A Look Back at Our Wedding Day Six Years Later

Jamie and I are celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary on Sunday, and though he’s away this weekend with the Army, we had the very best time running around town together last weekend celebrating just a few days early.

I’d love to walk down memory lane and share a few pictures from our wedding day, if you’re interested in seeing them. 🙂 While hearing our girls cry for the first time were the two single best, most surreal moments of my life, our wedding day was one of those days that I would pay gobs of money to go back and relive over and over. While I’m sure there were a few hiccups throughout the day, I was completely oblivious. I’ve never had another day were I felt quite so blissful.

Here we go. 🙂

Quick, quick background story: We pushed up our wedding 18 whole months because we decided to get married before Jamie’s 1st deployment to Afghanistan. Since we only had seven weeks to plan, we decided to head six hours south to Seacrest Beach, Florida and have a destination wedding. I always dreamed of a huge, traditional wedding, but I had no idea that this was the type of wedding that would make my dreams come true. 

On the morning of our wedding, a few of my family members and I went to get our hair and makeup done while my bridesmaids started getting ready back at the beach house.

Around 2 p.m. I threw my dress on and soaked up a few moments with my best friends before heading down to the ceremony.

We took a few pictures here and there before the wedding, but Jamie and I waited to see each other until I walked down the aisle (a.k.a. beach house stairs).

At 3 p.m. our families and bridal party headed out, and my nerves were through the roof.

At one point, my sister and wedding planner were the only people left back with me (my dad met me at the bottom of the steps), and my sister couldn’t stop crying. Hesitantly letting go of my sister’s hand as she left to go walk out to the beach is one of my favorite memories that I have with her.

Here comes the groom!

And here comes the bride! My dress ended up getting caught four times on the way down the stairs, and apparently everyone started chuckling a bit. Jamie said that he freaked when people started chuckling because he didn’t want me to hear and get upset (I didn’t.)

The walk down the beach was a blur; I remember very little of it. I just wanted to get to Jamie!

Our ceremony was 20 minutes long. We designed the whole thing with our paster, and it was perfect and meaningful and just the way we envisioned it.

100ish of our closest friends and family traveled to the beach for our wedding. They came from all over the country, and sometimes when I think about that, I’m still just so humbled.

We couldn’t have pulled this off without our families, who gave up so much time, money, and sanity to make this perfect for us. Our parents have all agreed that this was also one of the best days of their lives. Music to my ears. It really was just so much fun!

Jamie and I couldn’t have asked for a better bridal party, made up our siblings, a couple of his cousins, and our absolute best friends.

We filled the beach house for our reception, and it was a party full of dancing, dinner, and drinks! We had our first dance to “You Had Me from Hello” by Kenny Chesney, which we’d always dubbed as our song. (We basically started dating the minute we met each other – ha!)

At sunset we went back down to the beach and took more pictures. My mom still gets emotional when she thinks about how perfect the weather was. It shouldn’t have been like that in the middle of January. It was cold the days before and after, but our day was unreal.

Then we headed up to the beach house and danced our hearts out for hours. A few guests actually paid our DJ to keep the party going for two hours after we left. So fun!

I couldn’t believe so many of my sorority sisters made it to the wedding. I love these girls so much; Still do!

Around 8:30 we had our last dance to “Save the Last Dance for Me” by Michael Buble, which was something we’d decided after hearing it while sitting on the Staten Island Ferry while we were dating “if we ever got married someday”. 🙂 We jumped in a fancy car and enjoyed a great two-day honeymoon in Destin before going our separate ways again, embarking on a journey that I couldn’t even begin to fathom would play out like it has.

Happy anniversary, Jamie. I love you so much!

More

• I wrote a post just a few days after our wedding that really captures the raw emotion of the entire weekend. You can find it here. 🙂 
• A lengthy post about how we planned out the details of the wedding in seven weeks