenaded Jesse. You see, she has a beautiful voice and is just amazing to listen to…she continued to sing all through college and in graduate school. It was a true gift to see and difficult for her to do, I am sure.  The next morning everyone, including the new married couple, had brunch and watched them open gifts before they took off for Fiji. A truly wonderful weekend, I  tell ya’.

Big brother Brett and his wife, Michelle

Perhaps Jesse's most profitable dollar dance...Jett flew in from back East. Jesse and he played ball together at PENN. What's up with the skirt, you may ask? Yeah, me too. Supposedly it is just kind of a joke that he does for "important" things. Never fear, though...the guy's a cutie!

Jesse and Linden wanted a photo booth at their reception. It has kind of become a fun thing for people to have photo booths at their receptions but often times the photos are taken just for the couple and if the guests want to they can go on-line later to order their photo. Jesse posed the idea to Adam and being the computer guy that he is…Adam ran with it.

People watching the screen showing the people inside the booth. Also: the big black and white picutre of Jesse & Linden on the side was a surprise from Adam that he was able to get printed through his company too.

He made an awesome photo booth for their wedding. I had no idea what all would go into this project! Someone from the software division in his company helped him design the software for the booth. It is amazing. It has a screen on the outside so people walking by or standing there can see what the people in the booth are doing. Once in the booth you have the option of having your photo taken or taking a video message for the Bride & Groom. It prints out right after it takes your photo…he built a light into the top so there would be enough lighting.

Towards the end of the night...the couple themselves finally had a chance of their own!

Jesse and Linden had a logo that they designed and once Adam digitized it he added it to the photo booth cards so it was basically an AWESOME wedding favor.

The favor was an actual 4X6 photo greeting card size!

Uncle Adam & Calissa Jo

My older brother and his family

The groom's party got ready at the country club where the reception was held so naturally "played" with the booth before the wedding. Jesse, Adam, my older brother Brett and my sister's husband, Rick

me & mine

Linden & Jesse’s wedding was outdoors and was actually held in Linden’s parents backyard. Now. Previous times I have been in the backyard and thought to myself, 250-300 people sitting here…..ahhhh, not gonna happen! This was to be an elaborate elegant event. With many in attendance.

But.

Can I just say oh my goodness. Holy smokes. The place was gorgeous. Her father has a talent (a green-thumb for lack of a better term) for this sort of thing and it was magical. Puremagic. There were even a couple of small ponds with lilly pads and fish. The seating for the wedding guests extending out into their driveway which had fresh new white rock so was just perfect! I just can’t describe it. Was it hot? Yes. Very. But it was so beautiful and so very much what Linden envisioned (I think) and she glowed which made everything even more fabulous! There were bottles of water with their initials printed on them with the “ingrediants of marriage” printed onto them handed to guests as they arrived.

Rather than bubbles or bird seed, we threw the rose petals from all of the roses Jesse has given her over the years. There was a string quartet and they were married by “the Rev”; a wonderful man that we came to know as the “team pastor” for U of Penn when Jesse was playing Football. He flew in to marry them before he and his family leaves to go live in Paris indefinitely to be missionaries.

Later when I was dancing with Jesse at the wedding he told me he made himself look at the ground when the Bride’s procession was playing. He didn’t want to get “just a glimpse” of his bride. He waited until she was about just 10 seconds away and then looked up so he could see her in full view.

18 months ago our bank caught some strange charges in Paris and we immediately realized we’d…well, basically been hacked, robbed, you name it. So we put an identity theft protection thingy-ma-bob on our “credit reports” and thought that would help.

….until we went to Canada a couple of weeks ago and Mexico yesterday. Man, with all of this traveling we are busy people I tell ya’! Sorry we didn’t get any photos taken to post for you to enjoy!

The good news is that the identity theft protection deal is working a little. It protected myself from myself. As you can probably imagine we are working on trying to purchase a new home and the loan officer we are working with where we are moving called me this morning and asked about our land-line phone number….a number that hasn’t been used in probably two years. It is there purely because it has to be for internet.

To protect myself from myself and to prove to them that I am who I am because of the identify theft program we have set up I have to answer the phone to that number~WHOA, that almost sounded like a Dr. Seuss rhyme! We’re gonna have to go buy a phone just so we can buy a house.

But boy oh boy…Paris, Mexico and Canada rocked!!!! (in my dreams!!!)

Linden & I

After the rehearsal we had a humongo party for everyone that was in the wedding but also everyone that had come from out of town for the wedding so we had about 150ish people. It was so great. One goal Linden and my brother set out in the beginning is that they didn’t want us to work. It was wonderful. This allowed us to enjoy EVERY moment of the entire weekend without having to worry about getting whatever needed to be done next.

Brother and "his girls"

kudos to my Mama....she came up with all of the decoration ideas, etc....she thought of EVERYthing!!

All the nieces and nephews were there. There was music. The food was amazing. There was an open bar and my mom ordered stuff in from Montana to make Huckleberry Margaritas! Even now I wish that night was three times longer. I actually danced and danced and danced with Jesse and Linden and their friends. I had decided to try to keep up with these young ‘uns and it was very very fun.

