The appreciation I have for my brides and their gorgeous wedding days has doubled if not tripled. Because wedding planning is HARD and I’ll be honest, I really did not enjoy it. I loved everything up until the actual putting together part. The Pinterest boards, the ideas, getting the dress, and creating the vision that part is fun. But calling vendors, finding supplies, and putting everything together causes so much stress. So for the girlies that love wedding planning- you have a gift and should share it because wow, I honestly had no idea how much work planning a wedding is. Like as someone who has been to 30+ weddings in the past few years, I had an idea that wedding planning was a ton of work. But I don’t think I comprehended how much work it would be.

Mitchell and I got engaged on September 20th, 2021, we waited a few months before deciding a date, did we want to get married in 2022 or 2023 the real question was, obviously we decided in 2022 and now had only about 9 months to plan this wedding. And I have pretty high standards for myself so I felt so much pressure to make it perfect. Once we figured out a date, we had another big decision to make, which was the size of our wedding. I come from a pretty big family so our options were to go big or stay small. A medium-sized wedding was out unless I only invited half of my uncles and aunts. After lots of thought, we decided to do both, a small wedding and a large reception. So not only was I stressed about planning one wedding, but now I had TWO events to plan for.

So let’s start with the details, I wanted my images to be as cohesive as possible between the ceremony day and the reception day so I kept all colors and themes the same. My favorite flower is the sunflower so I obviously chose those as the main flower for my bouquets. Mitchell and I also share the same favorite color of blue so we went with blue and sunflowers for our color/themes. We also chose to bring in some wood tones with wood slabs and some more natural things like cattails and wheat/tall grass into our centerpieces. I think one of my favorite things I did for my wedding had mismatched centerpieces. It took the pressure off of finding 25+ of the same items and just made life easier because we shopped a lot of clearance. So we had mismatched lanterns, blue glass, mason jars, and milk jugs scattered around and it looked really nice and I loved it.

Moving on to our ceremony plan. Mitchell and I originally wanted to do our small and intimate ceremony in Colorado in the mountains. However, it was important to me to include our grandparents and siblings in our ceremony so after some thought and travel logistics, we knew this wasn’t going to be an option. So we looked to Duluth, Minnesota. In our home state and a stunning area that my heart is so drawn to we looked at our options here. We found an incredible Bed and Breakfast in Two Harbors MN, The Fitzgerald Manor. And from the beginning the owners Mark and Becky were amazing. They are so easygoing and are incredible hosts. Back in May, they invited us out to stay for a night so that we can see the house and go over options for our wedding. After this trip, we knew we made the right decision and we were so excited to be getting married here. It is a short drive to all of the amazing things Two Harbors has to offer so even if you aren’t getting married here I highly recommend staying at the Fitzgerald manor when you are in the area. (plus Mark is an amazing cook). This bed and breakfast was the perfect place to bring our family together. We booked it for two nights, the night before our wedding everyone came and we just hung out and talked almost all night. It was really special to have our siblings, parents, grandparents, and best friends there to be with us and help us get married. On the day of the ceremony, we woke up and had breakfast together, then we started getting ready and set up. We were able to have a hair stylist come to us to get us ready for the ceremony. Hair by Serena was recommended to me by one of my mom’s friends and she did an incredible job. I have a complicated relationship with my hair and she made me feel the most beautiful I have ever felt and I never worried about how my hair looked. My sister-in-law helped me with my makeup and everything was perfect. I am just so grateful I had these amazing ladies to help me feel beautiful (because I’ll be honest I am a little bit of a female failure because hair and makeup are just not my strong suit). Right about when we were done getting ready my photographer arrived to start documenting our day. I found Afton Joy Photography on Instagram and fell immediately in love with her work. I showed her page to Mitchell and we knew that we loved her images and would love to have her on our day.

The rest of the day was a bit of a blur, but a few moments that I will always remember are my first looks. I did one with my dad and one with Mitchell. I grew up as a daddi’s girl so I have always thought about how my dad would be on my wedding day. So I wanted to do a first look with my dad. And now we laugh at the photos because my dad trying to hold back tears creates some pretty funny pictures. But I will always remember that moment and feeling how proud my dad was of me. And seeing him almost cry was pretty special too.

