Happy birthday Grandma!

We here at the Lynne and Matt blog want to wish a very happy birthday to Geraldine Majewski, Matt's grandma and Lynne's future grandmother-in-law.
Lynne and Matt are blessed that Grandma Majewski will be joining them at their wedding.

Lynne and Matt hope everyone says hi to her - she'll be the lady dancing a mean polka. If you're pleasant, maybe she'll even tell you about the time she hit a pig with her new Subaru. Grandma was once Miss New York Central. And she still regularly watches two of her grand kids and hands out plenty of free sewing lessons.

Lynne is known to be riding in the car when she will randomly blurt out: "I really like your grandma." To which Matt can only reply, "Me too."
What's not to like?

This year, Grandma will be...well, let's see. She's got the energy of a 22-year-old, and the dance moves of a 28-year-old. She looks like she might be maybe 29. Still, some of that math isn't working out quite right. She's got to be at least older than her grandson, right?

Happy birthday Grandma! We love you!

In other, non-wedding news

This is not an update on pink limos, or music selection, or flowers, or cake, or tastings, or dresses, or rings, or John Dillinger (bet you thought that would say Johnny Depp!) or Illini football.
This post is quite simply about good news.
The first piece of good news is that Lynne recently had her year-end review and to say it went well would be a massive understatement.
Quite frankly, the head of the department and the vice principal say she's a superstar. They love her style and demeanor and composure with the kids. This is no joke: they are going to videotape her and show it to new teachers as the right way to run a class. That's as big as compliments get.

Other good news, including some (very to only somewhat) belated congratulations:
Belated congratulations to Luke and Tracy, who got engaged and will be getting married this summer. Matt went to college with Luke and thinks he made a great choice. But you have to question Tracy's judgement, saying 'yes' to a Twins fan, don't you?

And very belated congratulations to Katelyn, for meeting her fantastic parents, Dave and Angela, and her brother 2-year-old Michael. Lynne and Matt finally got to meet Katelyn recently - what a fantastic little girl and great family.

And congratulations to Kevin and Angie, who are "with child," as the kids are saying. A fantastic couple who will make fantastic parents.

As long as we're talking babies, congratulations to Mark and Kate(s) who have a beautiful new baby girl, Phoebe Joanne.

And congratulations to the Mets for being so awesomely great.
As long as we're talking baseball, did you know Matt has another blog now? He's addicted. He kept it a secret because it. is. so. very. nerdy. But, if you're so inclined and love baseball cards, enjoy.

And congratulations to Lynne's sister, Laura, who got a fantastic internship at the prestigous Marco Island resort. Apparently, unlike many of her Western Illinois classmates, Laura had several offers for internships. It's not surprise a lot of people wanted to hang out with her - she's a blast. If it weren't for this pesky wedding Lynne and Matt would definitely be visiting.

More good news to share? Post it below!

Three little monkeys jumping on the bed...

And then there were three. (3) (III) (+++)(tres)

Three peat.

Three of a kind.

Three's a crowd.

Easy as one, two, three.

Three strikes and you're out. Three musketeers. Three pointer. Three sheets to the wind.

Well, just three months away from The Big Day.

It's really getting really real, isn't it?

Lynne and Matt feel confident because all the big decisions have been made so now it's a matter of filling in a lot of details. They've been lucky because they've had great support from both Mr. and Mrs. Seago and Mr. and Mrs. Hanley - not to mention a ton of friends and family who have offered their advice, knowledge and encouragement.

Ninety days of single life left. Even that feels like too many!

Lynne's dream, as told to Matt

What follows is a synopsis of Lynne's dream, as told to Matt, via cell phone on April 9, 2008. No details were changed, pretty much.


In Lynne's dream, she is at the rehearsal dinner. It's the night before The Big Day. But there is a problem.
Matt and Lynne never had time to go to the food tasting. So they never picked the food to be served at the reception. The reception was going to be held in - of course - the basement of Lynne's grandfather's old house. Even though it didn't have a basement. Unimportant.
Being a no-nonsense, take-charge gal, Lynne heads into chef's room for advice. After all, who would know good food better than the chefs?
There were three or four chefs down there. Lynne asks them about the meals. For the first course one chef suggests either salad or roasted almonds.
Roasted almonds? That's an odd choice, Lynne thinks.
"Our guests will have either almonds or salad?" she asks.
The're covered in powdered sugar, the chef insists. They're the most popular item on the menu, the chef insists.
Lynne is thinking this over when suddenly she's back upstairs. And there's another problem. The head chef is dead. We don't know how he died. It's unimportant. He's dead; that's all that matters.
It gets worse. Everyone suspects Lynne was involved.
"If there's a problem with the head chef, we have to call the police," Lynne suggests, helpfully.
"No, because they'll suspect you," the other chefs tell Lynne. "You're the one who never picked your wedding food."
Lynne is nervous. So, she takes the only reasonable course of action. She chokes the sous chef.
Does the sous chef survive? Doesn't matter. Unimportant. Because, now, Lynne's running in the street.
She sees a cop car is coming to save her. But the bumbling cops turn the wrong way!
Then she wakes up.

