Closing the Book

As the dust settles and we begin to approach the month mark, I think we’re finally getting used to married life by becoming members of society not focused on building to a 13-month goal. I’m closing the book on the wedding related posts with some of my final thoughts and advice for those planning a wedding in the future.

• Enjoy it and be a part of the process! Bethany definitely led Team Somerville, but I knew what was going on and tried to help out where I could. I know some traditions have the bride doing most of the research, but I urge the guys to offer to chip where they can and at the very least be prepared to give pep talks. Remember there’s no we in me.
• Control the wedding and don’t let the wedding control you. At times you will get flustered (especially in the final month) so be prepared to recognize this and steady the ship. Also, schedule date nights for yourselves to keep your sanity by dedicating two hours to have a nice dinner, catch a movie, or watch mindless TV. I have to admit we found it ironic we chose to see The Breakup on the Monday before the wedding.
• Your guests will make strange requests and no one will be an exception. From family members to friends to people who have recently planned or are planning a wedding you will get questions that have no thought put into them. At some point people need to behave like adults and if they can’t keep up, leave them behind.
• The guest list will be one of the most difficult tasks at hand and we recommend preparing a full rough draft before consulting parental approval. We tried to move a single person to a new table after our list had been completed and after one hour we gave up because we could not make it work. Also, we probably gambled a bit here, but we wanted to promote intermingling at the wedding so we intentionally separated groups to promote socializing. During dinner, Bethany and I peaked at how all the tables were making out and much to our surprise everyone seemed to be doing great.
• Think of your guests. Personally, I think everyone involved with our wedding spent a serious amount of time and effort to make things special for our guests. Our mission statement strived to make everyone feel loved in order to create a positive energy that would take over the wedding. To be more direct, people don’t want to watch a 20-minute speech, a weird entertainment act, or only listen to music after the year 2000. Sure, it’s your day, but if you want it to be a great day you will need anyone’s help.
• If you like something you saw somewhere else, steal it. I think the only place you may want to draw the line here is for your first song, but that’s my personal opinion.

I could go on and on, but we’ll wrap it up there. If anyone has any thoughts or questions on anything we did feel free to contact either of Bethany or myself. I will be offering a break dancing class in August.

See you next post.

The Honeymooners

After thirteen months of intense planning, my beautiful bride and I finally found ourselves at a point where we could simply relax and enjoy our lives together. It’s an odd beginning because you spend so much time and energy hammering out all the details and then everything comes to a screeching halt the day after the wedding. You get so caught up in all the excitement of celebrating your love for each other with all your family and friends it doesn’t occur to you the deadline has arrived. And then you suddenly realize I don’t need to think about wedding planning anymore. It’s done, we’re married so let’s go sit on a beach and enjoy life.

As many of you know I strongly angled for our honeymoon to be the Pirates of the Caribbean Volvo XC90 SUV Treasure Hunt, but I could only swing a week off at the office so we settled on Nantucket instead. Neither of us had ever been to Nantucket and I have to warn everyone even though it can get a bit pricey, I strongly recommend it. This proved to a perfect destination for us because when it comes to vacations we’re pretty low maintenance, as we simply want to kick back, relax and have some good food. We spent our days on the beaches or walking through the picturesque town while at night we ate in restaurants we normally would decide we couldn’t afford followed by drinks around town where we met someone every night to talk to. Mental Note: This usually works very well on your honeymoon because people start buying you free cocktails. Try the local drink Life is Good the next time you’re out. It’s Stoli Raz and Sprite with a splash each of cranberry and Red Bull.

The Ships Inn served as our home for the week and we strongly recommend it to anyone planning a trip and I at least beg you to make a reservation at their excellent restaurant. It’s on Fair Street, the last road before the beginning of downtown Main Street (by the bank), has easy access to the shuttle, and is about a 30-minute walk to the beach. Bethany summed up the coolest part of this location when she indicated when you turn the corner onto the full view of Main Street it feels like you’ve stumbled upon a movie set. You’re on this quiet side street, walk fifty yards, and then you have cobblestones, storefronts, and a thousand people transported from a J Crew catalog.

There’s a large amount of cool people on Nantucket although I found it very intimidating when we first arrived. In the middle of a Sunday afternoon 30% of the guys wear pants in pants and I saw three T-shirts on all Main Street. That’s not a good sign for a Hawaiian shirt wearing lad like myself, but we both compromised as clothing in town became more casual as the week went on. There also appear to be plenty of Clints and Buffys floating around with the attitude of, “I’m rich, leave me alone and get me a Cosmo.” Float a friendly, casual line to a bartender within the first drink and you have a new best friend who will introduce you to the other locals in the bar.

