This is my mom putting my dad’s boutonniere on. He looks like he is thinking that this whole wedding thing is totally insane lol. Which it was! While we were all getting ready there were tons of people in the house running all over the place lol.

This is Danny calling the guys trying to find out where on earth they were. They were late as always lol. They were all supposed to be there getting ready a while ago. Luckily it doesn’t take guys that long to get ready! The guys actually ended up having tons of extra time before the wedding so they went around with the photographer and took a ton of really fun pictures. I’m still a little jealous that they had time to take some fun pictures. Us girls took so long getting ready that we didn’t have a chance to get any good, fun, pictures together before the wedding. It’s ok though, there was no way on earth I was going to wake up before 6am on the day of my wedding just to get some extra pictures lol. Yup…the girls started getting ready at 6am…there were 8 of us getting our hair/makeup done by only two people!

Waiting for something, but at least there is coffee now!

Danny’s brother, the best man, pinning on his boutonniere.

The guys starting to get ready.

Me, still in my batman pj’s and flannel shirt, with my hair and makeup all finished.

Look! My hair had curls in it! They didn’t stay in for much longer than the ceremony, but that is ok. Everyone saw me with my hair nice and done for a little while at least! It started to sprinkle right after the ceremony for a few minutes, so needless to say, the curls fell out quite a bit. Plus, we danced a ton and were playing games until midnight…lol.

Carla put a little more hairspray in, and then put in my two hair facinators. They were so pretty. They had some lace, crystal beads, and synthetic pearls. They were one of my favorite touches. I still wear them sometimes!

I love this picture. It is glowing which is exactly what I felt like.

So pretty!

Last minute make up touches.

Next time, pictures of the girls getting dressed! That means, pictures of me getting in my wedding dress!

And they lived happily ever after…

So in the morning I totally forgot to wrap the present! So had one of the bridesmaids wrap it for me while I was getting my hair and makeup done (Julie wrapped it I think…pretty much everything is a blur so I’m not really sure who did it lol). We all thought it would be fun if Danny and I both opened our gifts at exactly the same time even though we were two floors apart (Danny downstairs, me upstairs) in my parents house.

So Julie ran up and down the stairs to figure out the timing! It was so funny and fun. So here are some pictures of us opening our gifts:

This is me starting to open up my present:


It was an absolutely AMAZING necklace. It was white gold with diamonds and came from the same design line as my wedding ring set. At this point I had still not decided if I was going to wear by great grandma’s set of pearls, my mom’s set of pearls, or a necklace of my other great grandma’s. As soon as I saw the necklace from Danny I knew it was what I was meant to wear that day. It went perfectly with my dress. It was so amazing. I wear it almost every day now.

These are pictures from the store’s website that I blew up in photoshop:

Here is Julie giving Danny his present!

Danny opening it up and realizing that I had cheated by writing him a note

This is a picture from the Skagen website of the watch I got Danny.
We both ended up wearing our gifts on our wedding day which is pretty special. I wear my necklace all the time and Danny wears his watch all the time. It is really neat that we got each other something that we can wear everyday to remind us of our wedding day.

And they lived happily ever after…

So I figure what I will do is just start at the beginning of the photos and go in chronological order. Anything that gets left out (like details from the planning I never wrote about, or details from the wedding that I dont have pictures for) I will write about at the end in whatever random order I think of them!

I am going to do the recap in little mini segments. Instead of posting all my favorite pictures from “getting ready” I am going to post about 5 to 10 at a time. This is mostly because I don’t have huge chunks of time to sit around and upload pictures lol, but also so that you have more manageable sized posts to read. It just means you are going to have to keep coming back!

I am also going to do the recap with all the professional photos first, and then I will go back and do some posts with some of the great pictures our friends and family took during the day. Doing it that way will make it a little easier for me to organize all the photos.

So here we go!

Since all the bridesmaids, me, my mom, and my sister were all getting our hair and makeup done we had to start pretty early. We were up by 6:30am getting our hair and makeup started.

The woman who did it all is from Half Moon Bay and has been doing my hair since I was a sophomore in high school! She flew up from Half Moon Bay to Oregon with one of her assistants to do it.

Here are some fun pictures from that:

This was the color of my hair for the wedding. I LOVED it. My dress was a very pale ivory so the red highlights looked amazing next to the dress.

Yes, that is right. Instead of wearing one of those little “Future Mrs. Farmer” or “Bride to Be” tops like most people wear while getting ready for their wedding I wore my batman pajama bottoms and a flannel shirt! I figured if I had to wake up at 6:30 in the morning then I was going to wear something comfy! Danny laughed soooo much when he saw these pictures. He got a kick out of the Batman PJs.

