reclaiming wife

Posts Tagged ‘Wedding With Kids’

As you might imagine, I see a lot of wedding pictures these days. But some weddings take my breath away. When I was reading about this wedding, I kept having to stop, because the tears made it hard to see! Ember and Ben's wedding was thrown together in a month, and was shot by the bride's best friend, the super talented Heather Gilson of One Love Photo. This wedding between two long time partners and parents was a celebration of an existing family, which is such a powerful reminder of what weddings are really about.
Continue reading Ember & Ben’s Bainbridge Island Wedding

A Wedding With Kids

I love this picture of Ember and Ben’s wedding, and after the comments about there being very few resources for parents getting married, I just had to put it up. This casual, spontaneous, loving moment during the vows made me so happy.

Photo by One Love Photo

A few weeks back, after I posted this amazing wedding, lots of commenters did a little jig of joy, pointing out that there are very few resources and models for parents getting married. With that in mind, I am thrilled to share Sarah and Bryan's Seattle dinner cruise wedding. The pictures of the bride and groom with their son melt my heart. Continue reading Sarah & Bryan’s Over-The-Top Dinner Party

I've been inundating you with reader weddings of late, but I have so many good ones! Keep them coming. It's such a honor to get to share them with you all. This uber-practical reader wedding involved the couple's children, a passel of adorable babies, and some of the hippest trends around. Krystal and Patrick got Weddinged at a 'Happily Ever After Party' at their home in Santa Cruz, after marrying last year at Patrick's parents home. Continue reading Krystal & Patrick’s Happily Ever After Party

I'm so excited to introduce our newest wedding graduate, Marie-Eve. Marie-Eve has been reading this blog for a loooonnnnngggggg time, and she has her feet firmly planted on the ground. I've been waiting and waiting for her to graduate, because I knew deep down that she would have words to say that would be so wise they would ease my soul. And, of course she did. This one is long, but read it all the way through. It's smart. My husband Martin and I live in Montreal, Quebec (and are native French speakers). As is quite common in our -fairly laid-back and progressive-culture, we kept marriage for last in our life equation, after spending several years together, buying a house, and welcoming a son, who is now 2. We got engaged in May 2008 in New York (Bryant Park), and immediately after came up with this idea of marrying in that city we both love in September 2010, bringing our closest relatives and friends for a long weekend while giving them enough time to plan, schedule, and finance the trip.
But as the months went by we became a bit disenchanted with this plan, for several different reasons, two of which being that we couldn't bear to wait that long, and that the economic crisis made us wary (neither us or our guests have been affected yet but who knows how it could be next year?) In January of this year, we went there to do some scouting and realized that the plan wasn't working so well after all, financially and logistically. So we scraped it and toyed with the idea of eloping for a while, before admitting that we wanted our loved ones near us after all, even if it was clear from the beginning that we needed to do things our own way. In February during a weekend in the countryside, we passed by an orchard that produced this ice cider I love, and spontaneously decided to ask them to have our wedding there during the blossoming time of the apple trees. They had never done it and were hesitant, but they still invited us over for a visit in mid-March, and I guess we were convincing enough. Everything was confirmed during the last week of March, with a wedding planned on May 17. So this gave me about 7 weeks of "active" planning! But by then I was prepared and already had things pretty much figured out. The invitations were in the mail within three days.
Continue reading Wedding Graduate: Marie-Eve In Montreal

Oh, today’s wedding. What to say? It contains the cutest ‘just married’ picture I have ever seen. It reminds you what weddings are about in the first place – forming a new family, celebrating with your greater family, laughter, tears, joy. It reminds you that it doesn’t really matter if everything is cute and blog-worthy and detailed, because in the end you are never going to pour over the pictures of the wedding stuff you had, you’re going to pour over the pictures of the wedding love you had. And just when this all sounds too sweet to be true, it reminds you that part of planning a wedding is growing into your role as a fully-fledged, fully-recognized grown-up in your community, and coming into the power of your ability to say NO! Because I swear to you on everything, saying yes to things that are not right for you will end up more painful, than just biting the bullet and kindly but firmly said, “No way.” And with that, I leave you with a thank you letter, written to this community:

Dear Meg and Team Practical,

I wasn’t sure about writing a wedding graduate post, because our wedding planning experience was so easy and stress-free that I didn’t want to make other people who are already stressed feel any more stressed about how other people have lovely stress-free weddings. But I did want to let you know that these weddings really do happen and why our wedding was like this.

To be honest, it boils down to Team Practical and all the wise couples who have shared their experiences. I wanted to share our story as a huge thank you, but also as evidence of the impact your blog and blog community is having on people like me. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Lyndal and Stephen (with cheering from Leo)