Cheeeeeeese!

As Ryan and I prepare to take our vows in 32 days, our days and nights are filled with all things wedding - picking out decorations, ordering bridal party gifts, making a timeline (a mere 9 pages long), and calling my hometown newspaper and DEMANDING a re-print after they printed my father-in-law's name under Ryan's picture in our engagement announcement:

Some of these wedding tasks have been more fun than others, but the absolute MOST fun 2 items came courtesy of our super talented and awesome in general friend, Elisabeth. Having a short (4 month) engagement (and NO, I'm not pregnant...we're just in love), we have had to cut some of the ordinary engagement activities, but we decided that we absolutely were not sacrificing pictures. This was so important to us in fact, that we booked TWO different days with Liz to make sure that we had enough shots of our mugs to decorate the whole house with!

For the first day, we headed to downtown Cedar Rapids dressed in jeans and some super sexy shoes to showcase just how urban we are. Here are some of my favorites:

Under the "City of Five Seasons" tree

Hugging my love

I love how intently we're gazing at each other. And the shoes. Of course the shoes!

Piggy back time!

Taking the plunge!

I know, I know, get a room...

And in the interest of full disclosure, here is the recap of my not-so-favorite albeit totally blog worthy moment. Just before the above super sexy black and white kiss photo, I noticed that there was a spider on the column that Elisabeth was asking me to lean against. My sweet protector of a fiance bravely knocked it down and as he spotted a second spider I didn't originally see, he said, "here, I'll get his wife, too." Smiling and basking in how wonderful he is to me, I didn't have thepresence of mind to realize that the second spider was spinning a very long piece of silk, which caught the breeze at the right moment, and sent the spider INSIDE OF MY SHIRT SLEEVE!

Me: "It's in my sleeve! It's IN MY SLEEVE!"

Ryan: "Calm down, I'm getting it."

Me: "Calm down?! CALM down?! CALM DOWN?! It's IN MY SLEEVE!"

As you can see, Liz didn't want to waste a single moment and caught it all on film. Unassured that Ryan would be able to save me (I could feel the spider crawling on my arm a half step ahead of Ryan's hands), I did what anyone in my position would...I LOST MY MARBLES. Screaming, creeped out and no longer caring who saw what, I peeled my shirt off right there in the middle of downtown Cedar Rapids and shook it violently until I saw the eight legs of grossness land on the ground:

Luckily, I had opted to wear a tank top under my shirt that day, but honestly, it wouldn't have mattered to me in that moment of terror. Again, thanks so much Liz, for capturing THIS for all of the world to see! In her defense, she did step on the spider as soon as it was thrown to the ground, and shortly there after, I stopped screaming.

As if that wasn't enough excitement for all of us, we signed up to do it all over again the next weekend. This time, in a park at sunset. Unbelievably, we think she may have gotten even better shots there:

Ryan singing a love song to me...or a break-up song...hard to tell.

We're kissing and so are our shadows, or as Liz exclaimed, "it's Pinterest in person!"

Holding hands in a field

Trying to be serious, but cracking up instead. In our defense, our photographer told us to "think about dead puppies!" Does this make us horrible people that we laughed instead of cried??

Smooches.

I wonder who that pretty girl is. I should go talk to her...

Heyyyyyy.

Let's pose together next to this really tall shrub.

How do you NOT get on the balance beam if it's right there?!

Doing what the sign says.

"Monkeying" around

This brings me to the high/low light of this shoot: changing in a port-o-potty. It was too light out to change in my car and not get a ticket for public nudity, so into the blue toilet house I went. Keys in my mouth and never putting anything down made for quite the interesting (and record breaking) wardrobe change, but the following shots were soooooo worth it:



Thanks again to Liz at Cloven Photography for making these shoots SO much fun, and for giving us beautiful pictures to help us remember this exciting time in our lives when we're 80.