Our Wedding: The Venue

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Abril

For a long time, one of the decisions I struggled with the most whenever I thought about having our wedding was deciding the location…and I’m not even talking about picking a venue, I’m merely referring to the geographic location!! I went back and forth for literally years about whether to have our wedding in my beloved home country, Mexico, or in my current home, USA.

Then all of the sudden, we decided it was time to stop fretting and just do it, and all the decisions became so easy. It’s amazing the clarity we can achieve when we really eliminate all the “if” and focus on what really matters…and to us that was having the least amount of stress so we could focus on enjoying the moment and the true meaning of this wedding ritual.

So having our wedding here in Arizona was the most practical choice because it made the wedding planning that much easier for me. I couldn’t even have imagined how easy! It turned out finding the perfect venue for us truly was a piece of cake. For years I had looked at hundreds of venues online and in magazines, and I don’t even remember now how I came up with the idea of Arcadia Farms, but after deciding we would have an itty bitty wedding, I somehow knew that was the first place I had to check out personally. And that was it! First place I visited, and it was perfection.

Growing up, whenever I would picture my wedding, I always had a vision of standing in a luscious green garden, which it’s funny because 99% of weddings in Mexico happen inside a church so I don’t even know where I first got the idea of a garden wedding. Even funnier is that I didn’t know Arcadia Farms could offer the choice of a garden. I knew it was a charming little restaurant, with a cute patio, but it was until I was there talking to the the event coordinator that she mentioned that across the street from the restaurant lived the owner and that she had a lovely courtyard/garden she would occasionally rent out for events. I immediately asked to check it out and as soon as she opened the gate and I walked in, I felt my vision of a garden wedding come to life.

It was so lusciously green and full of flowers, with big trees towering over the whole space and a fountain to add to the ambiance. It also had touches of Spanish style tile all around, which it’s a kind of tile very common in Mexico, so I felt it had a bit of a Mexican touch which made me even happier. It felt like a little oasis in the middle of the desert, like an almost secret garden I never would’ve guessed was there. The whole thing was just a dream come true. But why don’t I let these gorgeous pictures do the talking instead?

Photos by Steven Toupin

Our Wedding: The Dress Reveal

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Abril

If there’s something little girls around the world dream of just as much as finding the right guy to marry, it’s finding the right dress to get married in. Yes, it might be shallow and superficial, but who can honestly say they never thought about their wedding dress well before even finding a man? I don’t know why we care about it so much, but we just do.
I remember that about 10 years ago, I had decided that I was going to wear a mermaid silhouette gown on my wedding day. However, I didn’t foresee everybody and their mother would start wearing that same style, so after that trend exploded it didn’t sound so appealing to me anymore. Then for a while I considered wearing a big princessy puffy gown, but also ended up discarding that idea because it started sounding too cliché to go for the whole “princess bride” look.
When the moment finally came to actually start looking for my wedding dress, I just had one thing in mind, I wanted it to be timeless not trendy…something my grandkids could look at in 50 years and go “Wow, grandma’s dress was beautiful” and not “what the hell was she thinking with that dress?!”. Ok, so maybe I had two things in mind, because I also knew that I didn’t want a strapless dress, I wanted my dress to have some sort of sleeve, whether it was short, 3/4 or long. There are tons of beautiful strapless dresses out there, and I have loved many I’ve seen, but the reign of the strapless dress has just been too long, and I’ve really gotten bored with it by now.
So off I went looking for my perfect dress, with those two ideas in mind, having very little time and therefore very few options. Who knew it could take up to 9 months to get a wedding dress in after you order it? I didn’t have that kind of time, when we decided to have a wedding, we decided to have it right away… which left me with mostly off-the-rack options at most bridal shops. And do you know what off-the-rack means in wedding dresses terms? It means you have extremely limited choices, and most them are not very good looking at all. Add to that the fact that 90% of wedding dresses are strapless, and I began to seriously question whether I would ever find a dress I was 100% happy with….enter Schaffer’s Bridal and their awesome selection.
Schaffer’s is a bridal shop in North Scottsdale (they also have a couple locations in Iowa) that offers the ultimate bridal shopping experience. From the moment you walk in, you feel like you’ve stepped right into every girl’s dream of shopping for a wedding dress. The store is be-a-utiful, elegantly decorated, with their huge selection perfectly arranged by price point, and every fitting room large enough to be truly comfortable, spaced from each other so that you have enough privacy, and with plenty of seating for your whole bridal party if they’ve come to help you with the selection process. Of course you’re greeted with a glass of champagne or mimosa, and immediately assigned the girl that would help you exclusively on your search. And when I say their selection of wedding dresses is huge, believe me, it is huuuuge. Their price point starts at around $800 and goes up until the many thousands if you decide to look through their haute couture selection.
Of course I couldn’t miss the opportunity to admire in person some lovely Marchesa and Vera Wang, and even tried on a Reem Acraa dress that I had loved for years…but it’s true what they say, when you’ve found THE dress, you just know. The Reem Acraa was beautiful, but when I put on the dress I ended up picking, I knew I had found the one. And they just so happened to have it on my size, at the right price point for me, all ready to go! It didn’t even need any alterations other that the length…talk about meant to be. Granted, I initially couldn’t believe I was going to end up with that cliché princessy look after all, and even considered having them take some of the crinoline out, but I was afraid it would end up looking not as great, because it looked pretty darn good on me as it was, if I do say so myself.So yes, I ended up going with the big puffy ball gown, because at the end of the day, no matter what preconceived notions you may have had, you just want to feel comfortable and beautiful on your wedding dress…and this dress made me feel just that.
Now, once the dress had been chosen, the fantasy of finding the perfect dress was replaced by the fantasy of seeing my groom’s reaction when he’d finally see me in it. Every bride hopes to get that “you are the most beautiful bride I have ever laid eyes on” reaction from their groom… and I think I accomplished that. My groom is a man of few words and mild reactions, but there was just this look on his eyes, this lovey-dovey, “you are so beautiful” look, a look that I’m very familiar with, a look that I love and live for.
Luckily, my amazing photographer was on hand to capture that fleeting moment, the big dress reveal.