So that’s our story. We’re officially an excited husband and wife and now that we have our perfect honeymoon sadly behind us it’s time to see what the future holds and we hope to have a few more tales in us.

Oh, and Nantucket urban legend says if you somehow find you’ve drank a bottle of wine, champagne, and several vodka tonics the pizza on Broad Street will be the best thing you have ever eaten.

The Wedding, Part II

After the pictures (don’t worry, they’re coming), we made our way over to the reception with the goal of greeting all of our guests as they arrived. As you all know, the first shuttle beat us to Club Longwood and we rolled with it by working the room as we stuffed our faces with scallops wrapped in bacon. After cocktails, our grand entrance and first dance lay ahead of us and we found ourselves ad libbing very quickly because the version of Some Kind Wonderful playing held a much faster beat than our practice sessions. One of my biggest fears for the wedding involved us tripping over each other during our dance, but we ended up hitting all of our spots. I guess practice does make perfect.


Everyone settled in their seats and we were honored to have three excellent speeches made by Bethany’s father, my brother, Chris, and my friend Chris White. In my opinion, all three of our speakers like to and know how to tell stories and sure it’s my wedding, but I feel we had the best group for any wedding I have ever attended. Thank you to all three of you because you each made us feel very special.

Next, we’re on to dinner and what a delicious meal it was. If you didn’t like it you must have some serious taste bud issues. While you were all dining, Bethany and I were sneaking peaks to make sure the tables we put together were talking with each other as planned. We spent a great deal of time arranging the seating with the goal of making sure that everyone would have someone to talk to and the two times we significantly looked all our guests appeared to be enjoying themselves.

Finally, it’s time for the dancing and we would like to thank our DJ, David O’Leary, for doing an excellent job hosting and for putting together an excellent play list even if I did throw him the I Want it that Way curve ball he thought I had been joking about. We did not want to have a fraternity party and the goal was to offer the opportunity for all ages dancing and I think we had everyone up there at one point or another. I am fairly confident of this because I spent most of the 8:30-9:30 hour of hunting out people who had not been out there and engaging them in some dancing.

Well, that’s a not so brief summary of what happened and I think I could even make it longer. When your wedding day arrives, enjoy it, but be prepared for extreme sensory overload and for all your memories to be in fast-forward due to the amount of people celebrating with you. Oh, and we closed down the bar again with my brother, my new father in law and our friend Kyle.

Thanks again to everyone who made this memorable day possible and for everyone who enjoyed the day with us.

The Wedding, Part I

And we’re back.

Once again thank you to all of our friends and family for making our wedding day one to remember. A good amount of people spent a great deal of time and energy to achieve our primary goal of making the day special for all of our guests and we hope you felt pampered. From the menu, the shuttle, the table names, and the booklet you received in the mail we spent a large amount of effort to try and make thing as perfect as possible while adding our personality to the wedding. Several of our guests arrived expecting to have a fantastic time and I think we lived up to the billing. You might not be able to please everyone, but we came pretty darn near close to doing so.

After a pretty controlled final week of errands and adjustments the wedding festivities kicked off with a Friday evening rehearsal followed by dinner at Henrietta’s Table in The Charles Hotel. This group set the tone for the rest of the weekend by bringing positive energy to the cocktail hour and carrying it over to our delicious meal. Thanks to my dad for delivering a meaningful speech and to everyone who met us out at the bar afterwards. And yes, Bethany and I did make it to last call with my brother, Chris W, and Kirsten.

As I walked home with Chris that night, my adrenaline kicked in at full strength which is not good for someone who naturally runs at a high energy level. I did not fall asleep until 4 and woke up somewhere around 7 tossing and turning for a couple of hours as my stomach did cartwheels. I found myself not to be nervous, but just ready to get the day going and the best elixir for this problem is of course to wake up the entire house by blasting The Touch from The Transformers the Movie soundtrack. In reality I still felt very antsy until I went for a walk to pick up our lunch and then a calmness came over me which got me through the day.

I’m fast-forwarding a few hours to the church and I think we had a wonderful ceremony officiated by Father Jack Howard in his spanking new shoes. Thanks to Aunt Liz and Johnny for the readings and most importantly to my cousin Danielle who took full control of the situation once she found herself dangerously close to being cut out of the wedding. The most amazing thing about the wedding is Bethany and I hit all of our spots (except when to kiss each other) because I thought we would forget everything from the night before.

Thank You

Thank you to all our friends and family for celebrating our wedding day with us. We had a wonderful time and hope you did too.

Give us the rest of the week and we'll post a wedding/honeymoon recap and begin to detail our first year adventures.

Pictures will be available in a couple of weeks and please send us anything you may have to share.

Finally, if you need a CD please let me know and I will make a copy although the fancy labels are all gone.

Thanks again and we love you all