My Married Life

So, I said today would be a very special post – today I am celebrating 3 years of marriage to my soul mate! :) I thought for today’s post I would reflect on how I met my hubby and my wedding day.

I met my hubby online, thanks to my best friend at the time. My family finally got connected to the internet the summer between my junior and senior year in high school, and she was helping me learn my way around the interwebs when she decided I should talk to this guy she talked to from NJ. We began talking online, daily, and really started to like each other just from conversation. We decided to meet in person the summer between my high school graduation and first year in college (talking online almost daily for a year now), so his whole family decided to take their week long vacation here in PA, we met face to face for the first time, and became a long distance couple by the end of the week (July 21st to be exact)! We made a long distance relationship work for 6 1/2 years, when he proposed the day after Christmas in 2005. We moved in together into an apartment in central NJ in August of 2006, and got married on June 16th, 2007. Three years later, we now own a house back in my old hometown area in PA.

Our wedding day was beautiful and went smoothly. I ended up with the first dress I saw in a magazine. It was an Alfred Angelo design, and so were the bridesmaid dresses and my mom’s outfit. The flower girl’s dress, however, was a totally different designer, but yet somehow matched perfectly to my dress! I loved their dresses, which I left the decision making up to them, and gave them their wedding day jewelry as their gifts during the rehearsal dinner.

I picked my colors based on hydrangeas, and the fact that I love the color periwinkle, as well as the blue and purple color combo. My bouquet turned out beautiful, full of white roses, purple lisianthus, and blue delphinium. The girls carried hydrangeas, but the flower girl was not allowed to drop flower petals in the church, so she carried a bouquet similar to mine in her basket.

Isn’t she adorable?!? Do you see the matching of our dresses? I loved it!

The church was kind of warm, since there was no AC and it was a beautifully hot day that day. Thankfully, no one passed out, and even though the ceremony seemed to take forever at the time, it was actually fairly short. We walked out of the church to a flurry of bubbles (rice was not allowed – but I didn’t really need to deal with pulling rice out of my hair and dress all day anyway). After pictures in the church, and my feet were killing me (my shoes were off for most of the church photos), we were whisked away by our slightly lost and confused limo driver to our outdoor photo location. The pictures came out beautiful, but getting into place was a little tricky as we had a lot of goose poop to maneuver around! As soon as I yelled out, “Watch out for the goose poop!”, the kids had fun with that little saying!

This one was tricky…we were precariously perched on those tree roots, with the water only a few inches away behind us!

The infamous “goose poop” walk!

The reception was Disney themed, since we love Disney and went there for our honeymoon (we did 4 days in the park, 3 days on the Disney Bahamian cruise, and one night/day at Universal Studios). The tables were given Disney names instead of numbers, and the name cards/favor cards had a clip art picture on it to match which table the guest was sitting at. The head table was “Magic Kingdom”, and other tables included “Mickey Mouse”, “Little Mermaid”, “Peter Pan”, “Jungle Book”, “Lion King”, “Finding Nemo”, “Pinocchio”, and more. Each table’s centerpiece was a mirror with a set of 3 different sized glass cylinders filled with water and a floating candle, surrounded by small votives. There was also a silver picture frame on each table, and instead of photos in them, I created a scrapbook style piece that used an appropriate piece of scrapbook paper as a background to match the stickers I found for each table theme. I arranged the stickers to almost look like a mini movie poster in each one. Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of any of these, at least not that I have found so far. We walked into the reception to Disney songs. My parents walked in to “Be Our Guest”, since they were paying for and hosting the party, his parents got “Bella Notte” from Lady and the Tramp because they are Italian and it’s the only Italian Disney song there is, the kids walked in to “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo”, my MOH and BM got “Never Had a Friend Like Me”, the other 2 “couples” entered with “You’ve Got a Friend in Me”, and hubby and I chose “You’ll Be In My Heart”. We danced our first dance to Michael Buble’s version of “For Once In My Life”. I choreographed a foxtrot style dance for us! :) My dad and I danced to “In My Daughter’s Eyes” by Martina McBride,

and my hubby and his mom danced to “"My Wish” by Rascal Flatts. We had buffet style food, beer, wine and soda, and a fuzzy navel fountain (my favorite alcoholic drink!). Our cake was a simple chocolate and vanilla cake with buttercream icing, as I knew I could please everyone with that, and came out beautiful! We found that wonderful Precious Moments figure and had to use it as our cake topper, and my dad bought us the Lenox Sleeping Beauty castle found under the tiers (Cinderella’s castle would have been better, but we only found that in Disney World during our honeymooon, as it’s exclusive to there).

(Can you find the hidden Mickey’s?)

Overall, it was a success with a lot of fun had by all, but I regret to say that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to and should have. Due to the heat and stress of the day, I was becoming dehydrated (by the time we went on our honeymoon, I spent the first 2 days drinking as much water as possible, and almost passed out from the heat and dehydration while waiting in line the the Backlot Tour ride in what’s now called Hollywood Studios – it got much better after that!), I felt sick when it came time to eat, so I didn’t eat much at all, and the only alcohol I had all day and night was the champagne in the limo and the champagne toast at the reception – I didn’t even get a sip from my fuzzy navel fountain I wanted sooo badly! I was also so worried about mingling and talking to each table to show our appreciation for them coming, that I didn’t really get to relax and have fun dancing. Especially since a few guests also didn’t really know how to make small talk and keep a conversation short! I did participate in a few dances, but I do look back on the reception part with some regrets and wishes. Maybe someday, in the far future, we can re-create a reception or vowel renewal or something, and I would definitely allow myself to enjoy it more….that’s my wish…who knows if it will ever come true… ;)

(I warned you there would be pictures and a long post! Thank you for reading the whole thing – you’ll get my thank you if you actually got to this part and made it through such a long post - and sharing a review of my special day!)

*Photos courtesy of Photography by McDonough*