This is me seeing the flowers for the first time. They were beautiful. I know it was my wedding and all, but they really were the most beautiful bouquets and boutonnieres I had ever seen. They were so different and detailed! There will be close up pictures of them later on.

Well that is it for now! I should be less busy over the next couple days and weeks so I am going to try to post more regularly so come back to the website soon!

And they lived happily ever after…

We are almost done winding down from all the wedding craziness. We have been working on fixing up our condo (Danny is installing new light fixtures as I am typing actually!) and we have been working on trying to keep our garden alive during the heat wave. I promise I will start writing posts about the wedding, although I can’t promise how often I will get to do so.

Here are a couple teaser pictures though! These were done by my friend Sean. He took so many great pictures. I will be posting mostly pictures by him, and by some other friends and family members. It takes about two months to get the professional photos back but I know you don’t want to wait that long to see at least some pictures!

Once I have some more time I will start from the beginning of the day and try to go through in some sort of chronological order, but for now here are some pictures of the beginning of the ceremony.

What do you think? Did we forget anything that might come in handy?

And yes, that is our mattress in the middle of the living room lol. We are sleeping downstairs since Harley is locked in our bedroom. When we had the bed in there she kept trying to jump onto the bed which was totally not allowed by the vet…so we have been exiled to the living room lol.
And they lived happily ever after…

That is why Danny and I decided to put a “wedding search-a-word” puzzle into our program packet! (Yes, I said “program packet” you will read why it is a “packet” later…once I finish the programs and can take pictures).

I decided to do a search-a-word instead of a cross word puzzle for two reasons. One, I thought it was more fair to those people who wouldn’t know the answers to the “clues” in the cross word puzzle. Not everyone at the wedding will know all the same things about us as other people. Two, my grandpa loves search a words and I always remember watching him do them, and helping him out with them, which was a lot of fun growing up.

Here is a picture of what it will look like (I made it a really small picture so people don’t find all the words now instead of at the wedding ceremony! No cheating!)
What do you guys think? Do you think it is a fun idea? Do you think anyone will actually DO the search-a-word?

And they lived happily ever after…

So the dress I ended up getting was originally $1200…and I got it for $200 including tax! I can’t even buy a dress that fits from the shopping mall for that price! (I know this because I have been looking for months for a dress to wear to Dana’s wedding. No luck so far…lame!) The only thing I need is for the tailor to take in the top a little bit, but the bridal shop said that since I will be getting my real wedding dress altered a little that the lady the recommended probably wont even charge me to take in the top of the second dress. Awesome!

It is a totally wacky dress, but it is so fun and I think the pictures will turn out great. Also, it looks really poofy but it isn’t that heavy so I don’t have to worry about drowning in the ocean in the dress lol. Seriously though, I was worried about that!

I think it will be fun to wear something different for the trash the dress session. It is still poofy enough that it looks like a wedding dress, but I won’t feel too bad for possibly ruining a beautifully beaded or lace dress.

Danny is going to go to Ross and Marshals to look for a pair of cheap slacks and a button down and maybe a jacket if he can find one for really cheap. Man this is going to be soooo awesome!!!

Since it isn’t my actual wedding dress and I am just going to wear it for the trash the dress photo session I figured it wouldn’t be bad if Danny took a couple pictures of me in the dress for me to share!

What do you think of the dress?

And they lived happily ever after…

Since I love my actual wedding dress too much to possibly destroy I bought a used wedding dress on eBay and a new one from some online discount store (I can return both in case they don’t fit. The one from the discount store is supposed to be tailored to my dimensions, but you never know with these places. It is probably made in china and could end up being a total rip off lol). Hopefully one of the dresses will work out!

Here is a picture of the eBay dress:
And here is a picture of the online discount place dress:

Here are some fun random trash the dress pictures I found online:

I figure if neither of these dresses end up working out, then I might look around to see if any of the bridal stores in the area would sell me one of the sample dresses that is starting to get a little worse for wear. I guess a lot of bridal stores start doing that around May. Worse comes to worse, I wait until I can find a sample dress for sale and we can do a trash the dress session at some other later date.

It should be really fun though! We could take pictures at the beach, on the cliffs, climbing around on all my parents’ tractor equipment, climbing trees, hanging out on the docks and piers, etc.

What do you guys think?

And they lived happily ever after…