Weddingbee Blog

After our formal portraits, the bridal party all climbed into a 14 passenger van we had rented to drive us around to our photo locations. We decided to take our pictures in Old City, which is the historic part of Philadelphia. I was a little nervous about the cobblestone streets in my heels, so I had a pair of boots to traipse around in in between shots.

See back there to my left? BIL Socks was the best ever and carried my Kate Spades for me! What a gem!

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Right after our first look, we made our way two blocks from the hotel to Rittenhouse Square for our formal portraits. I was a little nervous about having our pictures taken at Rittenhouse since it’s a fairly bustling area, full of people, dogs, and sometimes unpredictable homeless people. We pressed on anyway, and though we did see a few pretty funny sites around the park (a cat being walked on a leash, a homeless guy dressed like a clown), our pictures turned out really well!

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It was finally time to do our first look! Our photographer Georgi picked out a place in our hotel where we could do it without a lot of other people around. Originally, he wanted it to just be me and Mr. Socks, but I knew Momma Socks would just DIE if she didn’t see what was going on, so she and my bridesmaids had a balcony view to what was going on:

Photo by Sister Socks

But here’s how the first look happened… Mr. Socks’ back was turned:
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I always loved the idea of Mr. Socks and I writing letters to each other on our wedding day, just so we could keep them and remember how excited and happy we were on our wedding day. Plus, I was kinda just in love with the idea of getting a love letter on my wedding day, so I told Mr. Socks to write me a letter.

A few days before the wedding, here’s how that conversation went:

Mrs. Socks: Honey, have you gotten stationery for the letter you’re going to write me on our wedding day?

Mr. Socks: What letter? What’s stationery?

Mrs. Socks: I told you about how awesome it is to have love letters for each other on our wedding day! It just has to be a nice piece of paper.

Mr. Socks: Do I have, like, a minimum word requirement?

Mrs. Socks: Sigh.

Sooo…Mr. Socks didn’t really get it. But I pressed on with the plans anyway because darn it, I was determined to get lovely pictures of us opening letters and getting emotional, saving them for our grandchildren, etc, etc.

I got a fresh box of stationery for my letter to Mr. Socks and got to writing the morning of our wedding. I had Sister Socks deliver the letter to Mr. Socks:
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It feels weird to have a post exclusively dedicated to photos of me, but there are quite a few portraits of me, so I suppose they have to be documented (insert exasperated fake sigh here).

I’ll keep it short.

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While we were getting ready, our photographer Georgi took some wonderful shots of some of the details we spent so long putting together!

Our personalized stickers that I made and put on our out of town boxes.
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When I last left off…

I was still in flannel. I promise I’ll be out of it by the end of this post, though!

Dad Socks came in after the guys were ready, and told me all about the tie fiasco.
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Our photographer, Georgi Anastasov arrived right around 1PM and started in my parents’ hotel room, where the guys were getting ready.

Apparently, they all tied their ties a different way at first, which is why Dad Socks had to help many of them tie it the way he always ties his ties.

Dad Socks, showing ‘em how it’s done!
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The morning of our wedding, I woke up with Mr. Socks by my side. We got dressed and went down to breakfast with my family. It was odd because everything seemed so NORMAL. It was my wedding day, yet I was just heading down to breakfast with Mr. Socks like any other day.

By the time I finished breakfast, I realized that I wouldn’t see Mr. Socks for the rest of the morning until we had our first look. I kept thinking, “but…what if I need him for something?”

I guess that’s what the rest of my family was there for, huh!

So Sister Socks and I headed up to my room to grab a few things before our hair and makeup appointments. I remembered to tell her to take a before shot, so here it is!

Surprisingly enough, my unwashed hair didn’t look half bad! And yeah, there’s that flannel again. I’m telling you, it’s one of the most comfortable things in my wardrobe.
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After tirelessly working on our bouquets for most of Saturday (sorry, I was a horrible blogger and was too stressed out to take pictures), it was time to load up the car and head into the city. We had our rehearsal at Ladder 15, and then dinner at Tavern 17, the restaurant at the Radisson where we were staying. Apparently, we only eat at places that have numbers in their names.

