Wedding

Rehearsal Dinner

August 21, 2013 By amusingmjblog Leave a Comment

As is tradition, the night before the wedding we had a rehearsal dinner. In my family we like to include as many people as possible, so our rehearsal dinner was about 75 people: mostly family and out of town guests.

Reese and I had just started looking for a place to host our rehearsal dinner when I drug him along to a Bridal Show at the Dallas Convention Center. If you’ve never been to one of these, it can be HUGELY overwhelming… tons of vendors all trying to sell you what they’ve got. I will say though, about 75% of our vendors we ended up using came from the bridal show, so I guess it was worth it. And BONUS Reese won a push-up contest while we were there.

Anyway, one of our favorite restaurants in downtown Plano, a pizza place called Urban Crust, was there handing out their flyers for their event space called Rooftop. It is a perfect reception location on (you guessed it) the rooftop of a building in downtown Plano. They serve delicious pizza and pasta from Urban Crust or mexican food from their sister restaurant Urban Rio. Its a gorgeous loft type room and their employees were awesome to work with plus the food was DE-LI-CIOUS.

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The room has this gorgeous wall of windows and a patio where you can watch the sunset. See my brother and his girlfriend (and their ridiculous photo-genetic-ness) posing on the patio?

My mother has an incredible talent for flower arranging so she (with some assistance from a great friend) put together these flower arrangements for the tables and the hallway as you walk in. She usually finds a wholesale florist she can order from and she has superb talent when putting these together. We wanted them to be a splash of color for the room since it is primarily black. The burlap rosettes were a crate and barrel find earlier this year. I think they are napkin rings? But we tied them up with lace and burlap and tied them around 3 mason jars to make each centerpiece.

Then for the welcome table we just used the larger size of jars with lace or burlap tied around it. The engagement pictures were framed from one of my showers and made the perfect accent as you walked in the room!

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I love the way these flowers turned out, they were so perfect for the space and atmosphere of our rehearsal dinner!

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And one last picture from our rehearsal dinner that I love and makes me laugh. This is a group of groomsmen and ushers that look like they are getting ready to stir up some trouble… and their ringleader? My esteemed brother-in-law (he’s the one in the aviators).

Want to see the other parts of our wedding? Check them out here:

Filed Under: Wedding

I Wanna Grow Old With You

August 20, 2013 By amusingmjblog 1 Comment

The day that Reese proposed I was supposed to meet my parents at an anniversary event for a church I had grown up in. Reese was supposed to go with me. But at the last minute he called and said that one of his nephews had gotten sick and both their parents were at other events, could he come over to help. I told him no big deal, this wasn’t that big of a thing, he could easily miss out and catch up with us afterwards for dinner. UNBEKNOWNST to me… he used his poor unsuspecting nephew as a scapegoat so he could execute his master plan. He was going to decorate the backyard of my house with lights and put up a hammock he had bought me to set the scene for him to ‘pop the question’. He convinced several of our closest friends and family to come help him transform the scene. They helped hang lights, put up tiki torches, scatter rose petals, and set up dinner for afterwards. Meanwhile I’m at this church function with my parents, catching up with old friends and having a great time. When it finishes up, we head back to my house to pick up the boys (Reese and my twin brother) for dinner.

Random sidenote: I had tried to put my hair up with bobby pins that day (which I should know by now will NEVER WORK ON MY HAIR, but I’m 29 and still don’t know this about my hair) and it had of course, fallen down, and didn’t look that great. As we are driving back to the house, my mom is scrambling to help me find a hair rubber band in my car. I keep plenty of them around, so its very rare not to be able to find one. I keep telling Mom it is no big deal, I’ll just run in and grab one when we get home, but she continues to look for one over my protests. As any good daughter would, I start to get annoyed that she is making this big of a deal out of NOTHING. We finally find a clip, and all is right in the world. Later I would understand her concern!

When I get to the house I walk up to the garage door and see a note on the door, its a poem that Reese has written me. And all of a sudden I know what is behind that door. I open it up to see the love of my life sitting at the end of a candlelit hallway, just patiently waiting for me.

