Love, Marriage And All The Heart Eyes

In the spirit of celebrating love this weekend, I’m filled with all the lovey-dovey feels and heart eyes as I look back at these photos and on this beautiful day. We received our wedding pictures a little while ago from our amazing photographer Alena Evteeva, but haven’t had a chance to post them until now. It was the perfect day filled with laughter, love, family, dancing, friends and so much more than we could have asked for. From our stunning venue The Century to having so many people we love there to celebrate with us, it felt like a total dream! So as we go through some of these photos together, I’m going to tell you little random facts about our story 🙂 I always knew there was something special about Aaron, even though I declined the first three times he asked me out, haha.  After the third time, I knew he’d probably give up (and he told me later that he was going to), so I asked him out to lunch with my sister and me after church and ever since then, we’ve been inseparable.

Our first official date was at a Muse concert at the Toyota Center. It was such a fun night. Then, three weeks later, he came with my family and me to California to visit our extended family for New Years. On his first ever trip to my home state, he met my seemingly never-ending family (so many people and so many names lol), we went sledding in the snow and we rang in a new year together for the first time. It was pretty perfect.

Aaron is not naturally a dancer, and if you know me, you know I dance whenever I can – music or no music. So, a couple of weeks before the wedding, I decided that maybe he and I should practice our “first dance” in our wedding shoes, just so we could get the feel of what it would be like. After dinner one night, we came back to the townhouse where he was living (which is where we now live), put on our wedding shoes and played our first dance song on my phone. What started out as a “practice” turned into such a beautiful moment for us. I love that before we danced in front of everyone else, that moment was reserved for just the two of us. 

One of the many things I love about weddings is seeing two beautiful families come together to become one –  through celebration, family tradition and the power of love that unites them. A funny story about our wedding is the surprise groom toss that “wasn’t going to happen”. My family has a few wedding traditions that may not be normal for others and one of them is that at every wedding, the groomsmen get all the men together and they all lift the groom up, tossing him in the air like if he was crowd surfing or something. Then, they take off pieces of the groom’s clothing to give to the bride who will then dress the groom. Well, in all the wedding prep, we decided that we weren’t going to do that because Aaron wasn’t totally comfortable with it, which is understandable because it is a pretty weird tradition lol. But to his surprise, the men still did it anyways and his brothers, Phil and Mark along with my dad, led the charge. Aaron was such a great sport haha, he went along with it like a champ. I am so thankful that I waited for this man. I prayed for him for a very long time and at some points, it felt like forever waiting, but he is worth it all. Everything that each of us went through to get us to this point, prepared us for one another and now we get to grow in this love together. It is such a blessing to finally have him to share life with – in all its ups and downs. Hold on to the ones you love, tell them and show them that you love them every day, not just the “special” days. Check out my post Honeymoon & Scuba to see our first adventure together as husband and wife.