Our Wedding Video

Our wedding day was one of the most memorable days I've yet to experience. And finally, the day has come when I can share our wedding highlight video! It only took a short period of time for us to figure out that working with Good Earth Films would be the best decision for us regarding capturing our day on video. Alex and James, who happen to be the most precious married couple ever, were such a dream to work with! We first met them for a consultation at Maxie B's in Greensboro. And from that day, we knew we were in good hands.

So without further ado, go and view our video here! If you are in the mist of planning a wedding, I hope our video inspires you to have a videographer a part of your big day. I can't tell you how many times we have watched our film! There were so many moments that had us rolling with laughter and it's been such a joy to "experience" all over again and as often as we want!

Photo's taken by Callie with Nancy Ray Photography

Our Wedding: The Reception

Happy Wednesday, y'all! If you missed Monday or Tuesday's blog posts you can read them here and here if you want to get caught up on my past wedding posts! Today I'm excited to share our reception with you as it was one of the most fun parts of our whole wedding day! For our reception venue, we knew we wanted to find a space that had a rustic feel to it, with exposed brick, floor-to-ceiling windows, and had an open floor plan that we could customize to our liking. The Cotton Room in Durham had all of the above and more. It was just what we had been dreaming of and ended up being the perfect reception venue for us.

We also put a lot of thought into our menu selections. Some of the most talked-about items were the pimento cheese sliders with fried green tomato and BBQ pork puppies that were passed out during cocktail hour, along with the goat cheese smashed potatoes. Will's favorite item of the night was the beef tenderloin which was one of the main dish items. I'd have to agree that it was defiantly the fan favorite of the night!

Our wedding cake and desserts were just as delicious and came from The Cupcake Shoppe. We decided to go with one small cake to cut, along with four different mini cupcake options for all to enjoy. The choice to have a smaller cake and cupcakes saved us money in the long run and allowed our guests to have multiple options to choose from which I think they appreciated. If you are wondering, the flavors we went with were called Big Red, Black and White, Cookie Monster, and What's Up Doc.

Our first dance was to Ray LaMontagne's You Are The Best Thing. Doing our first dance was something we both really looked forward to because we had been taking dance lessons weeks leading up to our big day, and even had it choreographed so it was fun having something to "perform" for everyone! My dad and I danced to The Way You Look Tonight by Frank and Will and his Mom danced to My Wish by the Rascal Flatts. Dancing occurred from the minute we arrived, all the way up to our sparkler exist. I think this had a lot to do with our amazing band, The Troupers. They did such an amazing job, played all the songs we asked them to and were interactive with all of our guests. They defiantly brought the party to life!

Cap Maison

Y'all, it's Friday and I'm getting MARRIED tomorrow! Eek! I can't believe our big day is finally here and the countdown is over. To say we are excited for our life as one to begin would be an understatement. And what better way for us to enjoy being newlyweds then to travel to a destination that neither of us have yet to experience, and to celebrate our first days of marriage as just the two of us, savoring all of the blissful and relaxing moments that we have been dreaming about for months?!

So welcome to Cap Maison friends! The place Will and I will call "home away from home" for a full week following our wedding day. I mean....did you look at those pictures above?! All of the photos came from Cap Maison's website and I can't help but sit here and daydream about how amazing this place will be when we see it in person. We will be staying in an 'ocean view' Junior Suite that has it's own private veranda and even a minibar. Y'all, I can't wait to wake up early, have breakfast in bed some mornings, and some days even outside, and spend our days exploring the property and all of St. Lucia. 

For most of you, you know that I'm a planner, but when it came to planning our honeymoon, we wanted to leave our schedule pretty open. Of course we have a list of things we want to do, but we want our time to be spent relaxing, going with the flow and being as flexible as possible. Something we both struggle with doing and thought would be the perfect time to practice while on vacation. Even though we don't have much set-in-stone, we are looking forward to our helicopter ride from the airport to our hotel once we arrive, going snorkeling, visiting La Soufriere Volcano and the Sulfur Springs Park in Soufriere, checking out the Castries Market and eating lots of yummy food.

I'll be documenting my time in St. Lucia periodically via Instagram (@mmackvick) and Snapchat (@mscheek) so be sure to follow along over the next week and when I get back I'll be doing a few recap posts. Have a great weekend, y'all! Can't wait to catch up when I get back!

The Answer is YES: The Celebration

Happy Wednesday, y'all! Up to this point, you've heard about and have hopefully read my previous two posts on Will and I's recent engagement. If you are new to my blog or have not had the chance to read the previous two posts, you can do so here and here. But I know you must be itching to hear all of the final details from that sweet July 26th weekend so I won't make you wait any longer! Be sure to read the entire post though because I will be breaking the silence and letting you in on some news that Will and I have to share...and I mean BIG news...

...After driving around for about ten minutes, my stomach started to growl which was a good thing because we had finally arrived to where we were going for dinner. I never did find out where we were until after we had parked on the 6th floor of a parking deck, and got on an elevator and headed to the 27th floor when we were greeted by a sign that read Bentley's Restaurant on 27. I had never heard of the place but it looked AMAZING! 

