5 Years of Wedded Bliss

This month, Jacob and I are celebrating our 5th anniversary!  I still can’t believe we are approaching five years.  Honestly, some days it feels like our wedding was yesterday, and other days, it feels like 20 years ago.  It’s so funny how it can feel like both of those extremes.

I thought since we’re hitting a big milestone (5 years is big, right?), I’d share a little bit about us along with some pictures from way back when to our wedding day and through today.  Warning though… this post is very picture heavy especially with a lot of photos of the two of us!  You’ve been warned.  😉

This is Us

Jacob and I met on a school bus during a band trip (yes, we were band nerds) our freshman year of high school.  We were introduced by our mutual friend, Stratton, who actually turned out to be Jacob’s best friend and the best man in our wedding.  Thank you Stratton for introducing us!  We didn’t start officially dating until our junior year (I think), and I wasn’t sure if it would last.  Going from good friends to dating is sometimes a little awkward especially when it happens in your circle of friends, but luckily, we made it!

We dated for 7.5 years before he proposed on June 5, 2010.  Yay!  Finally!! 😀  We went to my mom’s house first to share the news, and she snapped this photo of us on the day we got engaged!

My mom took some engagement photos for us.

We had a very long engagement, and if I was doing it again, I don’t think I would have waited 21 months to get married.  It was just soooo long, and I had way too much time to plan our wedding.  I created a blog and shared all of the details and every little thing I thought of for our wedding, and I’m sure I annoyed my two maids of honor very much for making them read all of that stuff, but it is a bit fun to go back now and see all of the craziness.  Sorry Lindsey and Connie!  I know I was a planning freak!  😉

We waited a really long time before we set the date for our wedding, but we finally settled on March 10.  One day, my mom and I were chatting and she mentioned an all glass chapel.  I googled it, and it was in California, but just below that one was Thorncrown in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.  It looked absolutely beautiful.  My mom, Jacob and I all took a trip to Arkansas and decided it was the perfect place to get married.  Here’s some photos from the first time we visited.

We booked it as soon as we could, and to this day, I’m so happy with our choice.  It really is so beautiful!  I can’t wait to visit it again sometime soon.

We had our wedding reception at the 1886 Crescent Hotel and Spa in Eureka Springs.  We chose the Conservatory room, and I absolutely loved it when I saw it for the first time in person.  There were so many windows, and it was just a stunning room. The outer white room in this photo below is the Conservatory.

You can see some of our wedding details on our very old wedding website.

Everything went completely as planned on the day of our wedding.  The weather was absolutely beautiful – not too hot or cold and no rain.  There were no hiccups, no major freak outs, no disasters, etc.  It all went off without a hitch.  Maybe that’s what happens when you plan so much, but I’ll take it.  We really enjoyed our wedding day.  It was everything I wanted, and I’m still so pleased with it.  I think Jacob enjoyed it too.  😉

Here’s some photos from our first look.  I’m so glad we did the first look because it definitely helped my nerves, but I was a crying mess!

We took our wedding party photos before the ceremony, so that helped with our time crunch at the church.

My gray and yellow Ted Baker heels still give me heart eyes!!  😉

We arrived at Thorncrown about 30 minutes before the ceremony, and then it was underway!  We only had 1.5 hours at the church, so the ceremony was pretty fast, so we could take some pictures afterwards before we were kicked out for the next wedding.

Yay!  We did it!  We’re officially married!

After our ceremony, we made it over to the Crescent Hotel for our reception.

I think before we even picked our wedding date, I knew I wanted to have a gray and yellow wedding.  I just loved those colors, and I still love them just as much.  I don’t think I would change them even to this day.  Jacob’s only requirement throughout the whole wedding planning process was no pink or purple, so he approved of the gray and yellow easily.

Wedding planning was so much fun for me, and that’s when I really discovered how much I liked to research things to death.  😉  I planned and planned and planned some more, but I really enjoyed it.

I absolutely loved the flowers we chose for the bouquets, boutonnieres, and table centerpieces.  Our flower vendor was my favorite person we worked with throughout the whole planning process.  Everyone was great actually, but she was so patient and helpful, and I really appreciated her expertise!  She made that part of the planning such a breeze.

In case you’re getting married in Eureka Springs, here’s a list of our wedding vendors:

Ceremony venue: Thorncrown

Reception venue: 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa

Florist: Holiday Island Flowers

Bakery: Rick’s Bakery

Photographers: Kerrie + Stefan (no longer doing weddings)

 

The next day we flew out of Arkansas and headed to Banff and Canmore for our honeymoon.

We had such a blast in Canada.  It was our first vacation alone together, and we had so much fun!  From snowshoeing, to skiing lessons (what a disaster), to dog sledding, which was absolutely the best part of our trip, we couldn’t have experienced a better 1st vacation together.  I am so looking forward to going there again one day.

Side note: dog sledding is such an exciting and amazing experience.  I highly recommend it to anyone that has the opportunity to go.  You definitely will not be disappointed!!  It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life!  Seriously!!

After we returned home from Canada, I moved to Shreveport to live with Jacob in his apartment.  I’m going to spare you the stories, but I hated the apartment.  I try to use the word “hate” as little as possible, but I absolutely hated it.  It was just a bad experience.  In June of 2012, we decided to build a house!  It took 72 days to build it from start to finish (which is an amazing feat), and we couldn’t have had a better house building experience.  I’ve heard horror stories of things not going right, everything taking forever, people quitting in the middle of the job, etc, but that was not the case for us.  Everything went so smoothly, and we were very pleased.  I miss living there so much!  If we could move back and it made sense financially for us, I would 100% move back in a heartbeat.

We stayed in our house until August 2014 when we moved back to our hometown (Lake Charles), and we’ve been here ever since.

We’ve been to Canmore, Banff, NYC, Memphis, Rome, Florence, Siena, Pompeii, Pisa, Venice, Cinque Terre, and Paris since we’ve been married, and soon we’ll be visiting Colorado together for the first time.  I can’t wait to show him some of my favorite things in Estes Park.

That’s our little story.  I can’t wait to see what these next years will be like.  Maybe we’ll start a family?  Maybe we’ll build our dream home?  Maybe we’ll adopt 8,000 dogs and a horse?  Who knows!  But I do know there are many more years of wedded bliss to come!  Happy 5th anniversary, Jacob!