After running through rehearsal, everyone headed over to Tia Rosa’s restaurant in Gilbert for ...]]> 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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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!

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}

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After seeing the ...]]> A few months ago, I saw a tweet from Ami about a coffee filter flower tutorial on Design Sponge. I was so happy to come across this link, because these paper flowers are perfect for the Mexican fiesta theme of our rehearsal dinner! I was also so excited about it because it led me to this great DIY website, Aunt Peaches.

After seeing the tutorial, I had immediately tried dying coffee filters as instructed, but they just didn’t seem to get dark enough. We tried using food coloring as well, but that didn’t work the way it was supposed to. Eventually, I took this project over to my brother’s house and him and my sister-in-law Brooke helped me get this project going. Somehow, Brooke figured out a great method in dying the filters and drying them quickly in the microwave. (We thought they were burning because there was a terrible burnt smell…turns out it was a leftover piece of macaroni stuck in the microwave, ha!)

While Brooke dyed and dried the filters, my brother and I cut the different shades to the appropriate shape.

Then, we put together three flowers to see how a complete arrangement would look. We used the green masking tape (my mom actually found it in the gardening department at Home Depot), but left off the green leaves as shown in the original tutorial. We are going to be putting them in empty jars of El Pato sauces to go along with the Mexican theme. We are so happy with how they turned out! The flowers pictures were the first three we did, they got better and better the more we did. I can’t wait to see how they will look in the cans on the tables!

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Posted in: floral and decor, rehearsal dinner

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First, the rehearsal: We gathered the family and bridal party for 2 quick run-throughs of the aisle-walk, the musical accompaniment, and the timing. Easy peasy.

However…unless ...]]> It came. It went. I barely remember any of it. However, from what other married folk have told me… that’s completely normal. Here begins a multi-part recap, which I will attempt to present in chronological order!

First, the rehearsal: We gathered the family and bridal party for 2 quick run-throughs of the aisle-walk, the musical accompaniment, and the timing. Easy peasy.

However…unless I had a wedding planner who already knew how to do this… it would have been a complete disaster. I can’t stress this enough: HIRE A WEDDING PLANNER. As someone who has only attended 2 weddings in her adult life, I really needed someone to orchestrate the ceremony. My wedding planner was Katie of Kate Ryan Occasions. She’s a peach. She and her assistant Robin took care of everything. I lounged around, drank coffee, admired my manicure, watched HGTV…etc. I literally did NO candle lighting, floral arranging, or bow tying the day before or the day of. Loved it. There she is in the stripes, showing us how it’s done.

Here’s a shot of my beautiful bridesmaids, laughing as one of the flowergirls nose-picked her way down the aisle at the rehearsal.

Then, during the chaos of all of the family and bridal party arriving, CG, grabbed me and said “Follow me!”. When we were alone, he asked me to close my eyes, and when I opened them, he had this gorgeous topaz and diamond gem in his hand. My “something blue”! That was the only thing I had been missing. Swoon. I wear it on my right hand every day now!

Then we all headed out to The Arcadia Room at LGO for a really awesome party and super tasty dinner (thanks pops-in-law!). That was really fun. Except I was really sick. I had some kind of allergy attack! Stuffy nose, puffy eyed, sneezy misery! I decided to take a 24-hour anti-histamine/decongestant so that I would be able to breathe when I went to bed. This turned out to be a bad idea. Very bad.

Because the pill I took had ephedrine in it… it made me stay up the whole night. I’m not exaggerating. I literally. never. fell. asleep. Luckily it wasn’t that big of a deal. When I looked in the mirror in the morning, I only a dark circle under one eye, and after I massaged the area, drank my weight in water, and applied concealer… it was no big deal at all. So brides… don’t sweat the sleepless night! Just hydrate!

Stay tuned for the next installment… our fabulous wedding day decor!

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Posted in: rehearsal dinner

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After some initial strategizing, we made sure ...]]> Yes, it’s true… another venue  checked off for the wedding weekend! In order to get my fiance involved in the wedding planning that he was so desperately seeking {yes, he REALLY does want to help as much as I will let him} I gave him the task of researching rehearsal dinner venues in and around Nashville.

After some initial strategizing, we made sure each of our choices would have most everything we were looking for:  a private room away from the hustle and bustle so we could have special time with our closest friends and family, an outdoor space perfect for socializing and hosting a pre-dinner cocktail hour, southern flair to complement the theme of our wedding, audio/visual capabilities for a possible slideshow and/or video, and of course–to die for food!

Now before moving on, I must admit–I was beyond amazed at how well he did–within two days of my “assignment”, the fabulous fiancée had contacted 10+ venues/spaces/restaurants we had combined on a list and had scheduled a time for us to check out and sample the food at his#1 choice…Mère Bulles in Brentwood.

