Zach and Clake Cut the Cake!

I have been trying to put this post together for WEEKS now, and haven’t been able to…too many photos to pare down and too much fun to try to cram into one blog post! The first weekend of October, our entire Minneapolis friend group made a pilgrimage down to South Bend to witness the marriage of two of my favorite people, Zach and Colleen!

I gushed about how excited I was on the day we got on the road…but nothing could have captured how amazing the weekend was. Z & C threw one of my absolute favorite weddings I’ve ever been to. The entire weekend felt like the perfect encapsulation of everything they’re about… fun, some party action, lots of Notre Dame, and most significantly a ton of love. These two are so in love with each other, but more importantly, they are absolutely adored by everyone in their lives. It was amazing to see that, and to feel how huge and meaningful the presence of that love was all weekend. Unbelievably meaningful and heartfelt across the board.

We arrived around dinner on Thursday night and spent the entire night reliving a classic Thursday night at Notre Dame, starting off with a dinner at Legends (that we didn’t pay for with Domer Dollars!)…

…followed by a trip to O’Rourkes, which will always and forever be Kildare’s in my mind. We enjoyed some beers, bonded with our waitress, and sent our night on a sharp turn for crazy with a few rounds of “breakfast shots,” a concoction of Jameson and buttershots with an OJ chaser that tastes exactly like pancakes and deliciousness.

From there, we headed to the cabin!! It was so fantastic to get to spend some time with Zach and his family in a lower-key setting…our small group enjoyed cocktails and catching up before the night took its second sharp turn for crazy. Riley, Zach’s younger brother, decided we were all going to Club Fever. 

ND grads know that Club Fever is utterly ridiculous. For Minneapolis friends, it’s sort of like The Library but sleazier…almost a Sneaky Pete’s type environment. I DIED with excitement and then felt incredibly old as we all gawked at the babies in their six-inch heels.

We assuaged our old-fogey hurt feelings with a few selfies, and a few Redheaded Sluts…

…and headed to Steak’n’Shake around 2am in a desperate bid to sober up. Too much fun, and it was only Thursday!

Friday was the kind of day that makes Notre Dame look insanely beautiful and makes Notre Dame lovers glad to be alive. 

We took a long tour of campus with friends Chris and Jodi, ate lunch in the dining hall, and made an all-important Grotto trip for a few moments of silence and reflection. I had a blissful afternoon to myself and spent some time wandering campus solo, which I completely cherished, before meeting up with friends Brett and Bekka for dinner. We then headed over to the rehearsal dinner afterparty back at the cabin! 

Lots of photos of high school classmates…

Old roommates…

…and “book club” veterans…

…and a selfie in the bathroom for good measure because I adore this girl. 

One of the highlights of my weekend was getting to watch non-Notre Dame friends experience my alma mater. It was jarring but gratifying in the best of ways to watch these worlds collide, and we had so much fun with it. As far as the “after party” goes, Zach’s parents’ friends totally outlasted us…we threw in the towel around midnight when they were still going strong! I can only hope I grow up to be that cool. 

Saturday dawned really cold and a bit grey, but we decided to brighten our day with BACKER LUNCH! …until we realized Claire didn’t have her ID, so we ditched and had a one-on-one date at Wendy’s hahaha. Then it was a mad rush to get ready and make it to the church on time for the event of the weekend!! 

I can’t even put into words how beautiful a Basilica wedding is, and Zach and Colleen’s lived up to all my previous experiences. Colleen could not have been a more absolutely stunning bride. Watching her walk down the aisle on the arms of her mother and uncle brought me to tears almost immediately. 

I always love to snag just one photo of the vows…although I never try to take a picture of the kiss, because usually I’m doing dorky little hops of joy as it happens. 

MARRIED! These beautiful people! I love them so much! 

The reception was at the hotel we were all staying at, so we headed back and killed a little time in the Catholic gap with champagne in Greg and Alex and Laura’s ridiculously large “executive suite.” We’re talking full boardroom, sitting room, and giant bedroom. It was bigger than my apartment. Cocktail hour was fantastic! The appetizers were mind-blowing. Crab cake tots?! Yes please. Plus I got to hang out and be the “plus three” to THESE lovelies. 

The facility was already a gorgeous raw space, and Zach and Colleen’s personal touches added so much to the evening. Their guestbook was a personalized map (I signed over most of Central Africa, because I’m a huge dork). 

