SkyBlueSounds❤: Life Update: Our Wedding

Hi everyone!! I can't believe how long its been since I've posted on here!! .... But can we just skip over the part where I lament over how bad I am at blogging? Because I have way too much to update you on! Ok thanks! Haha. As you can tell by my updated profile, a lot has changed in the past year and a half. I took the Georgia Bar Exam in July of 2015, found out I passed in October, Alex and I were married on November 14, and I found a job that December! Our wedding was everything I could have hoped for and more, I honestly felt like it was perfect! We celebrated our one year anniversary two months ago, here is a picture of us eating our one-year old wedding cake on our anniversary:

It was actually not that bad for being frozen for a year!

Alex and I are doing great together and have settled well into newlywed life. We had never lived together prior to getting married so it was definitely a learning period but ultimately we are best friends and living with my best friend is nothing but fun! Of course we have our arguments but we always try to talk things out and not let them dwell inside us. We also always try to understand each others positions and compromise on things we may not agree on.

I know I was giving you guys some updates on my wedding planning in my last post. Given that its now over a year after my wedding I am no longer in the "planning" phase so some of the novelty has worn off, but I thought it would be good to wrap up those posts with a quick rundown of what we ended up deciding on, and my wedding planning experience in general, for those of you who may be interested!

The color palette I chose for our wedding was periwinkle blue, light rose pink, peach, navy blue, and ivory, with pops of gold. Blue is definitely my favorite color, and Alex likes it as well! I chose a traditional lace wedding dress with scallop trimmed edges and a sweetheart neckline, along with a floral lace trimmed wedding veil. I decided on silver and crystal accents to match our wedding rings, including a beautiful sash adorned with hundreds of crystals and a crystal barrette for my hair. I borrowed a ring from my mother as my "something borrowed" and pinned a "K" charm (first letter of my new last name), a blue ribbon, and my grandmother's ring to the inside of my dress as my "something new," "something blue," and "something old." My shoes were Badgley Mischka white satin pumps that had this beautiful vintage-inspired crystal arrangement on the front. I loved them!

Alex wore a black tuxedo with a navy blue vest and bowtie, as well as vintage pearl cufflinks that I found online and gifted to him on the day of our wedding. All the groomsmen wore black tuxedos with navy blue vests and ties, while all my bridesmaids wore floor-length periwinkle blue gowns with crisscrossed bodice ruching and ruffled straps. They all looked so handsome and beautiful, exactly as we pictured them! For my bouquets I knew I wanted to incorporate Juliet roses since they are one of my favorite flowers; I love English garden roses! Overall I wanted the bouquets to be very loose and whimsical, as though someone had just gathered them in a bunch while walking through a garden. In addition to the juliet roses the bouquets also had peach lollypop roses, light blue delphinium, white football mums, mini white carnations, white veronica, light pink astilbe, dusty miller, maidenhair fern, and Italian ruscus. I kind of described the overall feel to my florist and she did an amazing job of suggesting all these different types of flowers that really turned out perfect together!

Our wedding ceremony at St. Andrews Church was beautiful and so special. I didn't have to do much in terms of decorating the church, the inside is already so beautiful. I will post some pictures below but basically I just had two alter centerpieces made incorporating flowers from my bouquet. We also had pew floral arrangements on every other row to show guests where to sit, which were white and periwinkle blue ribbons adorned with roses and foliage. I used our church florist for these and it was a fraction of what Primrose had quoted us for wedding ceremony flowers, just FYI! I also had my parents grab those two alter centerpieces after our ceremony and take them to Primrose Cottage to place on our guestbook table for the reception. Really great way to cut some corners! In the entrance of the church I had a table set up with our wedding programs and a gold frame chalkboard sign welcoming everyone to our wedding.

