wedding day: bridal prep, gifts & pre-ceremony

Sorry I took a few days off from wedding recaps, I know that not everyone is as gung-ho wedding as I am, so I needed to keep all the readers satisfied.

I knew from the beginning of planning the wedding, I wanted to be able to get ready with all my girls in the same place. One of my favorite things to do is snack and prep, just like the good old days of college, so my parents were nice enough to get a suite for all of us. Our hairdressers and makeup artist came to us–so nice!

 And because I was so nervous that I wasn’t going to get a photo with everyone, I demanded we take them before we left the bridal suite. These are the real life confessions of a neurotic bride, folks.

Jenn is actually who introduced Dane and I!

It was amazing being able to have my mom with us all morning. She is the best ever and made sure we were all fed and hydrated 🙂

Somehow I missed getting a photo with my sister 🙁 But I can only hope that our photogs snagged a good one.

Something Dane and I wanted to do before the ceremony was exchange gifts to each other. We didn’t want to do a sneak peek (100% traditional here), but our photographers came up with the idea to exchange through a wall so that they could capture our expressions as we each received our gifts. It was such a special moment! It was then that I discovered where we were going on our honeymoon (Dane had made it a complete surprise for me!) & was gifted with Tory Burch sunglasses and a pair of Jack Rogers. Dane is really good about reading my blog for ideas.

My gift to Dane was a little bit unconventional. I had a team of videographers here in Hawaii follow us around for a year (pre & post deployment!) to capture our love story. So much of my love for Dane is based upon our motto to always “live our own love story”, and I wanted to showcase that in a special way for him. I had our parents send in video messages and it was played for all of our guests at the reception right after we were introduced. Admittedly, I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house. Huge thanks goes out to our friends at ARIA Studios–you all are amazing.

Andddd, back to the ceremony, I snapped this quickly before walking down the aisle. What can I say..first I had to take a selfie 😉