Recap: Wedding, Reception, Honeymoon.

(Written the other night, but WordPress hated me, so it was delayed EVEN longer. Hope it was worth the wait!)

Here it is…the moment you’ve all been waiting ever so patiently for:

The Wedding / Honeymoon Blog Post!

Sorry it’s been such a long time coming. I had every intention of writing this earlier in the week, but two things prevented me from doing so: my job (see, they kind of frown upon using company time to write a novel-length post about “your first time”), and the internet (or lack thereof) in our condo. But tonight, since our internet seems to be cooperating at least temporarily, I knew I should jump at the chance to post. Anyway, now that I’ve sufficiently made wimpy excuses for my lack of posting this week, let’s move on, eh?

Oh, but before I do that, I want to say a special thanks to the people who contributed guest posts for me during the week I was gone. You were all life-savers, and I loved being able to share your writing here in my absence. I hope my meager amount of readers led some new traffic to your blogs! Thank you SO much to Cari, Nora, Lucy, Olga, Rachel, Ariel, and my HUSBAND!

Okay, NOW on to the long-awaited first REAL post from yours truly, Mrs. Carnes. (Wow, I feel like a school teacher all of a sudden.)

The wedding?

Was perfect. I’m serious. It could not have gone any better, at least as far as I was concerned. I was so giddy with excitement the whole day that if anything DID go wrong, it simply flew right past my radar. I had a blast. (Next on my list is to upload some pictures that my uncle took on my camera, so I’ll share those with you all soon.)

Highlights of the wedding/reception:

• When my dad first saw me in my whole dress and hair and holy-crap-my-daughter-is-a-bride-ness: I was ready to make fun of him for the reaction I knew he would have, but the moment I saw his jaw LITERALLY drop, and the stuff in his hands fall to the ground, I was the one who started bawling. He cried too, of course, but I didn’t expect to be such a wuss…lol. Anyway, that was a sweet moment.

• When I was walking down the aisle with my dad and JOE saw me and started crying? I was a goner. I mouthed to him as we got closer, “YOU’RE not supposed to cry!” But seeing his joyful tears was absolutely the greatest moment of that day. It felt so good to know that I was the person he’d waited for, and that he was so visibly happy that it was ME. Kind of gives a girl a little ego trip, too. I felt like a superstar.

• The photo sessions with our photographers. It was so much fun, and even though we took a little longer after the ceremony than anyone was anticipating, it was worth it. At least I assume it was worth it; we won’t see the finished products for a few more weeks. But we seriously had THE best photographers on the planet.

• Our pastor, Frank. He was hilarious, genuine, thoughtful, goofy, inspiring…everything you’d want your officiating pastor to be, really. He was articulate and personable, while also keeping things concise and not rambling on and on and causing us to think, “WHEN will he let us KISS already?!”

• The flowers. Oh my goodness…my mother-in-law did the most wonderful job with all of our floral arrangements and decorations. The bouquets, boutonnieres, centerpieces…it was beyond anything I could have ever DREAMED of having for my wedding day.

• Seeing all of my family and Joe’s together, and meeting new friends, too. As I’m sure is true of most weddings, I wish we had been able to spend more time talking to each person who attended, but I hope that everyone was able to sense our deep gratitude for their presence on our special day.

• My hair. It was fabulous. Oh, and the accessories, too, which I got from etsy.com. LOVE that site.

• The church. It was the perfect venue for us in SO many ways. The color scheme worked out so well with our wedding colors, coincidentally. The sanctuary is beautiful, with stained glass windows, but with more of a modern-day look. It was a great location for most of the people attending, as a mid-point between the various places everyone was coming from. And of course, there’s the sentimental (and also very helpful) fact that I worked there, so a lot of my former co-workers helped out in HUGE ways!

• The recessional: after Frank pronounced us husband and wife and we got ready to walk back down the aisle, Joe donned his Indiana-Jones-esque fedora hat thing and we walked down to the IJ theme song. It just fit “us” so well, don’t you think?

