It's Official!

The entire St Lucia experience was wonderful. As much as we'd have loved to be surrounded by family and friends, it was also very nice to privately bask in our own love and commitment to each other.

The ceremony was simply a wonderful experience. I had reasonable expectations of the entire Sandals process, and while the ceremony was very effecient, I never once felt like we were part of an assembly line of weddings and being rushed through the event. The entire event lasted approximatly an hour, including our mini-reception following the ceremony. We were very fortunate to make some friends on our trip, friends asked if they could come to the ceremony to support us. It was very cool to have others share in our event, and if there is any regret for our choice of wedding venue, it is simply that our love and celebration wasn't witnessed by those close to our hearts.

Although my father wasn't there to walk me down the aisle, he was there in my heart. I walked down the aisle to Kenny G's "Wedding Song" which I selected because of my Dad's love of Mr. G, and although it was a rough subtitute, it was comforting. We were also able to call our parents following the ceremony so they could share in our excitement.

Our officiant was a peaceful soul. I'm blessed that Ms. Jackson shared her thoughts of marriage to open the ceremony, they were very beautiful and while they are all a blur now, they nearly brought me to tears as I looked at my groom. Mircea has never looked so handsome as he looked in my eyes and professed his love to me, and I've never felt so beautiful as when I did the same for him. It was just magical. I get goosebumps as I type this as it was just...unreal. Any fear that we harbored melted away as we held hands and professed our commitment to each other.

Following the pronouncement of husband and wife, we had some fun for the camera before attempting our cake cutting. I have never in my life struggled to cut a cake-we butchered the heck out of it but finally managed to scrape up some pieces to feed each other. We then shared our first dance to U2's "All I Want is You". The song was perfect and it was like a little dream sequence as I quietly sang the words in Mircea's ear as we danced.

Our "best man" Kenny gave an adorable speech about us, which was hilarious since we'd known him and his wife for two days, but it was so sweet and memorable. We were definitely a rag tag group of silly people. Kenny and Kristi (my Maid of Honor-by the way, Sandals gave them these roles since they were the signature witnesses to our marriage) got married 6 days before us, and our other guests, Kathy and Tony have been married many years and have children our age. We were so lucky to meet them on an excursion and I hope we keep in touch as they were truly special people.

All in all, we had a great time-beautiful ceremony, lovely pictures of the event, and a lifetime of happiness and memories to share.

Food Tasting

Mircea and I decided to change our catering plans for our reception, so we went up to Famous Dave's in Waldorf to have a tasting. We met with their great catering director, Jackie, and she provided us with some yummy treats to taste. The food was incredible! Oh my gosh, I can see why they are so Famous. Fantastic. Mircea and I were both really impressed with all of the food, particularly the beef brisket and the corn bread. Man, that corn bread was fantastic. And, I even ate baked beans-up until now I've only ever had one or two bites of baked beans my whole life, but today I ate the entire little cup. Yum!

Here's some fuzzy camera phone pics of our yummy treats-thanks Jackie!

It's Almost Here...

Mircea and I are getting so excited about this wedding, and I won't lie, super excited about the Honeymoon to St Lucia. We need a vacation so badly, our trip to Romania seems so long ago and work through the Holidays has been nothing short of annoying. We're keeping busy with reception planning activities and the associated stress. Mircea is super busy with school and I've been swamped at work so it leaves us very little time to relax...but relax we will in St Lucia.

32 days til MR & MRS!!!!

Bridal Shower

This weekend I was lucky enough to have a Bridal Shower thrown by my future mother in law and attended by my fantastic girlfriends. It was a wonderful day and while I'm not used to having all eyes on me, they were all loving eyes and I felt so blessed to have such great friends in my life, both new and old. Here's some photos...

My wonderful future mother-in-law! Thank you for the party!

Wedding Song Part 2

When Mircea and I get married in St Lucia, Sandals does a mini reception right after our super short ceremony and they asked me if I wanted to pick a wedding song. Wow, that's a lot of pressure. I love the song that Ellen and Portia did for their wedding (which would be extra cute since Mircea and I were E & P for Halloween) but I LOVE U2 and I really wanted to use a U2 song that I could get extra excited about every time I heard it played. And we'll still use the other song for the reception too, but there will be no dancing, just pictures. I need to shout-out to my friend Nikki for the suggestion. I knew she would know the perfect U2 song to use as she's an even bigger fan than I am.

The video isn't the greatest, but I wanted to post something about the song because I'm really excited about using it-it seems more "us" than the other song did. Plus, Bono dedicated it to his wife in the video, and that's just cool.

The "Joy" of Invitations

I started working on the invitations this evening, and frankly, I thought my blood pressure would go through the roof. I typed out the addresses to be merged onto the labels THREE times...on two different computers. By the time I finally got the labels working I looked at the labels I'd purchased and realized that they were for laser printers. Well isn't that fancy? I jammed them into my inkjet printer, hoping that God was maybe looking down on me and knew that I needed them to work. He wasn't. They smeared all over the place and I felt myself slowly dying inside. So I won't get the labels until at least tomorrow (I'm making a special trip to the office to print them) which means I couldn't really start most of the invitations. Mircea decided that he wanted to hand deliver the invitations to his co-workers and friends so I addressed those. After about two invitations I realized that I didn't know the names of any of his co-workers' wives...and neither did he. Mircea might have the world's worst memory, but let me just say-that is embarassing. One of the invitations says "Steve & Lovely Wife". No, I'm not kidding. Yes, I'm leaving it that way. And yes, I'm sorry.

65 Days to Go!

Wow, I looked at the calendar today and realized that we're super close to being Mr & Mrs! And it's only 60 days until we leave for St Lucia so I'm basically going on an all water diet for the next two months. I'm only slightly kidding!

Most of the stuff is done for the event, just one final payment next week and lots of exercise to look better in my bathing suits! I think we're both really excited about the vacation aspect of things as well as the wedding, but it will be nice to just relax. While our trip to Romania was super fun, it was really all about R&R , we traveled around the country a lot and took in a lot of sites. The honeymoon will be much more low key. And a lot warmer!

The invitations have arrived and I'm busily addressing them in my free time. The invitations are only for the reception and I want to qualify that if you don't receive an invitation to the reception, it's not because we don't love you. In fact, it's because we DO love you and don't want you traveling all the way to Maryland simply to enjoy a pork BBQ and a couple of hours sharing us with other people. I'm selfish, but I want to spend quality time with those that are far away and hopefully you'll just want to visit any other time...I'll even make you BBQ if you want!