So we got to Ladder 15 and kind of took over the whole restaurant—the patrons that were there were polite and watched us with interest as we worked it all out.

Since we didn’t have a DOC or a planner, I kind of had to wing the rehearsal. I had only been to my sister’s wedding rehearsal before, so our plans were the “fly by the seat of our pants” kind.

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On Thursday afternoon, while all of my flower drama was going down, many of my family members and family friends arrived in Philly. My parents picked them up from the airport while we were dealing with the flower crisis. Once everything got settled that we would receive our roses, we had everyone over to our house to welcome them to the area.

We cracked open some wine and were prompted to open the gifts that Grandma and Granddad Socks and Sister Socks and BIL Socks brought.

Sister and BIL Socks got us an ice cream maker!!!
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The week before the wedding, everything was crazy busy, but going well. We had our DIY projects out of the way, all of our stuff was gathered in the guest bedroom, ready to be taken to Ladder 15, and all we had left to do were the flowers.

If you’ll remember, I decided early on to DIY our flowers. We ordered the following flowers from fiftyflowers.com:

Yellow Toulouse Lautrec Roses, Orange Ranunculus and Craspedia

I took the Friday before our wedding off from work specifically to put the flowers together, when lo and behold, the craspedia arrived a day early on Thursday. No matter, they were fine and would hold up until Sunday.

But on Thursday evening, I checked the shipping status of our other two orders, and saw that our roses were in Ecuador. They wouldn’t be delivered until Monday. Um…cue bride freak out.
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Let the Socks recaps commence!

I would like to start off with a bit of an update about our devastating wedding day and how we’re still dealing with it. Our pictures are wonderful and don’t show the issues that were happening with my in-laws on our wedding day, but that doesn’t mean that we have forgotten how hard that day was, and what it means to our lives now.

Mr. Socks does not want to communicate with his family still, and they have made no attempt to apologize or talk about the situation. It is difficult for me to see Mr. Socks go through the many emotions of breaking apart from a toxic relationship with them, but we both know that it is in our best interest to invite only positive influences and experiences in our lives. Of course, that’s often not what life has in store for us, but we can control the amount of contact we have with the negative forces in our lives.

We’re getting on with marriage swimmingly well besides the pain we frequently feel from such a big ordeal, and we’ve still found ourselves closer than ever before. Marriage wasn’t exactly life-altering for our day-to-day routine, but we did notice a change in how we try harder to work things out and make sure the other person is heard. We continue to keep all lines of communication open, and it has created a very fulfilling marriage so far!

Okay, okay. On to the pictures.
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When we left Seneca Lake, Mr. Socks and I traveled to Buffalo, NY to spend the night before crossing the bridge to Canada in the morning. I had never been to Canada before, and I was super excited to spend two nights there!

We went directly to our hotel at Niagara on the Lake, but our room wasn’t ready yet so we headed to our spa appointment. We had booked a side-by-side massage, and then chocolate body wraps. I’ve only had a handful of massages in my life, and always enjoyed them on vacations, but $600 later, I walked out of the spa with some pretty big developing bruises and smelling of chocolate and butter (the latter of which isn’t so bad, but I don’t know why the dude massaged my lower back to the point of becoming purple). Overall, I don’t think we’ll shell out the dough for spa treatments in the future. Live and learn, right?

After our spa treatments, our room STILL wasn’t ready, so we decided to hit up some of the local wineries. Also, I’m sorry for how horrible I looked in the following photos…it was because of that darned chocolate wrap and I could do nothing with my hair afterward since I couldn’t shower yet.

We first stopped at Peller Estates:
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Thanks to all of the Philly area bees who made it out to our meet up at Garces Trading Company! We had so much fun and it was a pleasure meeting everybody!

Haha…do you think we brought enough bottles of wine?

It was awesome meeting you ladies!