Weddingbee Blog

All along we knew that we weren’t going to have a traditional rehearsal dinner. In the spirit of our wedding weekend, we wanted to include all of our guests who had traveled to be with us, and I really wanted to make sure that any in-town guests who wanted to come to dinner were welcome as well. This could have meant that we ended up with essentially two reception dinners, but instead the Welcome Dinner stayed very close to the casual, welcome to the Northwest vibe that I really wanted (and a lot of guests ended up not being able to make it, so the dinner was much smaller than it could have ended up being!).

*Guest photo

We started with a reception in the Welcome Center as people slowly trickled in from the lodges or elsewhere on the island.

After spending some time mingling, we headed to the Dining Hall for dinner. You’ll hear me gush about this throughout all of my recaps, but I have to pause for a minute and talk about the food. It was SO good. All of it, at every meal, was excellent.

The staff at IslandWood works really hard to create meals from local and sustainable ingredients, and they worked with us to build a weekend of meals that showcased Northwest cuisine, but also made use of what was in season. For our welcome dinner we had boeuf bourguignon, whole roasted chicken, winter root vegetables, green salad, wild rice and freshly baked bread with herbed butter. And my god, the bread was fabulous. So good!

I have to say, my mom was a much better hostess than I was for the dinner portion of the evening. I did get a chance to talk to just about everyone who was there at the reception, but by the time dinner was served, I was starving!

In case you can’t tell, that would be me sitting at a table by myself in the background as my mom made sure to talk to everyone (here she’s chatting with Mr. EB’s best man). We purposely didn’t have any sort of seating arrangement for the Welcome Dinner. However, it didn’t dawn on me that everyone would just grab seats as they got food meaning there probably wouldn’t be seats for Mr. EB and myself, as we got our food last after going over a few last minute things with our coordinator. So I just grabbed a seat off to the side, which actually turned out quite nice to have a few minutes to myself! And don’t worry, Mr. EB and several other friends joined us shortly thereafter!

*Guest photo

After dinner we brought out the dessert, which was specially planned to pay homage to my mom’s family— our family’s “35th Anniversary Cake.”

This cake was first made by my mom for my grandparents’ 35th wedding anniversary, back in 1976. Since then this cake has been made for other anniversaries, birthdays, First Communions, graduations, and yes, even weddings. We decided to go in a different direction for our wedding cake, but I really wanted to have this served during our weekend and it was an excellent way to end dinner.

Now that we were all full and ready to talk some more, we moved to the Friendship Circle for a bonfire, s’mores and plenty of embarrassing and sentimental moments!

*Unless noted, all photos are by the fabulously talented Persimmon Images.

Want to catch up?

• We get our license to wed.
• We bottle and seal our wedding wine.
• We finish our projects one week out.
• The bridesmaids lunch.
• I make gifts for my girls.
• I break down the morning before.
• The family gathered.