I also loved the beautiful navy linens, which, combined with the gold chair covers, made the entire room perfectly Notre Dame-y. The centerpieces were all different…so fun to check them all out! 

Every toast was absolutely perfect. Colleen’s sister and mother gave the most incredible testimonies to how amazing Colleen is…I didn’t think it was possible to capture her, but of course as the two women who love her most in the world, they pulled it off. We all cried. Bobby, Zach’s best man, told a story I know well about freshman year at Glee Club House and a certain trophy…which brought the room to tears of laughter…and brought it full circle in the best way, bringing us to more tears of joy.

Each of the first dances ended up being “special:” Zach and Colleen’s first dance was to “Your Song,” by Ellie Goulding, and involved some fantastic dips and twirls and whatnot in the middle, but watching them made me tear up (common theme for the evening). 

While Colleen was having her uncle-niece dance, Zach grabbed her mom and brought her out to the dance floor as well. So touching.

Before Zach and his mom’s dance, his dad (I think) explained the significance of the song they were dancing to. Zach lost his granddad, a music teacher and jazz aficionado, a few months before the wedding, and they would dance to his favorite recording of his favorite song. I completely lost it (as did, um, EVERYONE else in the room). Such a beautiful tribute! 

This is getting insanely long, so I’m going to power through and wrap it up as concisely as possible. 

Steve-O’s “snapchat glamorshot” of me: Obsessed. I love that dress (steal of a deal from J.Crew Factory)!

Their cake: adorable. Their cupcakes: delicious. 

Our sneaky viewing of the ND-Clemson game: super stealth. Super disappointing game. Whatever, we had an open bar and a ton to celebrate, so I barely noticed or cared. Still, thanks Greg and Rabes for making sure we could watch it (when nothing more important was happening, I promise!). 

The photobooth: utterly ridiculous magic. 

These two: So beautiful, so loving, and so, so loved. Thank you for an unbelievably memorable and heartfelt weekend, Zach and Colleen! We love you a lot! 

On coming home.

I've been trying to think about how to write this without veering into ridiculously sentimental and/or hackneyed cliché for a long time. The last few weeks have had me thinking a lot about the concept of "home." It's where the heart is, after all. 

I'm fortunate to have a lot of places I self-identify as "homes:" places where I instantly feel like myself. The weirdest thing for me, though, is that the self I feel like in each of those places is a little bit different. Coming back to Notre Dame last weekend for Zach and Colleen's beautiful wedding brought me back to a place that I will always cherish as one of my very favorite homes.

Claire and I had a long conversation about it the day before the wedding as we killed time waiting for the men to pick up their tuxes. She's made it back to ND a lot more than I have in the last few years, and our perspectives were a little bit different, but she absolutely got what I was thinking, and I have a feeling a lot of Notre Dame friends will as well. 

Last year when I journeyed to South Bend for another October wedding, I ditched all my friends and headed to campus on Friday afternoon for a few hours of alone time. I was blissfully alone for the first time since I walked to Starbucks on graduation morning, almost four years earlier, and the moment I got out of my car and saw the Dome shining before me I burst into uncontrollable tears. 

I've thought a lot about that moment for the last year, and was wondering if coming back last weekend would affect me the same way. Instead I just felt joy, peace and an incredible sense of contentment. Why was that, I wondered? What had changed in the last year that brought me 180 degrees from a sense of grief to a feeling of comfort? 

I think that, for me, Notre Dame was a place that fundamentally ingrained itself in who I am, and in intensely meaningful ways. It shaped my faith, my identity, my sense of right and wrong, and my values. It's a place where I came into my own intellectually and spiritually, where I struggled and succeeded in equal parts. I found my best friend there, I became part of so many things so much bigger than me. I traveled the world, drank too much, stayed up too late, and laughed until my sides hurt. Bottom line, I became a person I really, really liked at Notre Dame. 

After college, I lost sight of that girl a bit, which I've written about ad nauseum. I floundered through a job I hated, and lost a relationship that had defined me, similarly to how Notre Dame had. My career and relationship, however, hadn't reinforced those good, positive, nascent adult aspects of my character that Notre Dame had brought forth, and I think that when I came home in October of 2014, I cried because I knew that I wasn't that girl anymore. I still felt lost and alone and adrift. Notre Dame, though still "my" place, felt more remote than ever, and that girl from four years ago seemed lost to me. 

