Show us your life- Reception & Honeymoon

There were four main rooms in the mansion where the reception was. Here is the largest room with all the tables. The whole mansion smelled like flowers and chocolate...it was wonderful! We had a topiary on each table. Here is a closeup of one, with a friend :-)

Another room.


Another room had the cake, punch, etc. This is one side of the room.

The cake on the other. Not only was the most gorgeous cake I have ever seen, but it is the best tasting cake! Usually wedding cakes are blah.....dry and just, tasteless. This cake is from Ludgers.
It's a bavarian cream cheesecake. The cheesecake cream is between two layers of light cake. It's wonderful and there were so many compliments about the cake. Before we ordered this cake, there was a picture of this exact cake on their website (not now, I guess it's not modern enough!) so it was easy to order. My florest did an awesome job with adding the flowers to look just like the cake I wanted!

The grooms cake was the same bavarian cream, but just chocolate flavored. It's even better than the white! We also had a bowl of raspberry sauce they could pour over the cake. For the couple of anniversaries that we have been home on our actual anniversary I always order a small chocolate one. It was nice to order a fresh one for our first anniversary than to have to eat a yucky frozen one!
Pictures by the cake.
I LOVE this picture! This is an 8 x10 that is in our photo album. I wish I had a scanner because it is so clear and pretty. Click on photo to enlarge so you can see it better.
In the other room was a chocolate fountain. So yummy. It also was nice because it gave guests something to do while we finished up pictures after the wedding. We had marshmellows, pretzels, strawberries, pineapple pieces, graham cracker sticks and apples to dip in it.

Here's some more pictures that were taken I really like.
He's bustling my dress :-)
My sister and cousins chasing us in the limo as we're leaving. As long as we can remember when ever we left each other houses we would run along side the car down the road. It's cute that they did it here :-D

We stayed our wedding night at the Renaissance Hotel. Andrew still says that it was the best bed he ever slept on (and that's serious, not because it was our wedding night lol) and we've stayed at some other Renaissance and other high end hotels since then! Since our wedding was early afternoon, we got to our hotel around 5:00 and were starving. We ate in the hotel restaurant and it was completely empty the entire time we were there! It was like it was just for us. Andrew, Mr. Picky eater, just wanted "steak and fries" and it took a little talking to the waiter to get that! After dinner the chef brought us out a beautiful creme brulee with fruit and congratulations written out in chocolate on the plate. How sweet!

The night was still early so we decided to go see a movie since the theatre was just a few blocks away. We watched "Soul Plane" and it was the worst movie I have ever seen, or what I did see of it...I was exhausted and kept falling asleep haha!

The next afternoon we left for Paris! To this day, that was the worst nightmare flight ever!! We were married on Sunday and the next day was Monday, Memorial Day observed. It was mass choas at the airport and every flight was delayed everywhere. The guy in Tulsa moved us around and upgraded all our flights to first class for us...but at each layover we would have to change flights once again and didn't get to fly first class until our flight from London to Paris. We weren't even supposed to go to London to begin with, we were to change in Frankfort, Germany!! Andrew doesn't like flying anyway, so this was just wonderful :-)

This was my 2nd time to go to Paris. Although we did all our booking through AAA travel for our honeymoon. Advice, never let a travel agent do a honeymoon booking to a Eurpeon distination :-) Our room was very tiny, to say the least. We still had a wonderful time though. I didn't take many pictures at all, partly because I had been to Paris before and secondly I'm not to fond of trying to figure out which tourists speak english so they can take our picture. I do have one of us by the Eiffel tower, I am happy I have that!

Show us your life- Wedding Party & Flowers

It's been really fun going through all the links of women sharing their wedding pictures today on Kelly's Korner. So many pretty weddings! I'm still partial to mine though ;-)

Here's a picture of our invitation. We got married at Harwelden Mansion and since it was located back in an older neighborhood, the parking was limited, and there was some construction on some of the streets I created a little card with the picture of the mansion on one side and a map on the back, then had them printed at Kinkos to enclose with the invitation. We had one of the invitations framed next to the guest book.

**click on photos to enlarge**

In case you don't notice, everything was square....the diamonds in my engagement ring, the invitation, the neckline on my dress, the cake, the favor boxes, etc.

We got married at 2:30, Sunday, May 30, 2004. We were engaged the end of November 2003 so most places were already booked solid for June. There were a couple of spots left in May and that Sunday was one. What was cool about having it on a Sunday is that we got the mansion for the day, unlike if it was on a Saturday you only got half a day, because obviously there would be two weddings held on Saturdays. I think it cost a little more, but it was worth it not having to be rushed. May 30th is also Memorial Day, I bet not many people know that all they care about is when Memorial Day is observed haha!

It was a beautiful day despite having been up til 1:00 am the night before because there were tornadoes. We (Andrew, two friends from out of town, and I) were huddled in the bathroom during the storm and sirens were going off. So...I actually saw Andrew on our wedding day! He left after the storm had passed and knew we were ok.

Here are some pictures taken before the wedding. We did our pictures as a couple after the wedding of course.

With my bridesmaids, my sister and Andrew's sister.

With my brother and sister

With all the guys. There was two groomsmen, and 2 other guys that were to help with the food etc (I heard it didn't work that way...) and my brother and nephew were the doormen. I remember how difficult it was to breathe in this picture!! That dress was so tight and I had to sit down on these stairs kind of hunched over and smile. ahh!
Andrew and his best man, his brother.
Andrew with his best man, his brother and groomsman, his brother in law.
Andrew and my nephew.
All the guys.
Andrew with the girls.

Andrew with his brother and sister.
This picture is cute. My dad and Andrew. They were supposed to be serious, but they were having a difficult time :-)

OK, now on to the ceremony! I show the picture below not for the wonderful quality lol, but so you can see what the mansion looked like inside. We had greenery and flowers over the banister. The wedding party and ceremony took place on the platform above, the guests watched below. Family sat across from the platform upstairs (kind of difficult to describe). The window is the front of the mansion and the door here is the front door you see in the picture. Not only did we have flowers on the banister but also had beautiful topiary on all the tables in the other rooms where the reception was. The WHOLE place smelled wonderful!!! Just like flowers...oh, yeah and CHOCOLATE. We had a chocolate fountain, which I will show pictures of next week.

I ordered english roses, but got regular roses! It think it was the only thing that "went wrong" in the whole wedding. My mom warned me when she saw them, but before I did. I was a tad disappointed, but the roses were still very pretty, at least the colors weren't wrong! Here's a picture of what english roses are.

We had a string trio, harp, cello and violin play during the ceremony and reception. It was wonderful to have beautiful live music playing! So romantic and definitely went well with the style of wedding.

Here we are waiting around the corner from going down the stairs to the platform!
The kiss :-)
Mr. and Mrs

I have a lot more pictures, but I'll share them next week!