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Our Wedding Rehearsal & Dinner

The day of our rehearsal (April Fools Day) was an incredibly hot day! It was the first day of the year to hit 100…this was incredibly worrisome for our wedding the very next day. Our coordinator and fill-in officiant were great though and kept things moving quickly.

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After running through rehearsal, everyone headed over to Tia Rosa’s restaurant in Gilbert for dinner (and shade).

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We wanted the rehearsal dinner to be more casual than the wedding and since we were having it at a Mexican restaurant, we went with that theme. We hung up paper banners, made paper flowers in El Pato cans for centerpieces and used limes for the name card holders. My dad brought in red linens and we used Mexican blankets as table runners. Everything looked great thanks to my Mom and Mike’s tia Holly who managed the setup.

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Our bridal party, close family and out-of-town family was invited to the dinner, so we thought it would be a great idea for them to get our “guest book” started. We ended up doing a wedding tree instead of an actual book — everyone seemed to love stamping their fingerprint on the tree! More to come on that project.

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The food was delicious! The manager, Clay and his team did a fantastic job of serving drinks, making sure the food was ready in time and cleaning up. We had a Mexican version of meat, potatoes and corn — it was a hit!

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After dinner, the staff brought out my wedding gift to Mike — a Phoenix Suns groom’s cake! Mike loves the Phoenix Suns, basketball and cake so I thought this would be the perfect gift. A friend of mine from high school made and delivered the cake. She did such an incredible job, everyone was so impressed with it!

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We also made speeches at the dinner honoring our bridal party, parents and grandparents. Both of our parents got up and said a few words about us along with Mike’s friend and groomsman Ryan. We felt so blessed that night to have such great and loving friends and family around us. This is the night our wedding became real…we almost couldn’t believe we were getting married the very next day!

{Images via various family members}