Coming home this year, so much has changed and all for the better. 2014 in general was a year of growing pains and grief for me, and 2015 has brought a personal renaissance in the areas that matter most. I have a close, strong group of friends. I see and cherish my family. I go to church. I work out and eat better. I've rediscovered that happy, bright, caring and vibrant person again, and coming back on campus I think I recognized that. 

Notre Dame is always going to hold the best of me. It will be a place where, above all, I learned. I can see now that it's shaped aspects of my character that I value too much to compromise, and that I am who I am largely because I got to call this place home for four years. Just like my other homes, it will always hold a unique, special set of memories for me, like all the others lucky enough to call Our Lady's University home. It will always hold a girl who I can revisit to remind myself of the best of who I can be, and that's, in a word, golden. 

101 in 1001 #68: Find a church to attend and love.

For as much as I love to share here, I’ve been fairly reserved on a few big topics. I have always, always ascribed to the notion that there are four things that shouldn’t be discussed in casual society: religion, politics, sex, and money. To be fair, I talk about all those things with my closest friends, but putting it out on the Internet is a totally different story.

Now, with that caveat, I’m going to break all my rules and talk about Catholicism…specifically, my brand of/relationship with Catholicism. Before I proceed, however, please note: I’m NOT saying  that I agree with 100% of the Catholic Church’s teachings, beliefs or approaches to certain social issues, or that I am by any means a perfect Catholic. My beliefs diverge wildly from the Church’s on certain points, and this blog will NEVER be a place where those points and beliefs are shared or up for examination. All I do, and all I think I can do, is do my best to believe faithfully and worship honestly, and I still find I'm most comfortable doing that through the Catholic Church. It’s the faith I was raised in, and I cherish it very deeply for very personal reasons.

During my time at Notre Dame, one of the areas I found the biggest/most satisfying personal growth was in my religion and faith. Religion was as much a part of Notre Dame as football and academics…the place seems to breathe it. There are chapels in every dorm and crucifixes in every classroom, and the spire of the beautiful Basilica of the Sacred Heart soars above campus even higher than the Golden Dome. I mean, we have Jesus on our library. It doesn’t get much more prominent than this:

That said, I found that Notre Dame’s particular approach to Catholicism made me fall in love with my religion in a way I never really had before. It was accessible, it was candid, and it was tailored to its demographic in a way that I think would be impossible to recreate elsewhere. Homilies and masses were relevant to what we as students were going through every day: midterms, homesickness, making friends and struggling to figure out who we wanted to be.

I was a regular attendee of dorm mass in both of the dorms I lived in, and senior year my friends and former roommates Theresa and Melissa joined me in an effort to hit all 27 of the dorm masses. I also loved attending Folk Choir Mass at 11:45 on Sundays in the Basilica…stunning music, stained glass windows and the beauty of the ceilings and walls just enhanced the elevated sense of joy I always left church with.

After college, I really struggled to feel the same way about Catholicism, and I blame in large part the parish I grew up in. My family and I had all grown very disillusioned with the way the Church’s message was communicated there, and the fact that, for many, Sunday Mass seemed to be more about keeping up appearances and being one of the elite “first families” of the church than getting anything meaningful out of the service. I attended more and more infrequently, and eventually stopped altogether when I started dating a guy who was actively questioning his faith in organized religion in general.

Subsequent to that breakup, I found myself craving the comfort and peace I had found in Mass during college, and upon my move back downtown I found myself close enough to three different churches to hear their bells every day. The beautiful Basilica of St. Mary is directly across the park from me, and I decided to try to hop back into the swing of regular Mass attendance.

Friends, I’m so in love with it. While it lacks the collegial feel of a dorm mass at Notre Dame, it offers so much of what I loved about mass there…the stunning environment and heavenly, wonderful music, priests who relate the church’s message to the real world in a cogent and relevant way, and an atmosphere of welcome and acceptance. Due to its location right downtown, it’s very much a “come as you are, stay as you please” type place…perfect for my desire for a laid-back, diverse population like my college days.

I’m happy to say I officially attend the Basilica’s services almost every Sunday, and that I think I’ve found a church I love. I keep my faith very private, and tend not to talk about my church attendance because, for me, it is deeply personal. I’m really loving the weekly presence of Mass in my life again, though, and am so happy to check this one off my 101 in 1001 list…it’s enriching my life in ways that will last far beyond the end of my 101 in 1001 challenge! 

