wedding photos (finally!) & 5 year anniversary!

today is our FIVE year wedding anniversary! of course, any anniversary is worth celebrating, but five feels like a milestone. our wedding was on September 12, 2015 near my parent’s home in northwest Ohio. strangely enough, even though i’ve been blogging for years, I didn’t ever share wedding photos on my blog. I started to share with this post of getting ready photos with my bridesmaids and this sneak peek, but just…forgot to share everything else. OOPS!

the entire day was a labor of love that couldn’t have come together without family and friends. My mom sourced all of the decor pieces and basically decorated the entire wedding. She also put together the smaller floral arrangements. My good friend Renee designed our gorgeous invitations. We hired a friend of mine from middle school as our wedding coordinator. Eric’s dad was the wedding officiant. My grandma made nine different types of homemade pie for the wedding reception. a longtime family friend and his parents were the musicians, singing “Wildflowers” by Tom Petty as I walked down the aisle and “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros as our song after we got hitched! Many, many friends and family came together to prep decor/flowers and also set up and prep both the venues the morning of the wedding.

one thing that was beneficial for us was to determine what our ‘wedding vibe’ was — and let these words dictate our choices when it comes to wedding planning. the words we decided on were AUTHENTIC and JOYFUL. we wanted it to feel very us. I describe our decor and overall style for the wedding as bohemian and organic with pops of colors mostly from the peonies (that we sourced from Alaska!). while it was a very special and magical and unforgettable day, it was just *one day*. when you’re wedding planning, it can often feel like the wedding is the “goal” and it’s a huge and special event, but really just one day. what comes next and how you live out the days in your marriage after that wedding are much more important and where the really good stuff happens. 💛

So, five years later, here’s photos from our big day!

This was a reading from our wedding (words by Shauna Niequist) that I will always love and remember. Such good advice!

Your wedding day will, of course, be an extraordinary day. But on that day, you cannot imagine the beautiful, life-altering, soul-shaping things ahead of you. This is just the beginning. What you feel on your wedding day is like dipping your toe in an ocean, and with every passing year, you swim farther and farther from the shore, unable, at a certain point, to see anything but water. This is just the beginning, and you can’t imagine the love that will bloom between you over time. You will cry together, laugh together, pray and dance and move furniture together. You will learn and unlearn things, make a home together, hurt each other’s feelings without meaning to, and sometimes very much on purpose. You will learn over time that the heart of marriage is forgiveness. Part of being a married couple means that you create a new identity together, woven from your experiences and histories and lives. Work hard to become your own family, with your own values and traditions, things you always do, things you never do, things that bring you back to why you fell in love in the first place. Dance to your song in the backyard, wear your wedding shoes every anniversary. Carve out your own history together, little by little, month by month, year by year. Because there will be seasons that are as dry as deserts, and the history of your love for one another will be the water you need to bring new life and growth, turning that season from dust to garden once again. Today is about the promise of the future and all the great moments of the past and, indeed, this beautiful present where you stand together, surrounded by people who love you and who are praying that your marriage is one of the great ones. It could be, you know, if you work hard and forgive often, and get over yourself and your selfishness over and over again. It could be one of the stories people tell, when they want to believe in love’s power and life’s richness. It could be one that your children and grandchildren tell each other, praying that someday they’ll have a love like yours. Make your love story one worth telling. Make it one worth living, every day, as long as you both shall live.