Pretending to Care About Flowers

I promised you all this day would come and it finally has. I'm going to take you all back about two months to the day I wore a white dress with beaded detail and took on a last name that I laughed at upon first hearing.

August 19, 2011 - Our Wedding Day

Actually, I'm going to take you back just a step further than that to the planning of this sacred day. The most intense stages of planning came while I was working at Camp Lone Star, an occupation known for making people so tired that they start to do things like this:

and also this:

not to mention this:

I must really not care what people think of me.

In the midst of all of that, I was also checking TheKnot.com every day, making random trips to Austin for fittings, working on my guest list, finishing up the final stages of decorating, having meetings with the coordinator at the site, planning my day-of schedule, pretending like I cared about flowers, prepping the DJ, selecting my accessories, finding gifts for the wedding party, and tons of other things that made a shiv in my cornea seem like a day at the spa.

All of that to say that planning the wedding was tough. It was especially tough in this wedding-obsessed culture we live in. Every time I got on TheKnot.com or stylemepretty.com to get some inspiration, I would see unrealistically cute things like this (note: the following pictures are not from our wedding):

 

and this:

  

and frickin this:

Confession: we did not do any of these over-the-top cute things. I couldn't hack it. Take away my girl license, but I just couldn't with all I had going on (spoiler alert: I was so happy, I didn't notice any of these details at my own wedding).

We weren't entirely lacking though because we did manage to have an actual theme (it was FIESTA, by the way) and we had amazing friends setting up sweet details all throughout the space (Emily, Lya, Dani, Reagan...start some event-planning company...STAT). But for the things we could skimp on, we did. Here's some pictures of our decor and details. You be the judge.

I don't know. I'm proud of it. It helps that we had the beautiful photography of Lauren Guy (www.laurenguyphotography.com) to make everything look like a fiesta in heaven.

Getting all of that fiesta kitsch was fun. It was me, Daniel and my mom at Market Square in San Antonio for hours and hours. Panchos and clay pigs were everywhere.

Anyway, so I planned things all the way up until the day before my wedding (that's when I found those cutie cacti). Is that typical? I'm not sure. The thing about planning for a wedding, at least for me, is that all of a sudden I had to care about a million things that I didn't care about previously. What kind of flowers? Don't care. What kind of food? Edible, but don't really care. Hairstyle? Half-up-half-down/don't care. Escort cards? Wait...what's that?

I was genuinely only focused on getting to finally be Daniel's wife and on having a big party where everyone gave us toasters and told us they loved us. Fortunately, that is pretty much what ended up happening.

Regardless of how tedious planning was, I'm glad I did it. I'm glad there was some level of detail going on and I loved the time Daniel and I got to spend putting it all together. The truth is, as beautiful as our piñatitas and papel picado were, nothing in my life has ever been more beautiful than what happened to us on that day. Kim Kardashian herself could have come in and dropped $10 million on the O'Shoney wedding and it still would not have come close to matching the beauty radiating from our family and friends that day. I've never experienced anything like it.

By the way, yes, we got married the same weekend as Kim Kardashian. No, our budget was a little less than $10 million, but we're actually still married, so I'd say we are the winners in that comparison. Burn.

I'm going to stop right there. It turns out, I have a lot to say about this whole wedding thing, and I think it would be best split it up into two entries.

Tune in next time for:

THE BIG DAY

which started like this:

My bridesmaid Lara promptly tweeted: The sacrifices we make for a bride :) @christianalizla #covershog

Truly, best sleep of my life.