Lately I'm Loving

Things making me smile/on my mind/causing distraction these days: 

--I've waxed poetic multiple times about how much I love my best girlfriends. Turns out I'm potentially just buying into a social media phenomenon and mass cultural shift, according to the New York Times. Doesn't mean I'm going to stop Snapchatting Kelsie manicure pics, brunching with Hannah, or inundating this blog with photos of my favorite girls. 

--Since Kanye West "officially" threw his hat in the ring for the 2016 Presidential race at the VMA's a month ago, I haven't been able to stop laughing at the appropriateness of The Kanye West Wing on Tumblr. Combining scenes from "The West Wing" with Kanye lyrics or vice versa, it's made me laugh multiple times with its perfect pairings. (Can't you just imagine the horror of Kim Kardashian as First Lady?)

--One of my goals for myself in this space is to try to candidly capture both the best and worst of my life. We've all seen articles make the rounds on how social media makes it alarmingly easy for everyone to fake perfect lives, and this story in The Atlantic about the hashtag "#luckygirl" on Instagram really hammered it home for me. I would call myself lucky, yes. Fortunate may be a better word, to have had the opportunities I've had in my young (still SO young) life. The critique of the social media portrayal of good fortune and hard work, however, was really interesting to me. 

--I live just around the park from the beautiful La Belle Vie, and couldn't believe when I read that it was closing! All political opinions aside, because I don't choose to share my thoughts one way or another in this space, I think it's a travesty that I've never made it there, and am seriously debating trying to sneak it in before it shuts its doors just shy of its 10th anniversary on October 24th. 

--Ending with football, as usual this time of year: Notre Dame plays Navy this weekend in an historic rivalry full of respect and tradition. While I may have been a bit bitter about the 43-year win streak being snapped my freshman year, or the fact that we lost to them 3 of the 4 years I was at ND, I more than made up for it with an amazing trip to Ireland with Kaitlin to watch them face off in the Shamrock Series in 2012. This year's game will feature each team sporting the same base layer, gloves, and cleats, which are all linked to in this Sports Illustrated article. I love that they've got the alma maters printed on the sleeves...what a cool touch. Here's to a great rivalry...and (hopefully) an Irish victory ahead! 

Off to ND...congrats, Zach and Colleen!

Wedding #7 of 8 this year is this weekend, and I could not be more excited!

Zach and Colleen are tying the knot at my very favorite place in the entire world, Notre Dame, and we’re all making the pilgrimage down to celebrate with them. By “we all,” I mean the bulk of my Minneapolis social group, along with those scattered across the country…it’s going to be a Lakeville reunion of epic proportions.

I’ve known Zach since sophomore year of high school through the oh-so-cool activities of marching band, Model United Nations and Youth in Government, but he and I didn’t become friends until we became the only Lakevillains of the Class of 2007 to make our collegiate home under the Golden Dome. We existed in each other’s sphere more or less for the first three years, and became friends senior fall in utterly ridiculous fashion as our parents got each other drunk at the Backer the weekend of our senior football game. That night is also the first time I met his then-girlfriend, Colleen…

…and it was instantaneous love. I’ve never met someone who can make a person feel welcome like Colleen can, and we hit it off almost immediately. Fast-forward a bit through a raucous spring…

…graduation…

…and relocating to Minneapolis, where the friendship continued with crazy nights camped out at my starter apartment and cheering the Irish on at every possible sporting event. Zach and I served as the Notre Dame Club of Minnesota’s Young Alumni reps for our first few years out of school and had a blast organizing various social functions, most of which probably shouldn’t see the light of internet.

Colleen moved up a few years post-graduation, and we picked up shenanigans right where they left off, with a failed book club...

lots of cheering on the Irish...

and plenty of nights out at various Minneapolis drinking establishments that never failed to entertain...

Soon after their February 2014 engagement at Notre Dame’s Grotto, they were relocated to Philadelphia by Zach’s employer, and their absence has left a gaping hole in our social lives ever since. Needless to say, my excitement to see and celebrate with them is off-the charts! Basically, I'm already giving this weekend a major thumbs-up:

Claire, Mike, and I are road-tripping down today for a long weekend of non-stop celebration of Zach and Colleen’s marriage, and knowing them, I just know it’s going to be perfect. Here’s to celebrating a couple I adore at a place that is so special to me…the perfect place to start a truly golden marriage! Congrats Z&C…see you soon!