Our Wedding: The Ceremony

Last Wednesday, I shared the morning of our wedding day including our first look and getting ready. This week I’m so, so excited to share our ceremony! 

I originally planned our whole wedding, flip flopped.. I wanted to get married in the barn and have our reception in the courtyard area. The week of our wedding we had beautiful weather. 70 degrees and sunshine. The day before our wedding, the temperature started to drop. We rented heaters, but the temperature just kept dropping. The night before brought in rain, freezing temps and 16 mile per hour wind. I was so sad that everything I planned had to be completely redone two nights before our wedding, but the barn was beautiful and it would be better than all our guests freezing to death! 

About an hour before the ceremony started, the bridal party and groomsmen went separate ways. This was the last time I would see RJ until I walked down the aisle, so it was the perfect time to add my skirt to my dress. Since we did a first look, I wanted to change up my dress for the ceremony. I knew it would be the perfect way to surprise RJ and honestly I couldn’t decide on just one dress! Since I was a little girl, I’ve doodled what I wanted my wedding dress to look like on the sides of my school papers. To see that vision come to life was incredible. This convertible dress is what I’ve always dreamed of and besides marrying RJ and having all our family and friends around us, the dresses were my favorite part. 

The ceremony started with Apple Cider Mimosas for the guest and guitar serenades. I love live music so it was an important detail to have a guitar player during our ceremony. I loved how his music sounded when we were booking him, but honestly I cannot remember what he sounded like the day of the wedding haha! He could have played heavy metal and I wouldn’t have noticed. 

We wanted to keep our ceremony short and sweet. My husband was nervous about speaking in front of so many people and I was worried I would just being crying the whole time. Our officiant did an amazing job of delivering the exact ceremony we wanted. Light and easy, but still heartfelt and meaningful. My favorite part of our ceremony was praying over our hands. The prayer was to bless our hands that will help each other through good times and hard times, also praying for our hands that will hold and care for our children and praying for our hands that will care for each other when we’re old. It was so sweet. 

During our ceremony, there was a surprise. We originally planned to have the dogs at the venue in the morning, and planned to have one of RJ’s best friends take them home before the ceremony. We ended up not having time to take them home, but I didn’t even know they were still at the venue. The boys were getting ready in the White House, so I never went in there! Before the ceremony Babe locked the dogs up in the front room. They could see us out the window, but I never noticed them. During our prayer, we kept hearing the front door to the house behind us opening and closing. It was so windy that day so I figured it was just the wind blowing the door. That’s when we heard everyone starting to laugh. It wasn’t the wind blowing the door open, it was the dogs opening it to sneak out! First, Dallas ran out and our coordinator grabbed him off to the side and placed him in the back door. A few minutes later, Doodle ran out and ran right to the bridesmaids! Dallas sure wasn’t going to miss out on the fun, so he ran back out and ran right to the groomsmen. The way they ran exactly to the correct sides and just sat there was crazy. Neither of them made any noise or tried to run throughout the crowd, it’s like they knew what was going on and had to be a part of it. Y’all know how much I love the dogs, I was so happy they made their way to our special moment. Everyone thinks we planned this but it was truly a surprise!

As soon as the ceremony was over, I felt so many emotions. We did it. We were married, after all the stress of planning our wedding, after five years of dating, after dreaming of this day my whole life.. we were married! I was so excited to celebrate with everyone and just enjoy the night with no more stress about how the wedding would go. Next week I’ll be sharing our reception and also a breakdown of each of our vendors, what I liked about them and why I chose them. 

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