Wedding Blog

Well folks, that was it for my pro photos (aside from the family-shots, but did you really want to see those? Yeah, didn’t think so. You don’t know those people anyway). Shawna and Kory did an excellent job capturing our wedding, and Mr. Mary Jane and I were so glad to have them there. They took basically the entire afternoon out of their day to record ours for us, and then provided us with a ton of photos: 3 times more than I was expecting. Kudos to them.

But don’t worry! This isn’t quite the end of the recap train. I’ve still got a little more to share.

After we finished snapping pictures in Hillsboro, we parted ways with our photographers and headed back up to Grand Forks to meet our parents, siblings and friend at L’Bistro.

L’Bistro is a restaurant attached to the CanadInn hotel in Grand Forks. Attached-to-a-hotel makes it really beam with ambiance doesn’t it? It’s actually a really quiet, adult atmosphere with jazz playing softly in the background. It’s one of the few places in town where we figured we

1. Wouldn’t encounter a bunch of screaming kids
2. Could still dine at with Mr. MJ’s youngest brother (other choices were 21-and-over-only).

Well, it turns out we were right on only one of those points.

Mr. Mary Jane and I have been to L’Bistro on multiple occasions and have never been less than impressed. Good food, fast-enough service, very quiet/private. So imagine our surprise when the wait staff set up our wedding dinner tables directly next to a family of 10 (including 2 babies and other young children of various ages). Apparently, this was the only part of the restaurant that could accommodate our party of nine.

We got to spend the first half of our dinner hour (actually, dinner lasted 2+ hours, but I’ll get to that in a moment) listening to babies scream, little kids complain about their meals, and a couple of women hushedly discussing how odd it was that someone would get married on a Wednesday (umm, I’m sitting 3 feet from you. I can hear you.).

To make it more interesting, our waitress was training a new waiter. Great, 2 wait staff to help us! Except, we think that each of them assumed the other was taking care of our table. Most of the night, the pair were nowhere to be found. Our food took over an hour to arrive after ordering, and if we wanted anything (like a drink refill), we had to locate and grab one of them to ask for it. Not impressive. At least the food was good. I had the Baked Seafood Penne. My husband (!) had the Classic Italian (a hot sandwich).

Then, it was back to our house for… cake! Delicious cake.

And did I mention: Wine? We had not planned on doing any toasts, and I didn’t buy flutes. But Mr. Mary Jane’s grandma gifted us these ’Precious Moments’ flutes at the bridal shower, so we definitely wanted to use them.

One day when we were visiting our jeweler, they were setting up for a downtown ’art and wine walk’. I made some kind of crack about the dozens of bottles of wine they had, and they surprised us by giving us a bottle of Moscato d’Asti! That’s the bottle we opened on our wedding day.

Speaking of things we had not planned for: cake-cutting. Obviously we planned to eat the cake. But cut it? Naw. Never even thought about that.

We did manage to find something suitable to use (a steak knife, I think) and commenced slicing.

Mr. Mary Jane fed me some cake…

… and then I fed myself some. Because I like cake.

No one took any photos of me feeding him. It’s quite possible that didn’t: I was probably too busy taking advantage of having his extra hand to help me shovel more cake in to my own mouth faster! Like I said: I like cake.

After cake, the nine of us hung around in the living room, chatting, laughing, and complaining about how full we were. At around 10 o’clock, everyone filtered out. Mr. Mary Jane and I cleaned up the dishes, put the leftover cake in some airtight containers, and headed off to bed, exhausted. We were married.

Looking back, doing the cake-cutting and ending the evening at our home was one of my favorite parts of our wedding day. Hanging out with the family, eating off of our own dishes, feeling right at home (because we were!). It was a really special experience that I’m frequently reminded of when I step in to our dining room.

The wedding day is done, but don’t fret: I’ve got one more recap! Up next… the picnic.

Previously…
1. Leading up to the Big Day
2. Cake, and DIYing the Bouquet
3. Getting Bridal
4. A Surprise for the Bride
5. Portraiture
6. Marriage Time!
7. Portraiture, Revisited