6 Months of Marriage + Wedding Photos (FINALLY!)

Last week, the hubby & I celebrated 6 months of being married! Woo! Six months isn't a lot, but it's hard to believe sometimes how fast time passes. For us especially, since we dated for so long as well, getting married was the cherry on top of many things happening in our lives last year. So to get to the 6 month mark already was amazing and unbelievable. 

All wedding photos featured are courtesy of Alexandra Burnett, who gave me exactly what I was looking for in wedding photos!

I also thought that this would be the perfect excuse to finally show wedding photos here on the blog! I posted a good chunk of them to my personal Facebook and I post couple photos of us on Instagram every now and then, but I think it's now the time to finally show a glimpse into our wedding day. 

It was a cold, rainy day in the middle of Australian winter (July 20th). Funny enough, it rained the day we got engaged too. They say that it is good luck for it to rain on your wedding day; I saw it as renewal and refreshing of us as we enter this new season of our lives. Despite the rain and our ceremony being outdoors, we made it work and it did not stop us at all.

Wedding Day makeup -- nothing too extravagant here, we were on a budget and made it work :)

We only got engaged 6 weeks prior to our wedding so it was the culmination of a very busy, somewhat rough few weeks. It was great. I won't talk too much about the process of planning the wedding because I will save it for another post, but I will say that other than it being worth it, everything came beautifully considering our low budget we had for it. I'm pretty proud of myself, hence me writing about the wedding planning process in another post :)

We got married at a Chinese garden at an aboriginal reserve not too far from where we live. It was a beautiful backdrop for our ceremony, and because we were on a budget, we later had our reception at a friend's house.

It was a small, 40 person wedding that was nothing the way we ever thought our wedding day would turn out, but it was such a special and perfect and amazing day. I wouldn't change any part of it.

We do still intend on doing some kind of wedding or formal celebration when we move back home to America in a year or so to have our families formally become one and to meet each other as well! Until then, I just want to appreciate my blood relatives here in Sydney, as well as our friends that we have come to call family as well. (BIG shoutout to our wedding photographer, Alexandra Burnett for the beautiful photos!) I will mention this again when I talk about my wedding planning process, but honestly this couldn't have been done without them.

Friends, family, brides to be, or even just someone who stumbled upon my blog by chance, I hope you enjoyed our wedding photos! If you or someone close to you is planning a wedding, I hope you got some ideas through our photos, but stay connected with me on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) or send me an email if you have any specific questions, as I will soon be writing a post on planning a less than $1500 USD wedding in 6 weeks :) Stay tuned!

Wedding Tip: When it Rains at an Outdoor Wedding

My friend Taylor married the love of her life a couple weeks ago! I hadn't been a guest at a wedding since 2011, although I did work at a wedding last December. 

One thing that Taylor's wedding and last year's wedding had in common: when it rains, it pours.
Yes, it rained at both weddings. With the December wedding, it rained pretty hard before the ceremony, and at my dear friend's wedding, it rained quite a bit after the ceremony and before the reception. At both of these weddings, the ceremonies and receptions were in the same place. (Check out some of the heavy rain from the first wedding in my video above!)
With the first wedding, huge white tents were put up in case it rained during the duration of the wedding. Luckily, it only rained during setup and by the time the bridal party and family of the bride and groom came to finish last minute details, the sun was out. 

With Taylor's wedding, she sent out texts to everyone to bring umbrellas to prepare for the rain the day before. I unfortunately didn't have time to get an umbrella before the wedding, but most of the guests got the memo.
I had also only been to her hometown once before, but it was in the summer. So I had also underestimated how cold it would be compared to the beach city I live in. (Why didn't I consider this?!) I was also sick at the time, which probably didn't help anything. 
I had assumed that there would be tents up to prevent the rain from falling on everyone at Taylor's wedding, but realized that there were only two small ones, not enough to cover everyone and were not covering the tables or anything. 
With that being said, it's always good to over prepare for situations like this.

Two tips to cover up for a rainy wedding: 
+ Bring an umbrella! This one is an obvious one. If you suspect that it will be rainy due to what the weather app on your phone says or heavy rain the night before, then it would be smart to bring an umbrella. Simple as that. I like the ones that Forever 21 sells. 

+ Wrap a scarf around your head. I didn't have an umbrella and was freezing cold, so I bought a scarf at an outlet we stopped at on the way to the wedding. This scarf, as you can see, is super furry, making it very warm for my neck and my cold self. When it rained, I wrapped the scarf over my head to protect my head/hair from getting wet. It did its job pretty well, I might add. 
You never know what to expect at weddings, so it's always good to be prepared so you can focus on the love of the couple for that special day. 
Do you have any interesting wedding stories? Any other tips on how you handled a wedding in the rain? 

A Day in the Life of a Wedding Planner

Before I had decided I wanted to do journalism, I wanted to do lots of things when I grew up. One of them was to become a wedding planner. Like any of my old dreams, they're all things that I still wouldn't mind doing or trying out, but for now becoming a journalist/magazine writer is the type of thing I want.

Anyway, last Saturday I had a great opportunity to see what it's like to help out/work behind the scenes of a wedding because a friend of mine just planned and coordinated her first wedding herself! She interned for a couple years at a wedding planning company and since it was her first time heading out on her own, she asked for some help and wanted to show what weddings are like the day of. If any of us helping out wanted to look into wedding planning, this was that experience that could either scare us away or make us want more of it. This wedding was not what I expected, but I do want to work more weddings to see a wider variety of weddings and styles of weddings. (If you want to see my experience first-hand, watch my video about it!)

Our day started by meeting up at 7:30am to get Starbucks and head over to the venue, the Newland Barn in Huntington Beach. The setting up process was a little slow at first but once the decor came and more friends of the bride and groom showed up to help, we were getting things done! For the first three or so hours, it was also raining so that also delayed us and caused for us to set up the venue for rain even though by the time the ceremony started it was all gone.

It didn't take long for me to realize that the theme of the wedding was Australia! The couple is moving to Sydney soon because the husband won Australia's "Best Job in the World" contest and won the position of Chief Funster. Because they're moving to Australia soon, they wanted to theme the wedding after their future home for the next year!