Many hands make light work – Wedding Part 2

Hey my lovely readers!  First off I gotta say that you all make my heart smile!  Your kind words and wishes on my wedding anniversary post seriously made me so happy!  So thanks for checking in once in a while and sending me some love!!

I mentioned before that our wedding was the result of many hands working together.  The whole family jumped in, eager to help out and make sure that the day turned out as stunning as I had hoped and things would go as smoothy as possible.  I loved when anyone came up to me to ask: “OK, what can we do for you now?!”.  And since we did all the food and flowers and decorating ourselves, many hands surely made for light work!

It also created such a fun buzz and anticipation in the days leading up to our wedding!  I wish we had more pictures of the prep work, but I guess we were sometimes just way too focussed on the task at hand to think about grabbing the camera – oops! I managed to find a sampling of it though:

Alrighty – let’s jump right in shall we?!

I shopped around all the fabric stores in the fashion district in Toronto to find just the right fabric for our napkins.  Ya – I totally shrieked when I found the right one!  A lady in our church made these napkins from the fabric.

Here my brother Niel and I are hollowing out lemons to serve as little bowls for the lemon sorbet.  We were on a roll once we figured out the best way to do it!  And it also resulted in a nice jug of lemonade I guess when life gives you lemons……..

I had seen a picture of pretty steamed baby carrots with their stems still attached in some magazine and I knew that I wanted those exact ones for our wedding dinner because they were so darn cute!  Problem was though that we had to do the grocery shopping for the wedding in a town close by the cottage and did not have the greatest selection of veggies.

This did not deter a bride on a mission though, and I was adamant that we could just use the big carrots, carve them down into smaller carrots and viola - cute baby carrots!  You think I’m joking, right?

Nope – I was dead serious.  After firing some people who were not doing a good enough job (sorry!!), my brother Garfield showed some skill and was officially appointed to do the job.  He was so thrilled!

My mom and grandma were in charge of flowers.  We just went to a few stores in town the day before and bought up all of the white flowers that we could find! It turned out beautifully!

This was so special, because I remember as a kid my grandma would do the flowers for a few weddings, and I can still picture her diningroom table covered in centerpieces that she had prepared.  I think she was thrilled to be there to help!  I was too!

My beautiful mama:

Making some gift bags for Derek’s nieces to keep them busy with during the dinner:

It was pretty cool, each person was responsible for something: making the salad, roasting the potatoes, cooking the chicken, setting up the bar, etc.  I wish I had more pictures of it!

This is me, hair and makeup done and whipping up my bouquet. What can I say, I perform under pressure.

It is funny, because looking back on the day I was more frazzled than it looks in the pictures!  The running joke of the day was my lists. Oh the lists!  In order to be organized and make sure that everyone knows what the game plan is I had to get it down on paper.

And here I am hiding out in the bedroom after surrendering the lists to my family a few hours before the ceremony.  It’s actually a pretty funny picture, because I bet you this is what was going through my mind: “I wonder if the chicken is in the oven yet?  And why are people still running around in their shorts and not dressed yet? I hope they remembered to set up the champagne down by the water…”

In addition to the lists, I split up all the different dinner courses into the different fridges and labeled EVERYTHING.  I even put the dessert plates in the fridge with the dessert.  No room for error, right?  HAHAHA

Remember I mentioned that we got two girls from a local restaurant to serve the dinner and clean up?  Here I am going over the details with them.  I can just see them looking at me thinking: “This chick is NUTS”.

They totally rocked it though and I was soooo impressed with how they took care of everything! I was able to just sit back and enjoy the evening! Thanks girls!

Our wedding day was very hot (which was such a surprise for us seeing that it was June and all), so most people did not get dressed until the very last minute before the wedding.  There was a little bit off hanging out and watching Wimbledon right before the ceremony.  They were probably happy to take break!

Dad doing the last prep work for the ceremony

Even after the ceremony I had my entourage to help me out!

So many hands really do make for light work – I love that our wedding was such a family affair and team effort.  Thanks to all of you for helping out – even if I don’t have pictures to prove it!!  The result was amazing

And if you made it all the way here you get to find out where we went on our surprise anniversary getaway!

Yippers – NYC baby!  It was so cool – I did not find out where we were going until we got our boarding passes at the airport.  My husband did good!

We spent 3 days walking around (my poor feet – we criss-crossed Manhattan a few times!), had breakfast at Tiffany’s, lunch in Central Park, dinner in the East Village. Lots of walking, laughing, eating, exploring!