He takes my hand and we walk to the backyard together where he gets down on one knee and asks me to marry him. He’d asked a friend to take pictures of the whole process and I am grateful to have these sweet pictures of that moment. He also wrote me a letter (its kinda his thing) which I read while sitting in the hammock he and our friends had assembled while I was away.

Afterwards we went inside and celebrated with a few friends and our families. How cute is this picture of how excited my dad is for us? My twin brother made my favorite dessert a chocolate meringue torte… delicious layers of chocolate meringue and chocolate mousse…mmmmmm.

And two of my favorite people, my mother and my best friend checking out the ring:

And a funny part of the story? He’d really planned on waiting another month or two to propose, but the jeweler had called to tell him the ring was ready and my parents were coming down for the weekend… so the ring was burning a hole in his pocket and he decided to jump right in with the backyard plan.

I love that every time I walk into our backyard I think about that moment and how happy we make each other and the lifelong journey we are going to have together!

Want to see the other parts of our wedding? Check them out here:

Filed Under: Husband, Wedding

Something Old, Something New

August 19, 2013 By amusingmjblog Leave a Comment

Its wedding week on the blog! Its been a little over 3 months of wedded bliss and I want to remember and document the wedding process… so enjoy a few more details about our special day! (PS… if you aren’t a big wedding person check back in a week and I’ll be back to regularly scheduled DIY details.)

So here’s the deal with me and dresses: I HATE dress shopping. I will gladly pick swimsuit shopping over dress shopping AN-Y-DAY. Seriously. And you know what? Wedding dress shopping wasn’t any better than regular dress shopping. I know it is supposed to be this magical experience (sidenote: when my mom went dress shopping with her older sister many years ago the shop lady actually walked in front of her spritzing perfume to ‘complete the experience’… my mom the tomboy, almost couldn’t handle it), but I was not one who wanted to go on this never ending quest for the “PERFECT DRESS”. Fortunately my mother and I are fairly decisive people, so we knew if a dress would work pretty immediately.

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When we found THE dress, it was actually one I didn’t even pick out. My BFF and I were doing a little shopping on our own for the dress before my mom could come in town and shop with us. And as the last of our dresses to try on, the attendant said… okay give this one a chance… it doesn’t look like much on the hanger, but it is BEAUTIFUL on. I took one look at this ‘sample size’ dress (about 3 dress sizes too small), to say I was skeptical was an understatement. But man, I put that dress on and I felt GORGEOUS. I knew it was the dress all the others had to measure up to. I didn’t buy it that day, but waited until Mom was with me to make sure it was something she liked too. It was the perfect amount of formal and informal (our church sanctuary was SUPER formal, but our reception was awesomely casual) to match our wedding and reception.

Mom and I also went hunting for the perfect pair of wedding shoes… they had to be cute and comfy and we went to our favorite shoe hunting place… Nordstrom Shoes. I mean really, it is the holy grail of shoe shopping. My groom is only about 1” taller than my 5’3” self… although he swears he’s 5’5”. And we all knew my hair would be poofed up a bit, so I decided to go with flats. We hunted through all of the sparkly silver ‘wedding-y’ shoes, but they didn’t really fit my personality. So finally we found the perfect pair of Navy Tumbled Leather shoes. PERFECTION.

We tried on several belt sashes on with it, and definitely liked the look with a belt. But did you know that several of those were $250+ for a belt with beading?? So I decided it wasn’t worth it. Mom thought we could take some baubles my grandmother had and make a belt ourselves. We decided to go with a Navy belt to coordinate with the shoes and the bridesmaids dresses. A navy belt is a little non-traditional, but it looked GREAT that day.

My veil is a family heirloom which my grandmother purchased in Belgium when my aunts were teenagers. It is a round piece of lace which didn’t have any way of securing to my hair, so in the week leading up to the wedding we bought some cheap clips from a craft store that we could secure it to. I knew I would have a low side bun for my hairstyle, and wanted it to slide in just above that. My mother went to my Great Grandmother’s sewing chest which my grandmother gave to me and stays in my office under the window. I have yet to clean it out (and now maybe I never will). Mom found some old thread that my great grandmother had hand crocheted to attach the veil to the hairclip. So all wrapped up and adorning my head on my special day I had pieces of women who have helped make me who I am. I’m big on tradition and family, so that little extra bit of family helped me feel a little bit of extra love.

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