So...what does it all mean?
One interpretation might be that this wedding stuff is starting to get to Lynne.
Matt's take: It was Lynne, in the pantry, with a wrench!
Who do you think committed the murder of the head chef? Is the sous chef really dead? And why do they call it a sous chef? And, really, roasted almonds?

Our Dish List

Matt has always been in favor of ordering china. He envisions Lynne and Matt hosting their own Thanksgiving dinner one day, sitting around the table with Stanley and Hannah (Matt and Lynne's imaginary future children) and the grandparents, all eating off nice plates.


Lynne, throughout this entire wedding process, has tried to remain low maintenance and unconventional. She wanted to be practical: order only what we need right now, she thought. We don't even have anywhere to STORE nice china, she thought. And besides, she couldn't see herself doing enough entertaining to warrant asking her friends and family for really expensive dishes.


Then, after Lynne and Matt registered for (admittedly) very few things at the Bed Bath and Beyond, Matt started to make Lynne see the error of her ways. It would be really nice, she realized, to one day host Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. It would also be nice, Matt convinced her, to be able to have friends over for a nice dinner. So they went to Macy's to look at fine china. And, much to Lynne's surprise, they had very beautiful china at pretty reasonable prices.


So Lynne and Matt registered with Lynne's mom help. Which, of course, was a good thing--Lynne knew nothing about which serving dishes were needed and which were useless, and she couldn't have decided which flatware best matched the china pattern without a little assistance.


Anyway, the china we chose is pictured on the right. It can be found at Macy's or online at http://www.macys.com/.

Take a letter, Maria. Address it by my (future) wife...

So, we promised a bunch of non-Johnny Depp wedding updates very, very soon. And we've got posts about groomsmen, flower girls, ushers, how they met, readers, haircuts, baseball baseball baseball, good news o' the day, Johnny Depp, rings, China just sitting in the hopper.
(Did another Depp slip in there? Whoops!)
But, without further delay, here's some wedding news:

The Invites are in!
Lynne and Matt ordered The Invites from Matt's high school classmate, Amanda Ingwerson, who runs Something New Designs out of Ohio. She did the invitations for Lynne and Matt's friends Mary Beth and Matt's (that's a lot of Matts!) wedding. (More on them later.)
Besides being incredibly funny and talented, Amanda was great to work with and The Invites turned out great.

In case you're interested, the invites look....wait a minute! You're not supposed to know! Don't you want to be surprised by anything?
OK, you can't take it. Well, The Invites are made of paper. They're rectangular. And - get this - they're going to be mailed in ... envelopes.
Amazing.

Rather than a preview, you'll have to settle for a picture of Lynne, hard at work on The Invites. She taught herself calligraphy (this girl's amazing!) so she's been writing everyone's name on the inside envelope. Apparently, The Invites are so delicate, so dangerously close to disintegrating at any moment and splitting into 10,000 pieces, that they must be contained in not one, but two envelopes. Perhaps they're radioactive.

Well, they'll go out in a few weeks, so that gives you something to look for in the mailbox, besides that economic stimulus check. (Matt spent his on a new swing set!)

Lynne horrified! Wedding called off!

We here at LynneandMattblog have the sad task of announcing the dissolution of the Lynne-Matt pending nupitals.
Lynne and Matt hate to make this kind of announcement on a blog, but your phone was busy. And when we came by, you were out, so we felt uncomfortable leaving a note with your secretary. And, also, someone stole our car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts!

Anyhow, how it all happened was...

As you all know, Matt was rejected by Mr. Fancy Pants Johnny Depp.

Matt was really angry and he called Johnny every bad name in the book. Stupid head. Bongo brain. Bongo butt. Pig face.

But Lynne was willing to work with Matt. She understood his hurt, his rejection.

Then, Matt decided to hold a one-man protest of all Johnny Depp movies, which was troubling for Lynne because she really likes Finding Neverland.

Still, she was willing to work with Matt. She understood his pain, his anger.
And then.... Matt started to get a little too obsessed with Johnny Depp. He talked about being a Pirate. He wanted to move to 21 Jump Street. And he started wearing pink sweaters.

And then these pictures appeared in the local paper....

And then, there was this picture....

So....that was a little hard to explain. Matt claimed, "It was just Photoshop, honey!"

But really. Does that look Photoshopped to you?

And well, when you've seen that, can you really blame Lynne?
Of course, the "break-up" is all April Fools...

But those pictures really were published in the paper. Oh yeah, it's easy to serious journalism after that!