Wedding Memories: Day 4

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I LOVE being outside. Even as a child living in Japan I would stand by door and beg my parents to take me on a walk outside. To this day I still beg Steven to go on walks with me. It's nice now to have Winston who has no other choice than to go with me. Yes, we go on walks almost every day. Anyways...
Being Mormon it is pretty typical to have a wedding reception in the culture hall of the church. For some reason I NEVER wanted to have a reception inside. However we were a little tight on the cash and since the church building is free I basically had no other option than to have our reception in the church building.
This really made me kind of sad... Lucky for us someone in my parents ward (who I hardly knew) offered her backyard to us for free. I have always dreamed of having a backyard wedding so obviously this offer made me very happy. The yard was a decent size but needed a little bit of work. My family, Steven and I took on the challenge (this was also our way of saying thank you for letting us have a reception in your backyard) and spent the next month planting, gardening and digging. We (and I am just speaking for myself) had a lot of fun getting the backyard ready for the reception!


The day before the wedding Steven, my family, and my mom's best friend Kimberly came to set up and get the decorations ready for the reception. After a day of hanging up lights, setting up tables and chairs and what not I developed a bit of a... farmers tan. So naturally since our wedding was the next day there was nothing I could really do about it.

I don't even care about the funky tan. I love it. It reminds me of all the work we did on the reception. One of the reasons that I loved our reception so much was because we did it ourselves. It was very personal and I think that it was all worth it.

Thank you mom and dad for helping so much!