One Year

One year ago today, Joe and I were married (again) in front of our closest friends and family and it was without a doubt, the best day of our lives.  

In honour of our anniversary, I thought I'd share our wedding with you this week.  (I can't believe I haven't done that yet!)

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For those of you who are new around here, you may not know that Joe and I were actually married in Gabon.  (You can read about it here.)  When we did it, we assumed it wouldn't actually be legal anywhere outside of Gabon when in fact, it was.  While that wedding was certainly memorable, it wasn't exactly what we pictured and we knew that we wanted to be able to share the day with our friends and family.

Planning a wedding is hard and planning one from Africa, with a terrible internet connection and a 7 hour time difference, was bound to be impossible.  The first thing I did was contact Jennifer Bergman Weddings, we set up a skype date and the rest was history.  Jennifer was amazing and hiring her was the best decision I've ever made.  Because I wasn't working, I had tons of time to peruse wedding blogs and compile ideas to send to Jennifer and she basically made it all happen.

Joe & I really wanted the wedding to reflect us: our tastes, our personalities and our relationship and we weren't afraid to bend tradition.  Our must haves were:

**When Joe and I began talking about our wedding years before, we had always talked about having in a restaurant - somewhere that had it's own atmosphere, somewhere that we didn't have to 'fill.'**

**We wanted to keep our wedding small.  Both of us feel more comfortable in small, intimate groups and we knew we wouldn't feel any different at our wedding.  Of course, we wanted those closest to us present and in the end, we had 85 guests.**

**We wanted our guests to have the easiest weekend possible.  Having the ceremony head directly into the reception to avoid downtime, booking hotels within walking distance of our venue, great entertainment, delicious food and an open bar were all very important to us.**

**While we respect tradition, we didn't feel the need to stick with things if they didn't make sense for us.  We eliminated the cake (we'd rather have apple crisp,) we didn't want a ton of speeches nor a traditional MC and we wanted to keep the wedding party small (we both know how much work it is to be in a wedding party and we wanted our friends to be able to show up and enjoy themselves without having to do a ton of work.)**

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With that in mind, our Canadian wedding day went like this:


We started with a first look...

Did our portraits and family photos

And then the ceremony

And directly into a champagne reception and cocktail hour while the room was prepared for dinner

And finally, dinner, a couple of speeches and the party!

We had the most amazing dueling pianists who completely 'made' the party!

All photos are by Sharon Litchfield Photography

Joe and I had the time of our lives and when we stumbled home at 4 in the morning, we were so happy with how everything went.  It was most definitely the best day of our lives.

Later in the week, I'll get into the details but today...

I want to wish my husband a very happy first anniversary (for the second time - how lucky am I to celebrate 2 wedding anniversaries every year!)  I love the life that we're creating together and I'm so proud to call you my husband!