Shalyn & Caleb ~ August 18, 2018
For many brides, getting married takes months and months of planning. It starts with the engagement day (YAY!), updating your Facebook status, and then starting out on researching, researching, and more researching.
What venues are in the area?
What is the best month to get married?
Which photographer should I go with?
Will I be able to make everything perfect?
These are just some of hundreds of questions that must be answered fairly early on in the wedding planning.
I was fortunate enough to get to skip a lot of these questions! Having had Samuel Cedars right in my backyard since I was 9 years old, I knew exactly where I wanted to get married. Though we did change the month around a couple times, I always knew I wanted to get married outside and I was so glad that my now husband was equally as excited about the idea of that as well! (The man wears Chacos 90% of the year).
For photography, I was lucky enough to have a special bond with one of the best Springfield area photographers, Debbie Ballard with Creative Shots Photography. Debbie had worked with us at Samuel Cedars for years and even did my Senior Photos! I knew that I wanted her to be a part of my wedding day. Thankfully, she was available! The day would not have been the same without her and the photos turned out, as you can see below, AMAZING.
I decided from the beginning that I was going to remember two things throughout the entire planning process:
Nothing I do at our wedding will be original.
Not everything will be perfect, and that is okay.
I knew that after watching weddings for the past 11 years of my life, most of my “creative ideas” had been done 1,000 times before. I had to be okay with that.
The second thing was something I am so glad I kept in the forefront of my mind. My motto was and still is, “As long as you and your hubby are married at the end of the day, nothing else matters.” I still say this to brides when I am working with them on their special days. Because I kept this in the forefront of my mind, I was able to just focus on what was important - getting married. And you know what? Looking back at our wedding day, I cannot remember a single thing going wrong. Because I did not expect it to be perfect, it ended up being more perfect than I could have ever imagined!
And here we are, a year and a half later, enjoying every up, down, and in between of that thing called marriage!