Life as Mr. & Mrs.

After many years of dating and engagement, and what seemed like a lifetime of wedding planning and such.....we are finally Mr. & Mrs.

Although I wish I could tell you that we are in some sort of fairy land with rainbows and unicorns, life is pretty much the same. Everything feels the same, we are back to our normal routines, but we simply have a piece of paper that will give us a tax break and I have to deal with the paperwork nightmare of changing my name.

Don't get me wrong, being married is AWESOME, but that is simply because life is the way it has been. We loved each other and our life before getting married. So the fact that our life is the same and we still feel the same about each other is perfect.

Here's to hoping we have a lifetime of happiness, love, fun adventures, and general AWESOMENESS :-)

First Day as Husband & Wife

After a crazy weekend of AWESOMENESS, Kevin and I spent Sunday having even more fun.

We started the day off by sleeping in, what a wonderful treat after so many busy days. We ordered room service for breakfast which was quite delicious. We had a number of visitors stop by as they began their journeys home.

We spent the day at the Aquarium of the Pacific with both of our parents. It was super crowded because there was some sort of Halloween thing for little kids, but we were still able to see quite a few cool sea creatures.

Cool Pumpkin LEGO man at the Aquarium - I think they were having a contest.

After going all around the aquarium we headed back to the hotel, thankfully Kevin's parents drove so we didn't have to do the walk again. We sat and chatted in the hotel for a little while and then Kevin and I relaxed for the rest of the evening.

We ordered room service for dinner, which was wonderful and we didn't have to go out at all. Instead of anything exciting, we instead fell asleep early which we so needed.

Us just before digging in to our awesome room service dinner :-)

The next morning was our day to head back home. We repacked the car to fit everything in, checked out, turned in our marriage license at the LAX court house, picked up our wedding gifts from my parents and headed back to our home as husband and wife.

It was a wonderful weekend and everything worked out so well. Here's to hoping that we can always remember how wonderful our wedding was and make the rest of our life just as AWESOME.

Dance Time!!!

After it all, planning, setup, getting ready, the ceremony, dinner, speeches, it was finally dance time.

What is there to say about the dance time? It was AWESOME. We danced right up to the end and just thoroughly enjoyed it. It was dance music pretty much the whole time. The only slow dance (not the singular) was near the end when the celebration was winding up.

The DJs were great and kept the party going. They danced, played limbo and who knows what else. I wish I could remember every detail, but unfortunately I was having too much fun to notice it all.

Not even on the dance floor, and still dancing away :-)

There was only one interruption to dancing and that was to cut the cake. This is the infamous cake we got at Baskin Robbins on Thursday. We put on our ponchos and suddenly everyone was paying attention. I guess putting on funny looking poncho grabs people, or maybe it was because they knew something ridiculous was going to happen. We cut the cake, or attempted to, which was rather difficult since the cake was still pretty frozen. After finally breaking off a piece of cake, the fun times began. We smash cake all over each other's faces and had lovely blue faces for pictures. I wouldn't trade that experience for the world.

Kerri got one of the best pictures of the cake smashing aftermath - don't worry, I got more cake on Kevin's face after this picture was taken

P.S. the ponchos worked great and our outfits stayed perfectly clean. :-)

I can only hope we can continue to dance for the rest of our lives. Dancing in the car, the living room, anywhere that good dance music begins, we will bust out our incredible white people dance skills. :-)

Speeches

After everyone had sat down with their dinner, we commenced speeches.

It began with Adrienne, my maid of honor. She had not been having the best day so far, but her speech definitely came from the heart. Lionel, Kevin's best man, gave a speech about how Kevin is good at every game or sport you play against him at.

My dad then gave a speech about our wedding was just another special moment that he would always remember. Kevin's parents spoke about how proud they were and how they have seen us grow in the years we have been together.

After those speeches, we then opened up the mic to anyone who wanted to say something. All of the bridesmaids and groomsmen spoke, and then to my surprise my uncle spoke. My Uncle Sid is an amazing man, and I was definitely in shock when he stood up. My surprise continued when he spoke. He spoke about how proud he was of me and Kevin. Even though he didn't really know Kevin, what he did know about him made him so happy. My uncle was happy that we were doing what we wanted to do and seemed to be having a great time doing it. I'm not sure there are any words to describe my happiness in having my uncle say these words. To make my uncle proud is something that I had always hoped to do, and it seems like I have succeeded.

In addition to my uncle speaking, he pulled me aside during the dance time and wanted to dance with me. He told me he was not very good at dancing (neither am I) and he then repeated those same words. He was just so happy that we were doing what we wanted. My uncle expressed his joy for us and how he wished he could have done exactly what he wanted.

I know this is not the most well written explanation of what happened, but it doesn't matter. I, personally, will always remember the words and emotions expressed by our family and friends. And in the end, that is all that matters. My memories will outweigh my horrible writing skills.

I can only hope that we will continue to make everyone proud and continue doing what we want and loving life. :-)

World Record Ceremony?

After all of the prep work and setup, we were ready to go. Everyone was lined up and the ceremony was about to begin.

Kevin, and then all of the groomsmen and bridesmaids walked in. Then it was my turn. I remember asking my parents if my hear should be beating this fast. It felt like it was going to jump out of my chest. I'm not sure what I was nervous about? I knew I was marrying the right person and I knew the room look awesome. I think more than anything I was just nervous to have everyone look at me.

I made it down the aisle, gave each of my parents a hug and took my place on the stage under the chuppah. The ceremony proceeded, with Jeff Kogen officiating. We had written out a script, so we knew everything that would be said. It was beautiful, even though I can't remember much of it.

Photo by Daniel Nguyen - It's amazing anyone got a picture of the ceremony since it was sooooo short :-)

We all walked out after the ceremony and into the lounge to sign our marriage license. Now, it was official, we had the ceremony and we signed the license.

