I hope you enjoyed my little trip down memory lane yesterday.  It was fun to remember the sweet beginnings of our relationship!

In continuation of Wedding Week 2009, today I’m going to sort of evaluate the good, bad and ugly parts of our wedding day.  Nope, not going to evaluate the marriage – sorry if you’re disappointed and were hoping for some ugly stories!  Things are great in the marriage department  Nope, you get to read an evaluation of the actual day of sha-bang.

I’ll try not to bore you too much and make it fun and light hearted. And hopefully someone else will be blessed by the joys of our wonderful wedding day, and I bet our mistakes will be helpful learning experiences for someone else as well.  Here we go!

The GOOD

1. The music and entertainment!

After several conversations and some negotiations, DH convinced me to have a Contra Band at our reception.  You probably have no clue what that means – contra dance is a type of dancing that is sort of a mix between square dancing and English line dancing.  It is HUGE in New England, and became a favorite weekend date activity before we got married (sadly, there’s not nearly as much of a Contra presence in the midwest for us to enjoy).  DH contacted a musician we met in Greenfield (the contra hub of the US) and he put together a band for us.  I was super nervous because we never heard them play together ahead of time, plus it was fairly important for us to have a good caller that could help direct the many contra newbies that would be in attendance.  We ended up scoring big time!  They were amazing.  Almost everyone was up on their feet dancing late into the night.

We knew that we would need a DJ as well for special songs and to satisfy the comforts of some of our guests, and we were blessed to have one of DH’s best friends from college DJ for us.  We had a ton of fun at our reception and lots of people commented on how they loved all the great music!

2.  Flowers

Okay, I know I promised I wouldn’t talk about flowers, but here’s my one chance!  I knew early on that flowers can be ridiculously overpriced, so I was on the hunt for a budget-saving way to pull it off well.  Enter two wonderful friends of ours – Lois and Anna!  Lois has done wedding flowers for several wonderful ladies, and Anna studied something having to do with landscaping and architecture (oh man, I’m totally getting that wrong!  Sorry Anna!).  They graciously agreed to be my florists and were so great at putting things together.  I ended up ordering all of my flowers wholesale online, so they were delivered right to my house.  I ordered exactly what I wanted, and while some of my selections ended up being a bit different than I had hoped (colors weren’t 100% accurate online), they really made it work. They even added fresh flowers from their yards to some of the arrangements!  Lois and Anna did all of our flowers except our table flowers at the reception – this was easier and cheaper to have a local florist do.

Even now when I look at our pictures, the flowers that Lois and Anna did are just breathtaking!

3. Reception food/location

I think we made this decision before I had a ring on my finger! (More on that story later…) We had our reception at the Delaney House, and I am so glad we did. Food was important to us, and we really wanted to host our guests well, and this place did not disappoint.  The food was absolutely spectacular and the setting is just so elegant.  It was one of the best deals we could find for our medium-sized-ish Friday wedding, and I am soooooo glad we went with them.

4. Photography

This is a tough one because I have such high standards for photography.  Our photographer did a magnificent job capturing a lot of great moments.  We ended up with many beautiful images to chose from.

However, she did miss a lot as well, and there was a slightly stressful moment when it began to rain right as we were supposed to take some family pictures that I didn’t really appreciate.  I was also less than thrilled with the confusing pricing structure for her albums and lack of artistic editing – that was a HUGE disappointment, and one that I wish I had seen ahead of time.  If I had known all of this, I wouldn’t have paid in advance for an album and would have paid the difference to design it myself.  All of the images from this blog post are edited by yours truly and are from pages of the album that I am in the midst of designing for our parents (a very LATE Christmas gift!)

5. Personalizing our ceremony

After going to seven weddings within a year of getting hitched myself, I had seen A LOT of ceremonies.  And they’re all basically the same, except with different colors  Not to be cynical, but weddings do tend to mush together in your mind after you’ve been to a handful of them.  So it was important to us to try to make ours reflect us and what type of commitment we were making to each other and before God.

We based our ceremony off of the one in the Book of Common Prayer, and adapted a few elements and changed weird wording.  Instead of lighting a unity candle, we took communion as a couple, our first act as a married couple.  This was such a great moment for us!  We also had our wedding party say several short prayers for us (which are included in the marriage ceremony in the BCP).

Now it’s time for the Bad.

1. Getting married in the middle of July + no AC= misery.

We didn’t really have much of a choice on wedding dates, but we sure picked a doozy in terms of weather.  It was probably 94 degrees outside the day we got married, and the humidity had to be in the upper 70s – we were sticky and sweaty and just plain gross.  To make things worse, our church had no AC!  Our poor pastor was dripping buckets up there!  Luckily, my dad and our best man thought ahead and got a cooler of cold drinks to stash under the first pew, as well as some slightly damp rags to dab sweaty foreheads during the ceremony.  I wish I would have thought to provide some hand fans, because only made enough ceremony programs for each couple/family, and they ran out rather quickly because of the heat.  Thank goodness our reception site had AC!

2.  Leaving so quickly

We had a very narrow time window for our honeymoon, and so we booked our flight out of NYC for the next day.  Looking back, I wish we had waited an extra day so we could have stayed later with our guests and not been so exhausted when we arrived on our honeymoon.

And word to the wise – don’t move two days after getting back from your honeymoon.  It stinks saying goodbye to friends at your wedding.

The UGLY

1. My dress

Actually, I loooooooooved my dress.  I wish I could find an excuse to wear it again.  I hated looking for dresses, so to actually find one that I liked at all was a miracle.

