We have made it to our wedding day of the Whitener love story. I won’t go into a lot of the planning portion. I am just glad that that part of our life is over and done with it. It all led up to one of the best days ever.

Get ready for the picture overload!

My mom painted the tree, which was our guest book and has since become living room art work. We stayed pretty simple with the rest of the decorations. My sister-in-law helped with a lot of the planning, which was helpful since we lived in Iowa and the wedding was in Missouri. Tom and I made all the ribbon dancers that were used for our exit out of the church instead of bubbles. That broach was my grandma’s who was not able to make it to the wedding. I also carried hankies from my family and Tom’s family, which came in handy later on during the ceremony.

My dad made my necklace and earrings. My grandpa helped officiate the wedding, which was really special for both of us. He made pretty much everyone weep with his warm words. And yes, we high-fived our “I do’s.”

We were very intentional about making our wedding about our story and who we are as a couple. We planned every detail to make the wedding very specific to us. We didn’t have any traditional music and put in personal touches everywhere, hence the high-fives. We wanted to make sure our wedding was “us” and not cookie cutter. We had a lot of help from our family and friends for getting on board with this and adding little pieces throughout the day!

We drove off in an old school Aston Martin.

We had the best wedding party. My brother was my man of honor, and Tom’s sister was his best woman. Keeping it real doing our own thing.

This is one of my favorite shots of the day. It was just one of those moments that it was just Tom and I before we went into the winery for dinner. We didn’t see each other before the ceremony, so it was really the first time we were able to steal some moments together.

One of my favorite touches was our candy buffet. This was our favor for everyone. We thought it was better for everyone to get exactly what they wanted. We made the jars ourselves with tags and ribbon. It was also really fun to search for yellow and blue candy! We felt like kids again.

Also, picking our wedding colors was really easy. Tom’s favorite color is blue, and mine is yellow. Boom color choices made. (It also turned out that we looked like even bigger Royals fans. We still to this day find ourselves in our wedding colors unintentionally…)

Our reception venue was absolutely gorgeous. We had it at a winery right outside of town that was on a hill overlooking the river and capital.

I am not the biggest cake fan, so we opted for a smaller cake and several other desserts in addition. The one thing I would change about the day would be to actually get some of those desserts. The only piece we had was the small bite of cake we fed each other. Everything else got devoured, even the plate of samples we had set aside in the kitchen for ourselves. Yes, someone ate stole that! And yes it has been three years, and I am still not over it.  So we were not able to partake in the one year anniversary tradition of eating your cake, because every little piece of everything was eaten that night.

I think the best part of our wedding was just to have all groups in our lives come together in one place. It was so fun to look back at pictures and see different people interacting and having a great time. We obviously had a blast.

One of most genius decisions I made was to have a party dress. I absolutely love my wedding dress. It was the first dress I tried on, and it was everything I ever dreamed for a dress for our day. However, that thing was a beast. It was very hot with all the layers, and felt like it weighed a ton after a few hours of wearing. I decided to get a cheap short dress that I could wear after all the ceremonious things occurred so I could move and groove more freely. I highly recommend it for any bride.

Yep this happened. I am sure you can guess what song was playing.

We had so much fun celebrating with those that we love. It was a wonderful day to start our marriage, and it was better than anything I had ever dreamed of as a little girl.

Thank you for reading our story up to now. Next week I will recap our first year of marriage.