Day 3 - a photo that makes you happy

This was a tough one to narrow down to one photo. I have so many that make me smile! I've been looking through the challenge a little more, and most of these are supposed to be photos of yourself. Goodness knows you all have seen a bazillion Caroline pictures here in the last year, so I'm going to try and stick with the challenge of posting photos of myself. (But don't worry, Caroline will still pop up all over the place, I'm quite sure!)

Moving along, here is the photo I went with for Day 3:

There are so many things about this photo that makes me happy. I'll start with the obvious - we look so completely ridiculous! This was taken my junior year of college (Dan's senior year) at an event we had each spring called "Lamrof" ('formal' spelled backwards). It was basically a dance with a ridiculous theme that called for some imaginative costumes and some good, old-fashioned, small-town fun.

The year was 2005, and the theme of that Lamrof was "My Big Fat Dutch Wedding," a play off of the popular movie about a Greek wedding and the local Dutch population/heritage in our college town. We actually had a campus-wide vote for the bride and groom, and one of my closest friends ended up being selected as the bride, and therefore asking me to be one of her bridesmaids...hence the dutch costume each of the bridesmaids donned that night. I will never forget getting ready in Rebecca's dorm room, fluffing her thrift-store, over-sized 80's wedding gown, applying too much make-up, and laughing until our sides nearly burst. We even had a wedding procession from our dorm, where the groom and groomsmen came to escort us over to the cafeteria/reception hall.

After the wedding party was released from our duties, I met my date, who was dressed as my "cousin from Missouri" in an outfit courtesy of my cousin Barb. I think everyone else was supposed to dress as wedding guests, and people really used their imaginations :-)

Aside from all of the craziness of the event itself, Dan and I were just weeks away from becoming engaged and blissfully, head-over-heels in love. Looking at this picture brings back so many wonderful memories in an instant - walks around our quiet college town, staying up way too late to finish homework because I had spent too much time with this boy, being surrounded by my best friends, random nights like this where we had no cares in the world (except maybe hoping that somehow I could pull-off looking cute in a dutch costume to impress my "cousin from Missouri" with the mullet).

Those were definitely some good times. Do you think Northwestern would take us back?