(No, I don’t have two heads – that’s just a layout trick for printing later on…)

What was ugly, however, was the bustle. Not the bustle itself, but the whole process of getting the dang thing bustled. My seamstress had graciously given me two bustle options, however one of my bridesmaids sort of forgot how to do them…and well, it ended up taking like 20 minutes!  Which meant everything at our reception had to be pushed back by 20 mins.  Not a huge deal, but we had to basically shave off an entire set from the band and miss out some dancing!  Major bummer.

Word to the wise – get an easy bustle, and make sure your bridesmaids know what they’re doing!

That’s all for the ugly – there was really only that one major hiccup.  Everything else went really smoothly!  We are so grateful to have such a joyous celebration with close friends and family, and an amazing wedding to remember.

We’re closing in on our one year anniversary next week! It’s crazy that it’s already been one year. We’re loving it

In celebration of the big event (well, right now, we don’t really have anything planned…) I’m going to recount and share some of the fun stories from our wedding last year. I’ll try to keep it from getting boring and too wedding-y

A little preview…

And if you still haven’t voted on my poll about what to name my photography business, make haste and go do it!

Yes, I’m still sick. And because of that, I got bored and decided to design a new header for my blog. So far, I like it. I may need to change the opacity of the background picture so you can read the tagline better…

I promised some pictures from our trip last weekend out to the Amana Colonies.  We missed peak fall color, but it was still beautiful.  Click on the pictures for the FULL size view, including the worlds largest walnut rocking chair!

  I just got back on Sunday night from my first major regional event since moving to Iowa.  Instead of having area conferences like in New England, we have regional ones, which are MUCH bigger.  We had students from Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska (actually, I don’t think we actually have any ministry in NE right now, but I’ll save that for another post).  There were 250 students there, plus about 35-40 staff, and let me tell you ,it was a PACKED weekend.  I came home absolutely fried.  And this picture of one of my students at Grinnell, Christina, perfectly describes how I felt yesterday after finally catching up on sleep.  

Christina actually had a pretty rough weekend – en route to Kansas City (where FC08 was), she was attempting to pass a semi-truck and ended up spinning off the interstate.  She was pretty shaken up, but she was fine, didn’t hit anything, and was actually able to drive right back on to the road.  Someone else drove the remainder of the way here, but still, I give her props.

We also had transportation problems on the way back – one of the students cars wouldn’t start.  We had to get a new battery, but it took us an hour to get the old one out.  While I expected to be back home around 5:30, I didn’t get home until almost 8 pm.  I was exhausted, tired, dealing with culture shock (there is such a thing as domestic culture shock).  Hence, this picture perfectly describes my weekend.  I’ll post more soon, since I was the official photographer for the weekend (more on that in another post).

I’ve changed themes again.  It wasn’t that I didn’t like the old one, I just like this one better.  It feels a bit “lighter” and easier on the eyes.  Eventually I will change the header picture, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

 We just received our CD of wedding photos in the mail yesterday!  Yippee!  My conclusion from a few photos is that I should be a model  Actually, I think our photographer was just really wonderful.  She took some amazing pictures.  I’m a little bummed that a few moments were missed, especially a really sweet an emotional hug with my roommate Cindy during the reception – our photographer was probably eating.  But all in all, coming from another artist and photographer, I was impressed.  Now comes the fun part of choosing pics for our album!  Eventually I’ll maybe post a few more favorites on here….and if you’re a friend that would like a “copy”, just send me an email!

For the probably 5 readers I get (maybe I have some people out there I don’t know about!) Jerod and I finally have some engagement pictures!  We waited a little too long to take them, and now we have pretty much ONE DAY to pick out which ones we want for an enlargement (11×14), these little hand out photocards for our wedding photos, and a magnet we’re going to make with our address.  So, because we’re pretty indecisive, I thought I’d post the link here.  :-)

http://www.pictage.com/485017

You have to sign our guestbook in order to view.  And there’s a folder called My Favorites that has our top choices so far.  Let us know what you like!  Anything can be changed to color/B& W…..seriously, comment away!

And eventually I’ll post about our trip to Boston, Phillie and NYC.  :-)

Congrats to my good friend Patrick and my friend Lois (she’s my florist and DOC for our wedding) that just got engaged this week!  Their story of how they arrived at where they are now is pretty extraordinary and really a testament to God’s grace and redemption, and patience and obedience on both of their parts.  I’m so excited for them!  I think they’re getting married around here in the fall, so hopefully I can make a trip back for that special occasion.  This means that over half of our staff team is engaged – Patrick, Lois, Matt and me. Crazy.

Yesterday we got our engagement pictures taken – it was a lot of fun.  Very different being on the other side of the camera as a photographer myself.  Things were a bit more “posed” than I expected, but it was still fun.  We went up to Mt Tom and took some photos by this massive rock formation, on the swings, slide and teter toter (I felt like a little kid again) and by this cool old stone house.  Then we went over to the Log Cabin, the sister facility to where our reception will be, and had a few pictures there by the flowers that we hope we can use for our newspaper announcement.  Danielle was super fun and nice, and really easy to work with.  We can’t wait to see the pictures when they come in!  I’ll make sure to post a link when we hear back.

Today is wedding to do list day – time to mark those things off!!  Hopefully I can get lots done!

Oh, and DF is amazing and somehow scored us tickets for Red Sox game tuesday night against red hot Tampa Bay, and then next weekend we’re driving down to Phillie to visit friends, and on the way back we’re going to a Yankees game! I know I know, totally a wrong thing to do since I’m part of Red Sox nation, but they’re tearing down Yankee stadium, and so we wanted to see it in person before it’s gone.  Should be fun!!