Our Wedding: The Ceremony

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Abril

Yes, I still have more wedding photos and stories to share. Today’s post is dedicated to our ceremony, which was the most important thing of all to me. When it comes to weddings we often get caught up in the details, the dress, the party, the flowers, the reception, and forget what this is really supposed to be about… two people standing before each other professing their love and commitment out loud in front of their loved ones. Of course, this ritual usually involves a legal contract and its signing. But this wasn’t the case at our wedding. Why? Because we had already been legally married for 5 years.

We had a justice of the peace ceremony back in November 2008, just the two of us, a couple witnesses and the judge. No fuss, no muss. We had a lovely dinner after to celebrate and an overnight stay at a luxurious resort, but that was it. We didn’t even have wedding rings…heck, I didn’t even have an engagement ring yet. It was less than romantic circumstances that took us to get legally married at the time (if you’ve read Liz Gilbert’s Committed, well it was something along those lines), so when the decision was made and my man asked me if we should get an engagement ring and all, I said no.

I didn’t want those less than romantic circumstances to be the main reason we got married and we weren’t yet truly ready to mean the “Til death do us part” aspect of marriage, but we also didn’t want to risk not being able to have a life together in the future if we ever decided we were finally ready. So we agreed that we would get legally married but he would save the proposal and the wedding for a time when we really felt we were ready to say our vows from the bottom of our hearts and not just because of legal matters.

So we signed our marriage certificate in 2008, he proposed to me on Christmas Eve 2009, and after years of fussing about wedding details, we finally decided to keep it simple and walked down the isle on our 5th anniversary of being legally married. A non-traditional way of doing things, but that’s just us! We’ve never really been the traditional kind.

We didn’t have bridesmaids or groomsmen, there was no real tossing of the bouquet or garter, there was no religious minister involved. However, the most important tradition of all, reciting both traditional vows as well as our own, was the thing we cared about the most. It was a very emotional moment for both us to finally face each other, pouring our hearts out with our closest family and friends as witnesses.

Also, we may have started a new tradition of our own with our wedding rings. We did finally exchange wedding rings and they are a very special set. They were the rings my in-laws exchanged when they got married 44 years ago (they upgraded rings 20 years into their marriage, and after decades of being kept in a safe box, the original bands were generously given to us as a gift ). A beautiful set of identical thick gold bands with a line of 5 small diamonds in the middle. Of course not only do I love their vintage beauty, but the sentimental value and meaning of them is what I love the most. Hopefully, they’ll also function as lucky charms so our marriage is as long and happy as my in-laws’ has been. Then we will pass them on to our own child, and I think that will be a nice new family tradition.

Whether you like to follow old traditions or create new ones on your wedding ceremony, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, because one thing is for sure, it’s a precious but very short moment in life. Luckily we can hold on to it forever in our memory. Here I leave you with the images of such special moment.

Photos by Steven Toupin, except the last one which is by Robin Palethorpe

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.