One Year Anniversary

Yesterday, August 14th, was our one year wedding anniversary!  It is so hard to believe that we have been married for a year already, time sure flies by when you're in love.  In honor of our anniversary, and because sadly I didn't have a blog when we got married and couldn't post pictures and memories from it, I'm going to do a post that combines both our wedding day and our anniversary celebration.

This is a picture of all of our friends and family that were at our wedding ceremony in Manti, Utah.  We were so thankful and blessed to have so many loving people who supported and shared this amazing day with us.  Even though we were in a random city of Utah and the sun was blazing hot, everyone that was a part of our wedding helped to make this day so incredibly special.  One of the biggest questions we got about where we were getting married, and still continue to get about where we chose to get married, is why Manti?!  Well ladies and gentlemen, look at this next picture of my amazing hubby and I in front of the Manti temple, or should I say castle of a temple, and this might give you a good idea why.  This temple is absolutely gorgeous, it is the house of the Lord and we were able to be married for time and all eternity.  When trying to decide which temple to get married in of course my first instinct was the Portland temple, my home temple.  But when discussing all of our wedding plans with Mykel, we both decided that it would be best to get married in the central location of Utah, where most of our family was located or could get to easily.  Then we went on the church's website and looked through pictures of all of the temples in Utah.  We quickly agreed on Manti, went for a little day trip down there to check out the temple and town, and knew it was the perfect temple for us.

The wedding planning continued and I had no trouble deciding what my wedding colors would be.  I wanted a summer wedding since I was a little girl, and anyone who knows me wouldn't think twice about what my favorite color is, which I'm guessing you're smart enough to figure out just by looking at these wedding pictures.  Next I decided on my flowers, which were beautiful, bright gerbera daisies.  And of course the dress shopping, which was an intimate and special day spent with my mother finding the wedding dress of my dreams.  Let's just say that the classic story of crying when I found the right dress definitely applied to me and I was so blessed to have such perfect details added to my already perfect day of marrying the man of my dreams. 

Our photographer was incredible and really gave us some amazing shots.  I would highly recommend her to anyone in Utah or even outside of Utah if you were willing to pay for transportation and she also does portraits, family pictures and baby pictures too!  She was so fun to work with and had such great ideas.  We were able to do a photo shoot with her a month before our wedding of our bridals/groomals.  Some people are against the groom seeing the bride in her dress before the wedding day, or don't think these shots are necessary.  But I am so glad that we decided to do them because we had some beautiful pictures with a mix of scenery.  The biggest positive part of it was that on our wedding day I didn't have to stress about getting the perfect wedding picture or about getting a certain amount of wedding pictures, because I knew we already had such amazing shots from our bridal/groomal session.  Here are a few more of my favorites from our wedding.

August 14th was one of the very best days of our lives and we were ecstatic to be able to celebrate it again yesterday, being one year later.  Now I guess that I should admit that there is one negative thing on this post... we forgot our camera on our anniversary weekend...  Isn't that ridiculous!  We managed to pack everything else but forgot our camera.  Luckily the hotel we stayed at had pictures online that I downloaded so we can share that, as well as the restaurant, but no pictures of us haha.  Oh well, we still had the most amazing weekend and memories to last a lifetime!

I mentioned the website City Deals on the post about our birthday celebrations and am definitely going to give props to the website once again.  An entire month before our Anniversary, when we still weren't sure what we were going to do to celebrate it, I found the ultimate deal!  It was a one night stay in a really nice hotel in Park City, Utah.  The hotel was actually called Hotel Park City and our room was an "executive suite".  This included a king size bed, jetted tub, triple-headed shower, balcony, fireplace and a kitchenette.  The deal also came with a $25 gift card to Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, as well as a $25 spa credit for a purchase of $100 of more which unfortunately I knew would go to waste haha.  And all of this put together for the incredible price of $105.  Now of course that didn't include the hotel "fee" and hotel "tax", or the fact that Ruth's Chris is one of the most expensive restaurants I've heard of... But it was all SO worth it.  Here are the pictures from hotelparkcity.com of our room:

We got to the hotel on Saturday at about 4pm to check it and relaxed in our room until our dinner reservations at 6.  Ruth's Chris was basically a part of the hotel and so all we had to do was take the elevator down to the 1st floor and we were able to enter the restaurant from inside the hotel.  Now if you haven't been to Ruth's Chris they do everything "A La Carte" and it is definitely pricey, but the steak is sensational!!  We each got a filet mignon and Mykel got shrimp with his and then we got a side of mashed potatoes to share.  They gave us a free dessert because it was our anniversary and we barely had any room at all to eat it.  But of course my stomach always makes room for chocolate dessert no matter how full I am.  This steak dinner was probably the best filet we've ever had.  They cook the steak in broilers at insane degrees and then bring them out on 500 degree plates with the butter all over the plate sizzling.  The steak was so tender, cooked perfectly and tasted incredible with nothing but the salt, pepper and butter. 

We definitely spent a lot of time just relaxing in the hotel and enjoyed having some quality time together without any worries from the world around us.  We drank lots of Martinelli's sparkling cider, watched a few movies, and did some other celebrating that I definitely won't be posting about...  Anyways, check-out Sunday wasn't until 1pm so we were able to have a relaxing morning with lots of cuddle time.  On our way home from our anniversary weekend we of course stopped by the Park City outlet mall and bought a few things.  Who can pass up outlet prices? :)  Overall the weekend was incredible and it was so special celebrating and remembering the event that happened one year ago, our marriage to each other for eternity in the Manti temple.