A Wedding & A Winner!

Katie & Mike Meyer ~ and my beautiful girls!

I just returned from a three day wedding! My husband's brother was married over the weekend and we traveled to the Twin Cities on Thursday evening for the rehearsal and groom's dinner (my husband was best man and our daughters were the flower girl and ring bearess). The ceremony was on Friday evening in their backyard with thirty-five close family and friends, with a dinner following, and the large reception was on Saturday afternoon/evening with a hundred and fifty guests, also in their backyard. It was a lovely wedding (I took over four hundred pictures!), but I'm happy to have the family back home and I look forward to sleeping in our own beds again (three nights in a hotel is enough for this mama).

By the way, I started reading a new book over the weekend (between wedding events) and I'm almost finished. It's called With Every Letter, by Sarah Sundin. It's excellent! I'll be sharing my review of it in the coming weeks - but, wow - love it!

I thought it would be fun to share a few of the pictures from the wedding (scroll down to see the winner of last week's book giveaway!):

The ring bearess and the flower girl



My hubby and the girls

Our twin boys

Mike, Dave and Matthew (my husband
in the middle and his brothers)

 

My girls and I



My father-in-law and my husband
dancing with the girls



My hubby and our daughter (who
became the dancing queen this weekend!)



The bride and groom's first dance
 (with partners!)

~ ~ ~ ~

I have a winner from the interview with Laura Frantz on Wednesday's blog post and it's:

Teri Metts!

If you'd like to read the interview, you can find it here.

To read my review of Laura's newest release, Love's Reckoning, go here.

What about you? What did you do over the weekend? Reading a good book? Any big plans in the near future?

June Bride

Today it's my great honor to be a guest on author Keli Gwyn's website.  Her debut novel, A Bride Opens Shop in El Dorado, California is now available! To read my guest post please go here. She asked me to share the story behind my husband's marriage proposal - I think you'll agree that it was very romantic. To go along with the wedding theme, I thought I would tell you about my favorite memory from my wedding day...

~ ~ ~ ~

There were a lot of wonderful moments on my wedding day, but one was so unexpected and delivered with such love, I still think about it in vivid detail with tears in my eyes, eleven years later.

I'll back up a little...as a child I loved the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I have it on VHS, DVD and I own the soundtrack. I have all the songs and dances memorized and I could list off all the brides and all the brothers...but I won't.

My favorite song in the movie is June Brides and because of it, I'd always dreamed of having a June wedding. When my husband and I became engaged in October of 2000, I only had nine months to pull it off, but I knew I could do it.

During the wedding reception one of my bridesmaids (I had seven!)  came to the mic and asked for the dance floor to be cleared. I was shown to a seat at the end of the floor and five of my bridesmaids went to the middle and arranged themselves to face me, the other two stood by my chair. At this point I had no idea what they were doing - until I heard: "They say when you marry in June, you're a bride all your life." And then the music started to play and my bridesmaids performed the whole June Bride song - choreography and all!

For as long as I live, I don't believe I will ever feel as loved as I did in that moment. My bridesmaids were my sister, my sister-in-laws, a high school friend and some cousins - only one of them had ever been in a play and for the rest to perform this for me was well outside their comfort zone. One of my sister-in-laws was nine months pregnant. I knew how much courage this had taken for all of them - but they did it for me - and they did it because they knew how much it meant.

I sat in that chair and I laughed and I cried and I laughed some more - not at their performance, but at their complete devotion to me. I love those ladies with all my heart and I'll never forget that moment.

What about you? What was a highlight on your wedding day? Have you seen something fun at a wedding?

A clip from the movie