Hey friends! It’s been a while! Hope you all have been doing well and have been enjoying my previous articles and recipes. I’ve been a little MIA over here lately, well, because I got married!!! I thought I should give you a little recap of what has been taking up so much of my time and energy over the last few months. I also included a few tips for anyone planning a wedding. Hope you enjoy!
As many of you already know, Billy and I have been together a longgg time and also had a bit of an extended engagement. Billy proposed on April 13, 2019 at the Biltmore (it was magical!!), and we planned on getting married on June 13, 2020. Well, we all know our evil stepsister, COVID, decided to come to town in late February/ early March 2020, and Billy and I made the difficult decision to postpone our wedding. While it was a major bummer, we didn’t want to risk anyone’s health. We also are very aware many people had much worse experiences with COVID, losing jobs and loved ones, so we really can’t complain.
Engagement photos from Summer 2019 in Charleston and Folly Beach, South Carolina. Images taken by @emmaliliphotography.
Fast forward to May 2021. Wedding planning really ramped up again, and we were fortunate enough to get to travel for a few weddings of friends and family! Such a fun season. And then BOOM, I looked up, it was June, and I was a bitttt behind on content creation. When running a website isn’t your full time job or even your primary side hustle, sometimes ya gotta step back during busy seasons to still enjoy life and get adequate rest.
Images from the weddings we traveled to this May. On the left, photos from my cousin’s wedding in Texas. On the right, photos from my college roommate’s wedding. I was in her wedding and she was in mine!
Anyways, on to what you’re here for, the wedding! Our wedding weekend was truly just so much fun! There’s no better way to explain it. We drove up to Knoxville on Thursday, June 17 and really began the celebrations on Friday, June 18. I had lunch and got my nails done with my childhood besties (We’ve been friends for over 20 years now! Crazy!) and then we headed to our venue, The Emporium, for our wedding rehearsal. To be honest, the rehearsal was such a whirlwind that it totally didn’t hit me that Billy and I were practicing to get married the next day! After the rehearsal, we had the most lovely dinner with our families and wedding party at Lakeside Tavern and then headed back downtown to Pour Taproom. We wanted to be able to spend more time with our wedding party and out of town guests, so we took over the porch and had a few (maybe too many) drinks until my bridesmaids whisked me back to my hotel room around midnight.
Photo of our wedding party and their dates at our rehearsal dinner at Lakeside Tavern.
The next morning I was feeling a bit worse for wear between the extra drinks, the travel, the lack of sleep, and just generally being out of my routine. BUT, I met my dad for a run through downtown Knox to kick off my wedding day, a memory that I will forever cherish. For those of you who don’t know, he’s my #1 running buddy. The run may have been hot and a little slower than we wanted it to be, but we pushed through 5 miles and then had a smoothie for breakfast. Best start to the day, in my opinion!
Photo of my dad and I on our morning run and a photo getting ready at the hotel.
Once I got back to my bridal suite in the hotel, all 8 of my bridesmaids came to hang out and get ready together. This was just so much fun, and made me so much more relaxed. After getting ready and what seemed like 1 million photos, we headed to the Emporium for the ceremony! The ceremony was just the sweetest and I finally got to see Billy! We decided not to see each other or even talk that day to make meeting at the altar even more special.
My bridesmaids and I getting ready at the hotel. Photo by @amandamayphotos, @erinfoxphoto, @bsidwellphoto.
After we were officially husband and wife, we took another million photos, this time with the entire wedding party together, with our families, and of course of the two of us. Once we finally got to go inside and join the party, the rest of the night was such a blur of non-stop fun. Nothing will ever beat getting to be together with all of the people I love most celebrating my marriage to my best friend!
More wedding photos by @amandamayphotos, @erinfoxphoto, @bsidwellphoto.
After eating amazing an amazing meal (breakfast for dinner, duh!), drinking champagne and moscow mules, and dancing the night away, we continued the party at the rooftop bar of our hotel on Gay St. It was just so wonderful to be able to spend even more time with everyone, because the reception felt SO fast.
The next morning we had a huge brunch with my side of the fam before everyone left town. It was the perfect close to the best weekend of my life!
If you’re planning a wedding and want some unsolicited advice, here are some of my tips:
- Your day won’t be perfect. Something will go wrong and that’s okay! Just put that in your head now, and you won’t spend your wedding day upset about something silly. This leads me to my next point.
- Don’t sweat the small stuff. Literally no one will remember it!
- Give your phone away and appoint someone to be your decision maker that day. Your only job is to have fun and get married. Let go and let someone else do the work that day. I know it can be hard for control freaks like me, and I know it can be hard to accept help, but if you’re going to pick one day in your life to do so, this is that day. I promise you will enjoy yourself so much more. Also- literally who could you need to be in touch with that day that isn’t already coming to the wedding?! Let me repeat- put. your. phone. away.
- Try to simulate as normal of a morning as you can in order to feel your best all day long. I went on a run and then had a smoothie like it was a random Tuesday. I know this made me feel my best all day. Oh and HYDRATE!
- Add in the extra events if you want to and have time to. We added drinks after the rehearsal dinner on Friday, drinks after the wedding on Saturday, and brunch on Sunday. One of my favorite parts of the weekend is that I truly got to spend time with ALL of my guests.
- Find a few minutes of alone time with your spouse that day. I feel like I barely saw Billy all day, but at the end of the night we sat up eating goldfish and reliving the day. So fun.
- At the end of the weekend write everything down in a notebook. Your emotions, what happened, all of it. Every year on your anniversary, go back and read that and look at wedding photos and relive the best day ever with your person. I’m already looking forward to doing that next year on our first anniversary!