{Photography courtesy of Author’s Personal Collection}

With the look and feel of an old southern plantation home, this venue has it all… a location close to the church, an outdoor patio complete with lights for nighttime fun, an endless assortment of food for our wonderful guests, and an on-site planner to handle all of the details for us. They were even more helpful when it came to selecting a customized menu, centerpiece arragements, and decor to top the night off perfectly!

Needless to say, the boy did an amazing job and because of this–he will most certainly be assigned other wedding-related tasks throughout this lengthy process! So to all EAD readers, are there fun and creative elements you’ve seen at a rehearal dinner I should try to incorporate?? Loving any and all advice from all of you!

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Posted in: rehearsal dinner, the planning process, venues

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We gathered our closest family and friends for a night out before the ...]]> After my father totaled our car (more on that later) we all were in need of a couple pints! The celebrations began at Quealy’s located in the central square of Dungarvan. This bistro-style pub was the perfect place for our rehearsal dinner.

We gathered our closest family and friends for a night out before the big day. It was a chance for both of our families to come together and get to know each other better. Being a family across two countries, it’s very rare to have everyone together at once and important for us to make it special when it does happen.

Much of the conversation revolved around wedding day preparations, catching up with old friends and quite frankly, who needed their next pint.

Although wedding day stresses were on our minds, we had a brilliant time and so excited for what was about to happen the next day.

photographs via author’s personal collection

How did you celebrate the day before your wedding? Did it involve “international” families coming together like it did for us?

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Before I get into the party itself, I want to quickly tell you about the week leading up to it. I’ve ...]]> Most people thought I was crazy. Actually, I thought I was crazy at times too… but having a welcome party at our house instead of a traditional rehearsal dinner was one of the best ideas about the whole wedding weekend.

Before I get into the party itself, I want to quickly tell you about the week leading up to it. I’ve already blogged about the crafts and wedding-related tasks that filled our house the week of the wedding and how much a blessing it was having my sister and step-mom staying with us for a week before the big day. What I have not mentioned is the other visitors we had coming in and out of our house that week. Not family members, not friends, but instead? Contractors and workmen. Let me just put it this way:

Do NOT do major construction the week of the wedding unless you want to spend 50% of your time running back and forth between various home improvement stores, staying up until 7am painting, and installing toilet paper holders instead of being able to truly enjoy your manis and pedis rehearsal day.

The point of my story? It was absolute chaos leading up to our welcome party, making the fact that the party was a total success even more incredible! So, even though we had a lot of stress leading up to the day, here is what made our welcome party a success:

1. We hired help: I was hesitant at first since it would mean an extra expense, but I was *out of my mind* thinking I could play hostess to 80 people in our home and still be able to enjoy myself. My mom had suggested that we hire someone to be in charge of all the small stuff: setting up, clearing empty plates, refilling the food, taking out the trash, making sure fresh bottles of wine and beer were chilling, and all the things that I would have spent the entire evening doing if we hadn’t had our angel, Elvira. It made it possible for me to still enjoy getting a manicure with my step-mom and sister even though it made us about 15 minutes late to the party…I knew everything would be taken care of! I was actually a guest at our own party :)

2. Amazing but low-maintenance food: A friend of ours just graduated from the CIA. As our wedding present he did the food for the party. We wanted fancy barbecue food but it was important to us that most of it was grab-and-go: you could either eat with your hands or just a fork. The resulting menu? 4 different types of sliders (pineapple-mango, caramelized onion-blue cheese, plain, and barbecue I think?), lots of grilled veggies, bratwurst, a salad with a wonderful light vinaigrette, and other easy-to-devour goodies.

I hate to say it, but the food at our party was way better than the food at the reception.

3. Inviting everyone: Being able to spend time with everyone before the reception made the whole weekend so much more relaxed and enjoyable and gave us another opportunity to see our out of town friends and family.

Reunion with out of town friends!!

4. Inviting the neighbors: If you invite the neighbors who usually call the cops about EVERYTHING, they’ll be too busy downing sliders to notice that your great uncle is double parked in the street :)

5. Enough seating: Seems like a small and obvious detail, but since we had the party at our house, we had to make sure we had room enough to seat lots of people. We were lucky enough to have a family member who had access to a bunch of folding chairs and tables…can you imaging grandpa and grandma sitting on the ground? Yeah.

6. Help from family members and friends: buying food, drinks, setting up, cleaning up…it was all about delegating! The party would definitely not have been a success if everyone hadn’t pitched in to help!

{all photos by the author}

My mom and Me!

Did anyone else choose to do something aside from a traditional rehearsal dinner? How did it go? Would you do it the same way again?

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