Today is the one year anniversary of Wil’s and my wedding. Instead of posting a couple of the prettiest pictres I want to actually tell our story. Grab a cup of coffee and settle in :-)

Wil and I very intentionally structured our wedding around what is most important to us. I originally wanted to elope but my mother nixed that idea immediately. Don’t get me wrong, I love weddings. Love love them. Obviously. And I love planning. But some part of deep down couldn’t plan a big wedding. I just didn’t have it in me. I didn’t want to share the start of our family unit with parents’ business friends and acquaintances. Also, neither of us have huge families or are super close to them. So that helped narrow down our guest list too. Instead of drawing some generic line between different groups of friends we decided to invite no one. Just immediate family and people who were to play a significan t role in our day (chef, photographer, videographer). Thankfully we had close friends who are talented in each of these arenas. Once we practically looked at who those people were going to be, we realized that more than half of them were in Texas and since it would be warmer there anyway, I found a beautiful vacation home in Galveston to be our venue. It was so great to have kind of a weekend retreat with everyone.

We arrived on Friday, went out downtown for a beautiful Italian rehearsal dinner. This is also when our parents met for the first time. Yeah…we packed a lot into that weekend.

When I think back to our wedding day itself, it’s just a conglomeration of feelings, smells, little moments, and what I honestly already at this point just remember from the pictures. Thankfully Arlina told me at the beginning of the day to take notice of the little moments, to remember every little smell, and feeling. It all passes by so quickly.

I started the cake, got my hair rolled, finished the cake, got my makeup done, told Wil he should probably stop washing vegetables because we were supposed to get married here in a little bit, got dressed, took pictures, and walked upstairs to have my Dad walk me down the steps. It’s pretty much that much of a blur. I can’t tell you how thankfully I am that we had Jack there to make the most incredible meal. Jack is a dear friend of Wil’s, a Culinary Institute of America grad, and a ridiculously talented sommelier. He made our wedding meal and selected the wine to pair.

Sorry I realize now that I’m not good at telling this story in a linear fashion. I guess it’s probably time to share some pictures and hope they can help tell the story too. Some of these pictures are from our friend and photographer Arlina. And some of them are from my camera (either that I took or someone else did because I left the camera laying around ;-)).

 Really what I most want to say though is Happy Anniversary to my love. And I am so excited for year two :-)