Birthday month, day #19...is what we call "muffin cake day" around here. 4 years ago today, Peter and I said "I do" to each other at 4:00 in the afternoon on a red sandy beach on Prince Edward Island: me in a white dress, him in shorts and a dress shirt. We then walked back to cousin David's cottage to grill burgers, dance on the deck, sing songs around the campfire and tell stories into the night with a few dozen family and friends. Wine and champagne, beer and pop, burgers and hotdogs were aplenty...as were "muffin cakes". We opted for cupcakes instead of a traditional wedding cake, which seemed like a good idea at the time: they'd be easy for everyone to eat and we could have a whack of flavours for everybody: chocolate, vanilla, swirl, red velvet...mmmm.

Weeks before the ceremony, we talked to a local baker, explained what we were looking for and confidently ordered five dozen cupcakes in all of the above-mentioned flavours and then some. Hours before the ceremony, we stopped to pick up our 60 little wedding cakes...only to discover that the baker didn't really understand the concept of 'cupcake' (I know: right???). What we ended up with was 70 (he gave us ten extras because it was our wedding--a little gift from him to us) HUGE, heavy, puck-like, undercooked blueberry muffins piled high with sickeningly sweet lumpy frosting. They were dough-y in the middle and crusty on the edge. And they were oh-so-ugly. Seriously. They were so ugly, I didn't even take a photo of them (although now I wish I had a photo of them). As it was only a couple of hours until the ceremony and party, though, we rolled with it: instead of offering our guests the perfect little cupcakes we had envisioned for our special day we ended up setting out paper plates overflowing with odd-shaped, weird tasting, monster-sized muffin cakes for our special life... silver color wears for bridesmaid With Sequins

...and somehow, they ended up being just right. Perfect, actually. I still can't believe that people ate them. :)

Now that I think about it, though, those muffin cakes are a lot like our life together: a little quirky, lumpy and bumpy and not always what I/we thought we ordered...and perfect in it's imperfection: kinda raw in some areas, overcooked in others, waaaay sweeter and heavier than what we expected, shared heartily with friends and family, and oh-so-much-bigger than anything we could have envisioned. Just right.

Dang. I love you, Peter McGaugh . And I love our muffin-cake kind of life. Thanks for saying 'yes' that day...and every day since. <3