• The dancing. While it was a teeeensy bit of a bummer that we only played three or four country songs the whole night, I really had a blast swing dancing with Joe in my wedding dress and special (decorated-by-MIL) dancing shoes. We were tearin’ up the dance floor, and it was awesome.

• The cake! My friend Kristen made it for us, and after all the trials we put her through (sorry!), she came out with a simply GORGEOUS design, topped with some silk flowers and our cute little topper, and also? It was divinely delicious. I actually only got to eat the two bites that Joe and I fed each other, but we’ll have the top layer for our first anniversary…NEXT August! Sheesh, I don’t know if I can wait that long for more of K’s masterpiece baking skills.

• The wedding party. They were so completely wonderful.

• And, you know, everything else about the day. Seriously, best. day. ever.

Now, the honeymoon.

Obviously there are certain parts I can’t exactly share with you. I’m sure you understand. All I will say about THAT stuff is this: YAY, and it was totally worth the 24-year wait. Yes, I really did wait to have sex until my wedding night. Call me old-fashioned.

And as I’m realizing (as happens rather frequently) that this post is taking longer to write than I expected, I guess I’ll do the honeymoon in bullet-points, too. Here are some of the things we did…oh, but I’ll leave out any of the items referenced in Tuesday’s post, since I can’t reveal the answer to the Honeymoon edition of Two Truths and a Lie until this coming Tuesday.

• We we to Vegas, in case you didn’t know. And one of the best overall THEMES of the week? Warmth. It finally felt like SUMMER! (And then we came back to Santa Barbara and it’s felt like WINTER all week. But that’s a gripe for another post.)

• It was my first time in Vegas, so naturally a lot of the time was spent on the strip just taking in all the sights. Loved that (all except for the creepers snapping those hooker cards at us everywhere we went).

• We did jello shots inside the Excalibur. Totally weak in terms of alcohol content, and awkward in terms of eating them (they stuck to the plastic cups so it wasn’t very shot-like), but tasty.

• We ate lots of ice cream and gelato. Namely at Hagen-Daas and the gelato place inside the Venetian.

• We saw Penn & Teller, and Joe got on stage with them for one of the magic tricks. I may have him write about that experience in another guest post, or just prompt him (lovingly) to do it on his own blog and then link to it here.

• We ate breakfast a couple of times at the casino restaurant connected to our hotel. It was the only place that served breakfast until 3 p.m., and that was kind of amazing.

• We lounged at the pool and got all the moisture sucked out of our bodies by their weird salt-water pools (not chlorinated).

• We went kayaking on Lake Las Vegas, which was soooo much fun, and about 20 degrees cooler than it is walking around on concrete.

• We ate at some fancy casino/hotel restaurants that were generally very tasty, but way overpriced. One place had suuuuper slow service. Boo on that, but hey, we had nowhere to be!

• We got a box of fresh Krispy Kreme donuts and ate them all in a matter of two days. Fatties, I know…but so worth it.

• We saw the fountain show outside the Bellagio a few times (different songs), and let me just say that it WAY tops the Disneyland show, Fantasmic or whatever it’s called. It was sa-weet. In fact, I got a video of one of the sequences that I’ll have to upload soon.

• We went on all three rides atop the Stratosphere. One of them was pretty “meh” but the other two were fun. Unfortunately, I was dehydrated and hadn’t eaten much that day, so I had to focus really hard on not passing out or vomiting, but I really did enjoy the rides even though I couldn’t allow myself to scream all silly-like.

And we really, really loved our hotel. And the fact that we came home every night to a cleaned-up room and fresh sheets, and chocolates and little water bottles…seriously, if we had spent one more week there, it would have made it REALLY hard to come back to reality and do all that stuff for ourselves.

Anyway, I’m sorry if this post turned out kind of boring…but it’s late, I’m wiped, and I mainly wanted to get the big stuff written down so I will remember it in the future. Feel free to ask questions about other specifics of the wedding, reception or honeymoon, and (as appropriate) I’ll gladly answer!

Can’t wait to get back in my blogging groove soon. Oh, and I’ve got to catch up on my Reader, too. Eek! So many blogs to read!