Next was my first look with Mitchell. Something about Mitchell and I is anything we plan something goes wrong. So we hid Mitchell in the basement so that I can run inside and hide while he gets set up. Except instead of staying away from the open stairs and being around the corner this guy stands at the bottom of the stairs. Then when I see him and at the moment wasn’t thinking I yell something at him so he looks and boom. Mitchell sorta sees me before our first look but it was just another example of how Mitchell and I operate. In complete dysfunction. So anyways we get to our first look and just laugh about what had happened previously. Something very special that I will never regret is that Mitchell and I said private vows to each other during our first look. We sent away EVERYONE even our photographer and took the time to just be with each other on our wedding day just the two of us. I will always recommend this to my couples, even if it’s not to say private vows but to spend some time together just the two of you on your day. I really loved that moment and getting to be so raw and real with my person. Even if we messed up our first look, to begin with.

We then did family photos and finally decided it was time to get hitched. Our family all made their way to where we set up our ceremony and we had just gotten married. Mitchell’s aunt has taken a course to be an officiant and she married us. Mitchell’s grandma also played her guitar and sang a song that she and her late husband used to sing together and it was really special getting to include him in our day. When we were planning our ceremony it was important to us to include all of the people there, and when we were writing the ceremony we realized how many role models for marriage we had. So we added a nice tribute to our ceremony to all of the couples there who had been married for a long time.

Something you may or may not know about Mitchell and me is that we created a blended family. Mitchell has a son from a previous relationship so over the last few years I have been also navigating becoming a step-parent. So when we were planning our ceremony we wanted to include our son somehow and find a way to represent our family coming together. I had seen the sand ceremony done in multiple weddings and my heart knew that was going to be perfect to show our family coming together. It was the best little unity ceremony for us and now we have our jar of sand displayed in our house to remind us of our promise to be family. I also said a vow to our son and it was really special to me, and I think to him to be included in this way. At the end of our ceremony, we walked out together, as a family and that might be my favorite moment of the whole day and the images I love the most from our wedding day.

We wrapped up our day with some bridal portraits and a quick outfit change and we sent our photographer on her way. We enjoyed dinner (made by Mark the B&B owner) and it was incredible then spent the night just being with our family, watching movies, playing pool and cards, and just laughing. It was so perfect and just so me and Mitchell.

I know this post is getting long so I will sort of wrap up this summary of my wedding. Our reception was a pretty basic reception, with some family formal, a grand entrance, speeches, first dances, and then a night of partying and dancing. It was really perfect and was so nice getting to be around family and celebrating with them. Nothing crazy really happened during our reception but it was perfect in every way. We hosted our reception back home in Fergus Falls at Elk’s Point Bar and Grill on Wall Lake (which fun fact; is the lake Mitchell grew up on). We used Cooking with Mama Sheena for our catering and she made an amazing pasta bar for us and then later on in the evening brought out some chicken wings for us. Our DJ was important to us because we wanted to have a great party so we hired Power Play DJ out of Fargo ND our DJ was amazing (and he even knew some of Mitchell’s friends and had made some songs with them) He did so amazing and was so good at reading our crowd and keeping people dancing all night. Our dessert table was from Peney cakes and she made amazing cupcakes and both our wedding cakes, she really did an amazing job and they tasted sooo good. A fun fact about our decorations, 90% of them were from Michael’s Christmas clearance and we just took out the Christmas flower and replaced them with sunflowers. It worked out really nicely and we saved so much money. We did splurge on one item which was these really cool lights that read “The Toso’s” I saw these at the Fargo Wedding Show and knew I really wanted them as a statement item for our reception. The company was Alpha Lit Fargo and they were the perfect things to have included in our decor for our dance floor.

So that basically sums up our wedding day(s). It so was important to me to be present during our days, and to make them about us and not everyone else. If I were to get married again would not change a single thing. We loved being able to spend so much time with our family in Two Harbors and it was really special getting to share Elk’s Point with the rest of our family because in the summer we spend almost every weekend there.

Our Vendors:

Dress: Xandy’s Bridal House

Hair: Hair by Serena

and Salon Eclips in Fergus Falls

Venues:

Fitzgerald Manor

Elks Point Bar and Grill

Photography

Afton Joy Photography

DJ

Power Play DJ

Fancy Lights

Alpha Lit Fargo

Food

Mama Sheena

Peney Cakes

Here are some of our images from Afton Joy Photography and we are soooo obsessed: