June 7th

A year ago today, we finally saw the floor of the bonus room (upstairs den) in the house I grew up in. Why? Because for about a year, it housed boxes of vases and anything and everything wedding related! Mom and I scanned the room for any more boxes, and saw that we had labeled everything, and I mean really labeled everything, and carried everything down and out already.

A year ago today, our parents were generously all meeting at the Science Museum unloading boxes and boxes of decorations to store in the back room overnight.

A year ago today, Matt and I were upstairs in our newly purchased house, gifts for our wedding attendants surrounding us, finalizing things, and making sure everyone's cards were signed and in the proper bag.

Matt and I drove to meet everyone at the Science Museum for our rehearsal, me stressing out, of course, because we were coming from The Berkeley and didn't take into account the VCU graduation traffic that would be around us! When we got there and I saw everyone standing inside (waiting out the rain) and waiting to get started, I couldn't believe it was finally our wedding weekend!

We finally had to head downstairs and outside to our ceremony site rehearse, obviously, only to find out that because of the rain that week, we had to change a lot about the set up. (Tropical Storm Andrea came through the week before our wedding, so you can imagine why everyone thought we were nuts when we decided NOT to set up a tent outside.) The grass area where the aisle and chairs would be set up was holding SO much water. To everyone who didn't get to see us walk down a center aisle: Sorry, but we wouldn't probably all sunk into a mud hole.

A year ago today, I wore these shoes for the first time. I loved them because they're shimmery and comfortable to walk in--perfect.

However, due to the fact that we did our rehearsal IN THE RAIN, my shoes started falling apart.....literally.  Part of the back of one shoe came unglued, and it remains unglued to this day. I thought about fixing it so I could wear the shoes some time, but I kinda like leaving the shoes all messed up, for sentimental reasons, haha.  Also, when these shoes got wet, they started rubbing my feet...a lot, which made them not as comfortable to walk in anymore, but I did for the rest of the night! (Until after the rehearsal dinner and I changed into flipflops.)

Huge thanks to Matt's mom for all of the pictures from our rehearsal and rehearsal dinner, including the picture above :) 

Our Wedding: Rehearsal & Rehearsal Dinner

On Friday, June 7th, both of our families were in full-force hectic mode, or so it seemed!
I remember
Mom and I up in the bonus room {aka...upstairs den} looking around at ALL of the wedding stuff, and making sure everything was packed in boxes.  Since we weren't going to be the ones setting everything up, I made sure to include notes in all of the boxes, directions, diagrams, labels, etc., etc.  To say I was a bit OCD/anal/very organized, might be an understatement! We carried all of the boxes down and then loaded up Mom's and Matt's vehicles to deliver everything to the Science Museum.

Before going to the Science Museum, Matt and I went to our house to make sure we had everything for our wedding party gifts.  We had kept everything laid out in an upstairs room in our house, because we knew we could keep everything unwrapped and organized, and could just look around and tell if anything was missing!  So, once we finished there, we headed up to the Science Museum.  Our parents had already all met up there to unload their load of boxes and had gone to get ready