Wedding

This post will cover the wedding ceremony, social hour, and reception. In case you missed what happened the rest of the day you can read about that here>>>Pre-Wedding Day

Wedding Ceremony

The ceremony was just so special. I always find it so bizarre how wedding ceremonies are often like 5 or 10 minutes. There’s was about 40 minutes.

He later told me he was getting emotional with the bridal party walking down the aisle and “Marry Me” (by Train) being played by the string quartet.

Sweetest moment – Drew and Caitlyn did not see each other before the wedding, so when the doors opened and there she stood, Drew just lost it, but it was the sweetest ugly cry I’ve ever seen. Sweet that Alex was comforting him.

They wrote their own vows, which were so sweet and special. Makes those vows and that time so much more personal.

The first act as a married couple was to serve communion to everyone. Here they are serving their bridal party first, so some of them could act as ushers.

Just a beautiful time

Two of my favorite shots as they recessed

Social Hour
From there most people went into a large lobby area, where we had someone playing the piano, while everyone socialized and enjoyed charcuterie boards and bottled waters. Of course, the family, bridal party, and Drew & Caitlyn were not there because pictures!

Since they didn’t do a first look, there would be a good amount of time to fill before their grand entrance into the reception.

Rob and I and our side of the family got our pics done first so we could go into the social hour and help with the timing of everything. Since the ceremony went a little longer than we expected we extended the social hour (which wasn’t even an hour) another 15 minutes. Attendees seemed to really enjoy this time. Lots of conversation and snacking. In fact almost all the boards were empty by the time we moved into the reception room.

Gary playing all the beautiful tunes.

We asked a friend of ours to be in charge of lots of things that day. She was tasked with making sure things happened especially with the logistics of the social hour and reception. She announced to the attendees when it was time to move into the reception hall and to make sure they had looked to see what table they were at, as we did assigned seating.

We decided to do this because we had been at a few weddings in the last year. We liked not having the guess work of figuring out where to should sit. Makes for lots of work on our end, but easier for attendees.

Reception
After everyone settled into the reception room, our friend Ben, announced that we would be playing Drew & Caitlyn trivia. Since photos were going to take over an hour, we wanted to try fill the time with several different activities to make sure folks were less likely to be bored.

Here Meredith is going through the round 2 questions with Caitlyn’s boss.

There were 3 rounds of questions. We had slides with questions on them and after the person answered. The next slide would have the correct answer. It was kind of funny that all three rounds everyone got 2 out of 3 correct. I think people really learned some things about them.

After that was the grand entrances, which was announced (pre-recorded) by Ric Smith, voice of Jordan-Hare Stadium. Exciting and a special touch that Drew wanted. So nice of Ric to do that for them.

Rob welcomed everyone and made some announcements and said a blessing.

Then, it was time for dinner so 3-4 tables were announced at a time to help with crowd control.

We served Tazikis and I don’t think we got any pictures of the buffet, but the food was really good.

We served sweet tea, unsweet tea, Toomer’s Lemonade, and water along with 12 different sodas. After the announcement the crowd wasted no time getting to the drink table for the Toomer’s Lemonade!

I went and got a shot of couple of the night at the head table.

Once all the tables were called we started toasts (Best Man, Matron of Honor, Bride’s dad, Groom’s mom [that was me] and then there were a few others mainly bridal party that said sweet words).

At this point the band came to the stage and announced the 1st dances (Bride & Groom, Bride and Dad, Groom and Mom).

Caitlyn had found an idea where the bride and groom go around to every table and get a picture with each table and then once they got their pics taken you go to the dance floor. As people got to the dance floor, our nieces and nephews handed out personalized flashing LED glow sticks. This all went really well, except I think some people had already left or were in the bathroom.

Alex and Madison with the glow sticks

I’m so glad people asked for pictures with us, because once again I was pretty out of it and wasn’t thinking about that. That’s really unlike me, but again just so tired. After all I had been up since 3am! Oh I by this point, I had taken my dress shoes off, gone bare foot, and then found my flip flops because my feet were killing me with all the dancing! So thankful I had my flip flops with me.

Selfie with my friend MJ that lives in Huntsville now.

Cake cutting. Top part Gluten free and it was amazing!

We also had a dessert table that was raided way before the cake cutting, but wanted to show some of that.

Then Grandfathers gave advice and encouraged everyone to give their own advice by filling out the Advice and Well Wishes sheets and put in the special box that Caitlyn’s PaPa made.

To get people back on the dance floor, the band asked for all the married couples to come dance. Then they eliminated couples by saying if you been less than a day, less than a year, less than 5 years, etc.

Rob’s Aunt and Uncle and Caitlyn’s grandparents have both been married 51 years, just a few months a part.

It’s a thing now to have a ‘late night’ snack during wedding receptions, so we had Foosackley’s chicken fingers announced. Those were quite popular. Didn’t have many of those left.

More dancing

Then, send off. If you ever been to an Auburn football game you know what Tiger Walk is…And that’s what Drew and Caitlyn wanted for their send off. Orange and Blue shakers. Since they were both in the Auburn University Marching Band and played trombone they wanted some live music, so what better than to have 5 trombone players come play the fight song, “War Eagle” and “Glory.”

Caitlyn’s bridal party waiting to run through Tiger Walk!

Then, they got in a limo and drove off…

What a day! Such a special day!

Hope you enjoyed hearing about it. I’m sure I’ll be back with lots more photos, once we get the pics from the photographer.

In case you missed other wedding week posts:
Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Pre-Wedding Day |