Photos by Steven Toupin

Bridal dress by White One – Tuxedo by Lauren Ralph Lauren Collection

Our Wedding: Getting Ready

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Abril

It has been almost 3 months since our wedding day and I can still vividly feel all the intense emotions of the day by merely thinking about it. All the nerves, the excitement, the joy that overwhelmed me at the time, oh how I wish I could feel them this fresh forever. But I know they will inevitably and slowly fade over time to turn into a lovely, happy yet mellow memory. And speaking of memories, let me go back to some older ones that led to the creation of our happiest memory yet as a couple.

Funny how life has a way of working things out, huh? Arranging and aligning them so they can turn out for the best, usually surprising us with the most unexpected turn of events. Ours isn’t a love-at-first-sight kind of story, not even close. When I first met my now husband 12 years ago, I didn’t get any kind of warm fuzzy feelings, I didn’t think he was good looking (to be fair, I didn’t think he was bad looking either, I just didn’t even think about his looks at all…but of course now I think he’s the best looking man on the planet!), and I thought he was kind of rude. We were on two completely different life paths, and circumstances were such that I never even considered the possibility of him becoming significant in my life in aaaany way, shape or form.

Fast-forward more than 2 years after we first met, when we first started dating, and I still had no clue that he would be the man I would marry. In fact, it seemed highly unlikely. We had the odds against us, and everyone around us to often remind us.

When you are just a 20 year old kid dating a guy over 20 years your senior, who’s by the way living more than 1,000 miles away, nobody gives you more than a couple months to burn thru that “fling”. Even I wasn’t sure that we could have a future, but as most 20 year olds are, I was only preoccupied with enjoying the moment. I actually remember telling my mom on one of the occasions she was expressing concern about me dating an older guy, “Relax mom, it’s not like I’m gonna marry him…I just like him and wanna see how it goes… what’s the worst that can happen? That I end up heartbroken? Nobody has ever died from that, so I’ll be fine, cry it out for a little bit and then move on. Plus, I rather try than wonder all my life –what if-“. Who would’ve ever known I was indeed going to marry the guy?! Clearly not me!

Then, times goes by, life puts you through better and worse, sickness and health, richer and poorer, and you end up going through it all together, for 9 years, and somehow find yourselves growing deeper in love in the process, until you finally lose the ability to imagine life without your partner…how not to share and celebrate that?! That’s what our wedding was all about, sharing and celebrating our love and commitment, the journey behind us and the one ahead of us.

So yeah, getting there, getting ready took us a while… and I’m sure glad it did!