Well, it’s official: I’m a married lady!
After close to a year of planning (and more than my fair share of research on places like WeddingWire and the Knot), Shane and I officially got married last Friday. It honestly turned out so well—despite a few things not going quite as planned!—and I’m so glad to be married to that amazing man.
We were also pretty lucky about how it all worked out. Because we live in Ontario, which has been going through a reopening lately, we were able to have our wedding without too many restrictions or having to move it or anything.
I will admit though, there was a lot of stress leading up to that, especially since I wasn’t sure the whole time that restrictions would get lifted in time!
Now that it’s all happened, I’m struggling a little to believe it’s all real. It went by in such a blur, and has some of the qualities you’d get from a realistic dream. But the photos have started trickling in from relatives (I’m still waiting on the ones from our photographer, and likely won’t see them for a month or so), which is helping me process that it really did happen.
And naturally, I’ve found myself thinking about where to put my energy.
For months, it’s been going toward the wedding; pretty much every minute before work, over lunches, and in the evenings has been dedicated to planning and coordinating. I had to laugh at myself a little bit this morning when I sat down at my computer and automatically checked my email for anything from our vendors!
Which, of course, there wasn’t.
It’s a little weird, but also nice. It’s been a while since I felt like I could put all my heart and mind into things like my blog. I think the last time was back before we bought the house, actually. So for now, I’m just taking a bit of time to enjoy not feeling busy, and then we’ll see what happens from there.
But in the meantime, I wanted to share a little bit about how the day went!
The almost-disaster of miscoloured flowers
Probably the first thing we picked out about our wedding was the colours, which we set as pink (naturally!) and a wine-esque purple. And when I ordered our flowers, it was with the intention of having both of those colours in bouquets and things.
When they showed up Friday morning, there was no purple to be seen—only a deep red!
I very nearly had a bridezilla moment about it, but there was nothing really I could do at that point. So I decided the red was sort of like fall leaves, which we also wanted to have at the wedding, and carried on.
Lesson learned: Things won’t always go how you want them to, and it all comes down to how you handle it. I may or may not be planning to apply that lesson to my fear of tanking in FFXIV too.
How all our personal touches came together
As much as I consider myself an aesthetic girl, I am a firm believer in making anything—even the most aesthetic things—as personalized as possible. And of course, that’s exactly what we did with our wedding, from our one-of-a-kind cake topper to the hexagons (read: d20s) everywhere.
For most of the people at our wedding, a lot of these things would have gone unnoticed, and it would just feel like a nice wedding.
But for us, it was something special to know everyone had a moogle hiding on their place card, that our sweets table was all the same colours as moogle poms, and that the classy instrumental music was actually a theme from Howl’s Moving Castle.
Lesson learned: Don’t be afraid to put your personality into anything! Even if you have an aesthetic in mind, there’s a way to do it without it feeling overly themed.
How important it is to take mental pictures
One of my favourite story arcs in the Office is the tale of Jim and Pam’s wedding in Niagara Falls. As soon as we started planning, one of the first things that popped into my mind is the scene from their drive, where they talk about taking mental pictures at the wedding so the day doesn’t just fly by.
I cannot tell you how important that ended up being for me.
When people tell you a wedding or another big event will fly by, they mean it. And even if you think to yourself that you’ll remember it all, it’s better to expect that you won’t.
Obviously, I wasn’t going to carry my phone around and take pictures all day. It was way more important to me to be fully present in our day. So instead, I made a point of taking mental pictures all day, and those images are burned into my brain now.
I can still clearly see Shane’s face as I walked up, and through our entire ceremony. I remember holding our hands up high as we were announced, the FFXIV victory fanfare playing in the background. I remember one of my dearest friends whipping her napkin around wildly as we walked into the reception.
Things like that.
Lesson learned: For anything important, prioritize being present, and don’t be afraid to use a mental camera to log special moments away!
