I promised you guys that we had a great wedding coming up today. Well that was putting it mildly. Sent to us by the always swoon-able Erin Heart’s Court, this wedding is beyond inspiring, beyond gorgeous. The bride was an avid SMP reader (toot, toot) and has been sweet enough to stop by and share all of the behind the scenes goodness…which always makes the wedding that much more lovable.
From the gorgeous bride…
Sean and I met in 1996, if you can believe it — I was a tender 16 and he was just 20, and we were friends for a couple of years (though I had an enormous crush on him) before we started dating in 1998. We’ve lived in San Diego together, then Charleston, South Carolina, then San Francisco (where we live now). At the time we got engaged, my parents were living in Singapore (I grew up all over the place! Mostly Asia but also Europe and the Middle East), Sean’s were in Connecticut, and we were living in San Francisco; meanwhile, the majority of my extended family were in England, and a lot of our friends were in Charleston.
We had a million options for where to hold the wedding! I had always wanted a backyard wedding at home, and so we eventually chose Encinitas (about 30 minutes north of San Diego), where my parents were moving in April 2009 — this put a TINY bit of pressure on them (“So, uh, how was the backyard?” I’d ask casually when they were househunting), but it all worked out in the end. Still, they’d only been in the house 4 months when we held our wedding there! The ceremony was at a sweet little white chapel built in 1894 in nearby Carlsbad — it’s called St. Michael’s By-The-Sea, and I have to admit that I LOVED the name! — and the reception, as I mentioned, was in my parents’ back yard.
All this back story has a point, because we wanted to make our wedding about a couple of things: travel, distance, letter-writing, suitcases, maps, globes, that sort of thing (it kind of all fits together once you know our story!) Additionally, since Sean is American and I’m British, and we’ve got friends all over the country and the world, we knew a lot of people would be traveling from all over for the wedding, so the travel “theme” — although I hate to use the word “theme”; maybe “motif” is better! — seemed to work.
SO MUCH more to come!