Life Update: Wedding Plannning, etc!

Hey guys! Today I thought I'd write a little blog post updating you on my life currently. I know I've been seriously MIA the past couple of months and I feel awful about it. It's my last year of law school so things have been seriously crazy! Not to mention I am planning a wedding! Yes that's right, Alex and I officially set a date. We are getting married this November 14th!! I'm so excited I can hardly stand it!! :) :)

After over five and half years together, we are truly ready to start our lives together! My family is super conservative, so living together before marriage was not an option. Additionally we both wanted to finish grad school before we got married, which is why we waited so long to get engaged (last July!). We honestly would have married each other within two years of starting to date if we'd had our way! But I'm glad it's worked out this way, as we've grown so much together over the past five years and truly feel 100% that we are meant to be together forever. But yeah, we are definitely SO ready to live together finally!

We are getting married at St. Andrews Catholic Church in Roswell. It's where I was baptized and grew up going to, and it's where Alex was baptized too as of this past Easter! Yes, that's right, Alex converted to Catholicism!!! It was important to both of us that our family grow up Catholic. Alex didn't have the ideal family life growing up, and he really admires my parents and the strong values they instilled in all of us due to their faith. Before this past year I honestly thought the best I could hope for was him coming to mass with us every Sunday. Alex's parents were Lutheran but they never practiced when Alex was growing up and he was never even baptized. He was not religious at all when we first started dating and it was just something we didn't really talk about.

After we got engaged last summer we started talking about reaching out to St. Andrews and finding out about pre-marriage counseling classes we could take. Alex surprised me when he suggested that we look into conversion classes too, as he was interested in possibly converting to Catholicism. I emailed St. Andrews and as luck would have it, they were just starting RCIA classes for the year, or Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults! We've been going to those classes and mass every Sunday since last August, and two weeks ago Alex finally joined the Catholic Church. 

Words cannot express how happy I am about Alex's decision, and how much more it makes me love him (if that were even possible!). Faith is very important to me, and I can't remember how many times I prayed for God to open Alex's heart and help him understand. That it finally happened is nothing but a testament to God's love for each and every one of us, no matter how foregone we may think things are. We've both enjoyed everyone we've met in the classes; it really is such a welcoming community. We are going to keep going and are thinking about ways to stay involved in the church now that the RCIA classes are winding down.

Us after signing our contract at Primrose Cottage!

Another exciting thing that has happened is that we booked our reception venue! We are having our reception at Primrose Cottage in Roswell, GA. I always knew I wanted to get married in a Southern plantation-style venue, and it was really between this and Naylor Hall for me. However, Primrose Cottage's ballroom just sold it for us. It is enormous!!! We had gone on a tour of Naylor Hall, and while it is gorgeous on the outside, the ballroom felt very cramped and small. I just couldn't picture my wedding there, which I knew was a bad sign. Primrose recently added a huge ballroom to their property, and it felt perfect the second we walked inside. I immediately could picture everything and knew it was the place. Here is a picture of the ballroom that I took while we were meeting with our wedding planner:

Don't you just love how big and airy it is? Plus Primrose has beautiful gardens and a fountain the backyard, which we loved as well. We signed the contract back in December and have been working with them since to bring our wedding together. It is an all-inclusive venue with their own events and catering company, so we don't have to worry about food or beverages or decorations, which is nice. However, it is a little stressful because apparently we cannot bring in any of our own decorations, it all has to go through their decorator and we have to rent everything from them. That's kind of a bummer cause we were hoping to cut costs by DIYing some things. Hopefully it won't be too expensive! We are on kind of a tight budget. Our first meeting with our decorator is June 1st, and we are hoping to get a realistic estimate then about how much it will cost to have my dream wedding (or at least close to it)!! 

This post is pretty long so I'm going to end it for now, but I will definitely keep you posted on how wedding planning is going! We've already nailed down our photographer, DJ, and dessert table, and I will be sure to fill you in on that soon!

xo Patricia