Married by the Lake on 8/8/08

My husband to be and I had our first 'talk' about what we were doing early in the year of 2008 after having gone through a very difficult situation after breaking up and then finding ourselves constantly together like never before. I remember my mother was in town, and asking her to watch my little girl who was almost 2.5 at the time as he and I walked a few blocks down the street to Cactus on Alki and ordered a "Dirty Belvedere Martini" and a "Maker's on the Rocks".

I think the conversation started with me asking, "So, what are we doing?" and it wasn't long after this conversation that he started mentioning the date...8/8/08. I remember telling him that we could not start talking about dates until I had a ring, or at least a proposal story, we weren't even officially engaged!

For my birthday a few months later, on a day that wi/out the year adds up to 8 ironically, he surprised me by providing the restaurant with a ring that they presented to me at the end of the meal...and we were officially engaged! I remember that he had printed out communication he had had with my folks and everything so I texted them with "I said Yes!".

From here everything happened so fast! We had agreed that 8/8/08 made sense because it was a day that based on so many sources would be a lucky day, and based on us both coming from families of multiple divorces we needed all the luck we could get! First thing we did was start talking about what kind of wedding we wanted, money was pretty tight and we decided we would use a local public park. He made the call to the city parks to find out which parks were available and one day the three of us all went out to the different parks to pick one, we picked one that is called Colman Park here in Seattle that is right on Lake Washington and it was just perfect, a nice rolling hill with a walkway leading to a platform by the lake and everything.

Once we had the location picked out we worked on our 'list' of who to invite, and with people like this it was narrowed down to just about everyone we knew! Especially anyone who had anything to do with us meeting or getting together and of course our family members, who came from all over! We had people from all over the US who came to our wedding which just blew me away, I really wasn't expecting that. My little girl was the flower girl too, and my younger sister and another girl the same age who was a long time neighbor were the junior bridesmaids. Our sisters and a dear friend of mine were the bridesmaids!

From here it was all just working out details, we booked the Masonic Lodge Hall where he is a mason for our reception and I made the calls to rent some chairs for the park ceremony and to rent some glasses for the reception. Our family and friends all pitched in to do things like make invitations, get good deals on drinks, keep and eye on my daughter, provide flowers, return things afterward and cook the fabulous food my husband had scripted out for the evening.

As I mentioned it was definitely a whirlwind but fabulous and beautiful wedding that happened in the Summer of 2008 on 8/8/08 here in Seattle. We even left that night for our almost week long honeymoon in Belize!

Tips Summarized:

* Remember why you are doing it, details are details and keeping things as simple as possible helps everyone involved!

* Ask for help! It is a time when there is so many things that will pop up responsibility wise and the more you can delegate to willing participants the better!

* Split the decisions, for us this worked well, my husband handled the food for instance, and I handled things like renting chairs and glassware.

* Don't drink too much you'll want to remember it! For me this was an easy decision because I got a 'positive' test result just 2 weeks before the wedding resulting in our daughter being born the following April!

* Have fun, none of the details are worth not enjoying your wedding!