After the ceremony we took pictures with relatives and our bridal party inside and outside of the church. I was so happy it didn't rain at all on our wedding day, I know rain is supposed to be a symbol of luck actually at weddings but I am such a sun worshipper (literally) that I personally would have been heartbroken if it had rained or been super cloudy. But it wasn't, it was the most gorgeous sunny day and I couldn't have been happier! Since we had a Catholic mass we did have a bit of a gap between our ceremony and our reception. Thankfully St. Andrews is located very close to downtown Roswell and historic Canton Street which has loads of fun bars that our guests went to. We also opened my parent's home up to all our relatives who had traveled for our wedding. As for us, we took our bridal party on a two-hour long trolley ride around Roswell, complete with champagne bottles and stops at a liquor store and McDonald's (SO funny!). The decision to rent a trolley was a last-minute one, but I'm so glad I did! It ended up being so much fun and one of the highlights of the day!

Primrose Cottage was a great wedding venue, I had several meetings with my wedding planner Katie and she really made herself available to answer all of my questions leading up to the wedding (which included reading all my insanely long rambling bridezilla emails about every minor detail I could think of!). That was so helpful in terms of easing my OCD mind and helping me feel on top of everything. I really tried to think of every possible detail, which is something that many guests mentioned to me later on, that they could tell that I had really thought of all the details! Our reception started at 7 with a cocktail hour and hor d'oeuvres. Our bridal party entered our reception to Frank Sinatra's Fly Me to the Moon, and Alex and I followed to The Blue Danube and immediately went into our waltz. This waltz was no joke, Alex and I literally took dance classes for it! We were so nervous and not the best I'm sure, but it was cute I think! My dad cut in quickly for our father-daughter dance, which is a Peruvian tradition. After that dinner was served.

We decided on a sit-down dinner instead of buffet, even though it was so much more expensive. I just hated the thought of standing in a buffet line in my wedding dress! We had chimichurri bistro tenderloin and grilled salmon with a chipotle cream sauce, served with feijoada-style collard greens, roasted corn ancho smashed red potatoes, & grilled red and yellow peppers. It was so good! The staff at Primrose was amazing and the dinner and toasts both flowed seamlessly. My dad's toast brought down the house, followed by Alex's best man Aaron and my maid of honor Rachel, who both gave really beautiful and touching toasts.

We had an open bar (Alex's one request!) which was such good decision, everyone was dancing by the end of the night! (Our DJ from Complete Events was amazing by the way!) Our desert table ended up being amazing, we used Kelly Cakes who I discovered while at a Bridal Expo, her cake-pops were so good I knew I had to use her the second I tried one! The dessert table had chocolate fudge bride and groom cake-pops on two tiered stands, as well as a strawberry and french vanilla cupcake tower topped with a red velvet cake. All of the desserts were so good, and we got compliments on them all night! Our wedding cake was my favorite, I knew I wanted something super simple but elegant, and ended up deciding on a plain white cake with pearl frosting trim and real flowers. The cake itself was lemon with buttercream frosting, Alex's favorite! It was a unique choice but all of our guests were pleasantly surprised and ended up really liking it I think!

The main thing we really wanted for our wedding was to just give everyone a perfect night out full of good food, plenty of booze, great music, and dancing, which was definitely achieved I think! I stayed on the dance floor all night and probably only left it a handful of times. At the end everyone formed a circle around us to Journey - Don't Stop Believin' which is so cliché but I loved every minute of it! Definitely an amazing way to end our night! We used ribbon wands for our sendoff (which were a real pain to make by the way, definitely enlisted my bridesmaids for that one!) and left in a Lincoln Town Car to our hotel.

My advice to any brides starting the planning process would be to just breathe and not lose sight of what is most important: your relationships. Not just with your future husband, but also with your friends and family. While it is definitely the biggest day in your life thus far, it is also the biggest day in your parent's life (especially, like me, if you're the first one to get married!) so try to include them as much as possible, even if they're getting on you're nerves! Also make sure you remember to have at least one moment with each member of your family at the wedding, no matter how quickly it seems to fly by. And last of all, hire a videographer! It's so worth it!

Wow this was a really long post, I hope you're still here reading it all! It's kind of nice to get all my thoughts about my wedding written down in one place as I'm sure my memory will get fuzzier as the time goes! I'm going to add some pictures now from our big day so you can see, as well as our wedding video. I will be back soon with some more blog posts, I really want to start updating this blog again regularly so stay tuned!