So tomorrow is a big day for me.
Like REALLY BIG.
HUGE.
MONDOLACIOUSLY LARGE!

Why, do you ask? Well I'm getting married tomorrow. I'm really excited this morning and also calm at the same time. This is weird to me because of one thing. I have had anxiety since I was probably 12. ANYTIME a big event was happening in my life, all hell broke loose in my body and I always had to know where the bathrooms were, and also sometimes I'd tell myself over and over I wasn't equipped for change or big life events. I even one time told myself to enjoy a mellow life because it's all I could handle. BOY WAS I STUPID! With a little work, I barely have problems with anxiousness at all anymore, who knew life could be so easy!

SO... that was a tiny derailment, but I'll work my way back.

We're getting married tomorrow, and we're not just getting married until death do we part. We're getting married in the LDS temple in Draper. This means we're together forever. Do you know how long that is? It's, well... FOREVER!  I think this is pretty cool. It's definitely intimidating. I mean what if I'm a royal pain in the butt and not that awesome? Well... we just have to learn to deal which each other's pains in the butts (does that even make sense? Forgive me, I've got pre-wedding exhaustion brain). Also, we have to actually try to work things out and apologize and be better people, and learn compromise and forgiveness... because if we don't, we have to have permission from basically God himself to breakup. Not that I'm even thinking about it. I'm just explaining to y'all how big of a deal this is. We're two very independent people. And we LOVE having things our own way. Joining together could prove to be challenging! Aside from the magnitude of this decision we're making tomorrow, I still am for the most part cool as a cucumber. That's why I'm excited. Never have I felt this calm about something so big happening to me. That is why I know this is the right thing.

And now for our love story... it's fun. And I happen to think it's one of the cooler love stories out there. Maybe I'm a bit biased, but you can decide for yourself.

We met in high school (stop rolling your eyes... we're both 28 right now and have only been together for 2 years... we're not telling THAT kind of a story...but it's still cool if YOU met your loved one in highschool. Just not as long of a story as ours. Ha!).

He was always skating around on those board things. You know, a skateboard?  And he would do tricks in the air, and then come down on the ground sometimes and break things, mostly his bones. Similar story as my brother, and they were friends with each other. We never really talked in high school. We hung out with similar people, he even went to my house once and I went to his. But neither of us really remember too much about each other other than we existed.

I dated his friend the summer of 2002 before I moved to college, and a big group of us went to the Vans Warped Tour together. There are times on that trip where it was just Justin, me, his friend, and justin's girlfriend all hanging out, AND NEITHER OF US REMEMBER EACH OTHER BEING THERE. We know we were together on that trip though because I took a picture of him with another guy. We have no idea why our brains blocked each other out. But I even have a journal entry of him that summer telling off a girlfriend that had left me hanging for like 7 hours without a ride, and then he and some other friends drove me the 20 miles home.

4 years go by. It's now 2006, and Justin calls my cell phone while I'm living in Orem, UT going to college. He says, "Hi Lana, this is Justin LeFevre, do you know who I am?" I said yes... and what followed was an AWESOME hilarious conversation... (no idea who he got my cell # from. I'd only had it for a year and I didn't keep in touch with high school people).

Over the next 4 years we would talk either on the phone or Facebook chat roughly every 6-8 months. Sometimes one of us would initiate conversation during the other person's super rough times, and we'd just flirt and make each other laugh. He'd mention that he wanted to come up from Southern Utah and take me on a date. But I was seeing other people, or in the middle of the worst parts of my anxiety and would just think that was too much pressure. So we never did.

It wasn't until the first week of October 2010, that we actually went on a date. We'd just started our random chatting again. I was in a place where I'd come through my worst breakup and finally felt happy (that one kind of roughed me up for a long while), and I didn't want a boyfriend. He was getting ready to ship off to military training in a few months so he didn't want a girlfriend. He was living in Salt Lake City so there was no long distance drive pressure. I was planning a trip to Italy and France, so we met up at Barnes and Noble and had a short, hilarious first date while I picked out foreign language conversation books. I've never laughed so much and felt so at ease with someone on a first date. I remember going home and just thinking, "I should've done that date sooner, he is so funny!"

Example of his funny antics: People at Barnes and Noble tend to think that it's a library so no one ever talks with normal voices in the store. It's NOT a library, it's a book STORE. Voices can be used. So Justin went behind a shelf and I had no idea where he was. All the sudden I hear this really loud awkward sounding "Mnuh!" And I knew it was him. I've never laughed so hard at the dumbest things, than when we're hanging out.

So we kept getting together. We'd go walk to a pretty pond covered in fall leaves and just chat, or have a coloring contest (I won), or just hangout. One night I was going to leave at 8pm to go back from SLC to my home in Provo (about 30 miles away), and we started talking on his porch. 4 hours later I finally made myself leave. Every night when we first started seeing each other I'd stay up until 2am chatting with him on Facebook. He was working a graveyard shift but just had to sit there mostly and watch people in a group home sleep. So we would chat half the night about anything and everything. It wasn't long before we knew it was more than just a friendship. The week before he left for 9 months of military duty, we dropped the "I love you" bomb to each other, and I decided to wait for him. He got home toward the end of 2011.

The waiting was awful. (Just like Tom Petty says it is.)

But the letters I have from that time I'll keep forever. We spent so much time on the phone that we learned how to fight over nothing. We were just fighting because we couldn't see each other. That's all it was. We also learned more about each other than we would've had we been together that whole time. Now he's been home from duty for about 10 months, and here we are about to get married.

We have for sure had our ups and downs. This year that he's been back from duty has been a true test of his endurance and mine. He's been home, but anything and everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. We're here together though dodging the bullets the universe shoots at us, and our goal is to have a successful marriage. I think we'll be just fine. We made it through so much adversity to this point that we already know what that's like. A lot of people get married before all the adversity hits, and they experience it later wondering how they'll be able to handle it with that person. We already know. So I guess you could consider us the lucky ones.

Wish us luck for tomorrow. And pray for sunshine, and for us to just have a great easy day!
Here are some photos... to go with this post.