Our nephew (and my Godson), Jackson

 But. I will say that at about 4am when I arose to use the ladies room for some reason my knees were killing me. It was then that I realized that maybe dancing barefoot for hours might do that when you are not a young ‘un??

At any rate, the rehearsal dinner was truly wonderful. Jesse and Linden are a classy couple and I love them both dearly. Adam loved his groomsman gift….of course baby brother being who he is, gave all of his guys a share of Berkshire Hathaway stock (Warren Buffet). The guys were all pretty stoked!

....a little stock anyone?

One final thing…remember when I said my Mom thought of everything? Well, check out the inside of the port-a-pot at the rehearsal party: wedding TP and candles!!!

To start with, EVERY wedding must have some sort of bachelor/ette gathering, shan’t it? Where you go out and make fools of yourselves. I remember for ours Adam went and played paintball….after they had a few drinks. He was a big ol’ bruise on our honeymoon. Real smart, dear. I wasn’t real involved with either of the parties rather had a very nice girls only supper at a nice restaurant with a cousin, my aunts, sister and sister-in-law and mom. Loved it. We did know, however that the guys were able to get a big ol’ fancy schmancy limo and the girls did NOT.

So. Being the girls that we are, we thought…..that just IS NOT FAIR. No sirree. What to do, what to do? We split up in two different cars and decided to search for the limo. We knew the guys had to be in a bar or some other guy-type of place and let’s be honest, one cannot hide a limo that easily. It took awhile but guess who found it?! Yep: Mama of the groom!

Mom shortly after confiscating the limo

...some of the rest of us...

We hijacked the driver and took the limo to where we knew the girls were. I love this picture of Linden! I also sent this to the guys per cell phone to let them know we had their “ride”.

Now, while I hate to admit that my brother is even out of grade school yet, let alone of age to drink or be married or…whatever. I have to include this picture just so you can see the t-shirt he had on.  note to reader: cock head to left to read. (Oh, and Adam got in BIG trouble when he said…game over? Don’t you mean the game is just starting?)

Calissa Jo

Where to start, oh where to start. I suppose the picture above is one of those that sort of speaks for itself and tells you “HELLO~BIG CHANGES HAPPENIN’ AT THE CARTER’S!!”. Which, there are. And up until today we weren’t comfortable “completely” sharing what is going on as Adam is just now discussing things with his employer.

I have been in this practice for a little over 7 years. I have A LOT vested in this practice and this little community. I love my patients. As you have read in previous posts we have completely (literally) re-done our home. She turned 100 this year, ya know~and I have the paperwork to get ‘er listed on the National Historic Registry. I ran out of time, though. Fortunately we put very little of the renovations on top of the home mortgage. We paid for things as we went, Praise God~which allowed us to sell it thus leading to the fun picture above!

The end of May I received a call from my sister (who lives in Kearney) to casually mention to me that there was a job opening listed in their paper for a family practice in Cozad. 

Hmmm. Well.

We had just returned from Adam’s mom’s graduation and spending time in Mississippi where we visited with his parents extensively about where we are at in our life and what we are doing, etc.  We came  back from that trip knowing that a change was needed in my employment someday but didn’t know when or where. Heck, at this point we still weren’t even sure if we might even go back to Montana! I decided to nose around a bit but this basically hit us like a pizza being delivered. WHAM!

The long of the short is that we are moving to a wonderful new community September 21st. Cozad, Nebraska is only 45 minutes west of my sister, rather than 3 hours southeast. I will no longer be taking call. Both of these will be nice things if we can have a family someday~ya’ think? The medical community is what I would consider “healthy”. Without going into tons of detail, let me just say that there are not as many issues there as there are here. It is always important to remember however that there is no such thing as a “perfect” job (darnit-to-heckola!) but I am hopeful for a more healthy work environment. The physicians I will be working with are awesome. All young with families. There is only one other female and she is prego with her first babe! Excited for her! I will have my own nurse (yay!!) and her name is Janna. We just met her this past weekend and she is going to be just perfect I know it (more to come about Janna~would ya believe that we are actually looking at buying her house?! WEIRD!).

Cozad is three times the size of Tecumseh. It has an Alco people, an Alco!!!! For those of you that don’t know what that is, Alco is like a Super Walmart in rural no-where-villes. About Adam? Not sure yet. Like I started this post out….just now telling his employer. It would be kinda’ cool if he could do some of what he does for them from home in Cozad and still keep his job. We’ll see.

Up until Saturday morning, I couldn’t think past….well, anything really. I was overwhelmed, worrying about where we were going to live. We were planning to rent a place and just have someone keep an eye on our home here while it sat empty. Because, while I may have been dealing with this job deal for awhile, we just finished our house three weeks ago and therefore just got it listed. No stress at our house. None at all.

I have so much more I could say but I am going to end this post now by just saying that by the grace of God….our home sold after being on the market for only 16 DAYS…16 days people!!!! Did we list it too low? Probably. Are we going to be able to pay off our mortgage? You betcha’! With $445.00 to spare baby! We decided when we were going to list that we were going to go for only what we needed, to not be greedy and to pray the house would move. We had a couple of people interested in it Saturday~I sent out a text asking for prayers; Adam actually layed his hand on the house and prayed and by noon it was sold and by Sunday we were house shopping in our new town.

Can I get an Amen?!