Reception

The hubs and I had a quickie ceremony on Friday July 16, 2010. (7-1=6, I like how it works out). 

We held a pool party at our apartments.

Our families were demanding that we have a party. We would have been fine with just the ceremony. But alas we must please everyone. 

As hubby and I didn't want a big thing the guest list was easy to create. My family. His family. Best friends. Sounds easy enough. Well, he comes from an awfully large family so just the family was over 50 people. 

Our reception site was easy. For free we used my parents home. They live on 10 acres of property in the country. Private and it had a view. In the planning stages I googled something like "backyard wedding, DIY" and came across my favorite blog that has pretty much inspires my life, Young House Love. Their backyard wedding inspired me to go with lemons and limes for center pieces in lieu of the traditional flowers. Plus they are Duck colors! Go ducks!

 Keg station! Best part of the day was my Paulaner Hefeweizen Keg. 

 In the front of the house we had another sitting station.

 There were so many good ideas for guest books I couldn't decide. On Etsy I found some thumb print wedding trees that all your guests thumb print and make a tree. Then I saw people using Polaroid cameras and having guests sign the polaroids. I opted to create a wedding scrapbook. I thought it would be a good activity for people to make a page with words of wisdom or whatever they liked. As polaroid are expensive and hard to come by I just placed a point and shoot for people to take pictures that I would later print out. 

 The Knot has some favor ideas, and I stumbled upon these on sale. They are plantable flowers so people can always remember your wedding with wildflowers. I thought it was nice. Hopefully the guests did too. This way its not something they don't feel like they can't use or have to keep to display when we come over or something. 

Bouquet toss from my perspective

Bouquet toss from below.

Our cake was from The Desert Tray. 

 Mambo got the first lick of the cake. It was hilarious. Normally I am very uptight I guess you could say so everyone was really worried to tell me that the cake had been "compromised". Well, you saw the keg above, and it was my reception day. I just laughed and surprised the masses.

As we didn't have the traditional walk down the aisle ceremony there was no need for a bridal party. Our niece and nephew were at the age where they wanted to be flower girl/ ring bearer so we gave them the title and bought them cute matching outfits. Luckily for them though, the title came with no responsibility but to be cute, which they are excellent at.

 Other activities we had set up were horse shoes and badminton. Hopefully nobody got bored.

The moms

Obligatory champagne twisty arm thing

I had one cousin come up from California and my other two cousins live in Portland. We stacked on the hammock. Rodriguez's in the front, cousins boyfriend in back. All enjoying none the less.

At the end of the night the "stragglers" decided to take a picture. There was a serious one but I much prefer the sillyness.

After the long day we sat down to open presents. Family friend's 8 year old daughter took pictures.  This was my favorite.

We asked my recent culinary school graduate, Cousin Ben to be our "chef" for the day. He recruited his brother and sister to help with the prep work. They used two of my parents neighbors ovens to cook the food for the day. He created the menu and executed the food nicely. My favorite part was blue cheese garlic mashed potatoes. yum.

It truly was a great party. Afterwards we drove off into the dark night to PDX to board our flight to Cancun. Delicious. I wish I was there now.