It wasn't until we were talking to guests that we realized how short our ceremony was. Estimate of 9 minutes including walking in and out. Sounds perfect. We did video record our ceremony, but I doubt we will ever actually watch it, but at least we have it for the memories.

I can only hope we will live up to our vows and have a harmonious relationship of equality. In addition, I can only hope that we can continue to be as efficient as our ceremony was. :-)

Getting Fancified :-)

After getting a lot of the decorations setup and falling a bit behind schedule, I finally went into the lounge with my bridesmaids to get ready.

I hadn't really planned much out, like anything. I knew I had to do my hair and makeup, but beyond that I knew nothing. Thankfully my bridesmaids are much more girly than I am. Libby and Shayna became my hairstylists extraordinaire, and Adrienne became my fabulous makeup artist.

I sat in a chair for what felt like hours (even though it was only an hour max). They straightened my hair, teased my hair, curled my hair, super hair sprayed my hair and who knows what else. I couldn't actually see what was happening, but the entire time I kept trying to look up and to the sides to see what was happening (which isn't very effective to see behind you.) I did finally decide to hold my camera above my head and snap a photo. The first one didn't turn out so well, but the second one worked and I finally knew for sure that there were two people working on my hair, rather than ghosts or something.

My wonderful hairstylists/bridesmaids (one of the only pictures I got during getting ready time. Our photographer Margaret took a bunch of amazing pictures of this time :-)

My sister did my makeup while I was getting my hair done, and that was just as complicated because I was not allowed to move my head and now I was being told to close my eyes. Talk about complicated. I wanted to see everything, but had to close my eyes, and couldn't look around because I had to hold my head perfectly still. In the end, it was all worth it. My wonderful bridesmaids made me look so beautiful. They were all so wonderful and helped me out so much.

We somehow got me zipped into my dress, I handed out the AWESOME lego bouquets, too pictures, and then the waiting began. With cocktail hour before the ceremony, I stayed in the lounge so nobody would see my all dressed up. Shayna was sweet enough to stay with me the whole time, and Adrienne brought us some appetizers. This was the longest hour, just waiting, but before I knew it, we were getting lined up for the ceremony.

I can only hope that I don't have to dress up fancy anytime soon. While I know I looked nice, the time and pain are just not worth it. At least, I have lots of pictures showing me all fancified :-)

LEGO Flower Bouquet

The most important part of our wedding, other than the actual marriage part, was my bouquet and my bridesmaids bouquets.

While most brides visit florists and bring in wedding magazine photos and color swatches to pick flowers and arrangements and such, I did none of that. About a year before we even got engaged, I had found a picture of a LEGO vase with LEGO flowers in it. I decided to try to recreate it, but it didn't turn out quite like the picture. Nevertheless, I loved the concept of LEGO flowers and decided that we should use LEGO flowers at our wedding instead of real flowers.

Photo by Karla Nunez

Now the idea seemed so simple, but a few hundred LEGOs, assemble them into flower shapes, attach some sort of stem thing, tie them together and you're done. Well, it didn't turn out that simple.

Photo by Margaret Jacobsen - our photographer

Assembling the LEGOs was the easy part, but then we had to epoxy each petal on so that they wouldn't fall apart as easily. Kevin thankfully has the precision and skill to complete this task. We had to put two points of epoxy on the underside of each petal to try to help them stay together.

Once the flowers were all made, it was time to make stems. We settled on a twisted metal wire thing that we found at Lowe's. I cut enough pieces to make all of the stems, with only a few injuries in the process. The only problem was how to connect the stems perpendicular to the flower itself. Kevin had heard about epoxy putty and figured out how to make this step work. It was almost like using silly putty, but extra sticky and smelly. It took a couple weeks to complete this step, since every flower had to be attached and then almost sculpted to make the connections pretty and consistent.

Photo by Kerri Quezada

Now we had a ton of LEGO flowers on stems. Success. It should all be easy breezy from here. Wrong. The flowers won't just bend into bouquet. So I had an idea to use foam hemispheres and stick each flower through in it's particular spot. This would give us the shape we envisioned. This step went pretty smoothly.

But you couldn't just pull all the stems together at the bottom, since the flowers would just spring back together after we removed the foam. So we painstakingly bent each stem to a center point and secured them together with a rubber band. They were finally starting to look like bouquets.

We started cutting out the foam and the flowers began to come back together once the foam was gone. I will admit it, I had a breakdown and was crying and thought the world was going to end. Kevin was able to use his amazing skills and bend each flower to it's exact position. Thank goodness he is a talented LEGO flower bouquet creator, or I might have passed out.

Photo by John Shen

After many weeks of dealing with each of steps, we were finally almost done. We secured the flowers together at the stem level with some sort of construction adhesive, to keep them from wiggling, and then we wrapped the stems with awesome red ribbon. Finally we had LEGO bouquets.

A project that I thought would take a couple of weeks ended up taking about 9 months to complete, but in the end it was totally worth it. We had created beautiful LEGO flower bouquets that matched not only our wedding, but who we are as people. I had been very cautious to make sure nobody saw the bouquets until the wedding day, and they were a hit. From all of the guests to the catering staff, everybody was fascinated with the bouquets and asking lots of questions about them. It made all of the work worth it.

Photo by Shayna Isenberg

We now have a beautiful LEGO flower bouquet centerpiece on our dining table that will always remind us of our wedding. And my bridesmaids each have a LEGO bouquet in their homes as well. A craft project that took way longer than expected, ended up looking way better than I could imagine. :-)

(P.S. all of the pictures are from guests at the wedding. the bouquets were probably one of the most photographed elements of the wedding :-) can't ask for much more)