After getting settled at our table, we received complimentary champagne and toasted to the start of the next chapter in our life together. Luckily, there were very few people in the restaurant, and it felt as if we were the "stars of the show" and received amazing service (which I think would be superb even if they were busy) and had the opportunity to walk around the whole restaurant and enjoy the many beautiful views of Charlotte as the sun began to settle down.

No celebratory meal of any kind should be without some sort of appetizer so we ordered the Grown-Up Macaroni and Cheese, and then got to talking about all the planning and behind-the-scene details that Will had been keeping on the down-low for weeks. But let me just say real quick that the appetizer was to-die-for and consisted of Maine Lobster, Black Truffles and three cheese sauce! Ahhhhmazing.

Okay, so as you can imagine I wanted to know every last detail and made sure Will left nothing out when he was recapping the whole planning process. It went something like this:

• Will did in fact ask for my dad's permission and one of the comments my dad made to Will was something along the lines of "It would be a blessing from Heaven to have you officially part of the family". Yes, I am a daddy's girl and Will knew that I would say no if he didn't get my dad's permission first!
• A picture is worth a thousand words right? Well I made sure that Will knew that I wanted someone to take photos on the day of the proposal so he made sure to find someone to do just that. The wonderfully sweet Caitlin was going to take all the photos that day but had to go out of town that weekend. Emily was going to be a part of the day one way or another so Will recruited her to be the photographer and person to get me out of the house, look decent and left as clueless as possible. Good job, you two. Oh and how could I forget to mention that Emily even came up with a hashtag for us to use. #MelandWillSealTheDeal ;-)
• The now fiance also knew that I wouldn't want to be proposed to in front of a lot of people, but wanted to make it as special as possible so he went above and beyond what I would have even guessed and had my family in on the whole thing! Family is number one in my life besides God so this was literally the best part of the whole thing in my opinion.
• Oh, if you didn't already know, I am extremely detail oriented and like to be organized and Will happens to be the same way to a certain degree and created an in-depth itineraries for my parents and Emily to utilize so that there was zero confusion on anything the day of. I may have laughed out loud who he told me that and asked him to show me the itineraries he created and I just had to share some of it with you...
  
  Melissa and I are going to go to breakfast and then the mall in the morning and will plan to get back by 1:45 pm.  I will say I  have to run into the office and then you can show up at 2:00 pm and take her to get her nails done and whatever else you think she would like to do, just make sure you keep her out of the house until at least 3:30 pm.  I’ll come back around 2:30 pm (after y’all leave and will set up some flowers and stuff, but will be gone by 3:30 pm).
  
  
  Schedule:
  2:00 pm – Emily arrives at apartment and takes Melissa to get nails done (and whatever else you think she would like to do).  Tell her that I texted you and felt bad I had to go into work and asked you to come hangout with her – doubt she will buy it but it’s worth a shot haha.
  
  
  [Keep her out of the apartment until at least 3:30]
  
  
  After 3:30 pm – Emily and Melissa return to the apartment and get ready for Dinner (I have told her we are meeting a colleague and his wife for dinner uptown tell her you are going to go meet a friend at the epicenter for drinks and you can just drive her up there since I will already be uptown at the office).
  
  
  5:40 pm – Emily and Melissa leave apartment and head to Marshall Park (address below). 
• Will was defiantly thinking ahead and had visited the park prior to the day of to figure out the best area for him to hide, for Emily to take photos, for him to get down on one knee and to see what areas would look best in photos.
• Remember how we were suppose to have a "dinner date" with Will's co-worker and his wife? Yeah, that was all part of the plan. Will had made all of that up! He never talked to his co-worker about going to dinner, he never went into work before "dinner" and everything was all made up.

Whew! Sorry for all the details...I didn't want to leave anything out though! After story time, we ate a delicious meal and then had to say our goodbyes to my family before they headed back home to Greensboro. Will and I finally had the chance to respond to the out pour of text messages we had and made phone calls to our family that we hadn't already talked to and told them the news. We even stopped by Menchie's for some frozen yogurt because what meal is complete without dessert? And plus, it's so good and hard to pass up. 

And that's pretty much how the story goes, y'all! Don't you think Will did an AMAZING job with everything?! I couldn't be more excited to be his fiance and future wife! We are having a ball planning for our wedding and i'm happy to say that we both agree that we want a marriage more beautiful than our wedding. I think we both realized that while we were completing PRE-ENGAGEMENT courses. Yeah, those do exist and if you're serious about your relationship, any and all the help you can get is worth it! But why would Will and I feel that we needed to take pre-engagement classes before pre-marital classes? Well...I'll tell you why. Part of the reason is because of our big announcement...

WE ARE MOVING TO HOUSTON, TEXAS!

Goodness, it feels so good to finally be able to say that out loud! Will and I have known for some time now, but wanted to make sure that we were not letting our excitement get the best of us! We will be moving down before we get married next June and are going to visit over Labor Day weekend to look at apartments and townhouses! We plan to look in the Galleria and Rice Village areas but will need to be pretty close to Post Oak Parkway where Will's office is located.

This leads me to letting you all know why Houston. Will currently works at a middle-market investment bank here in Charlotte as an Analyst, and typically an analyst is in that role for two years before they start applying for an associate level position. Well, Will completed his second year last year and his firm thought he had been doing so well that they offered him to stay on for a third year which is usually unheard of. Of course he accepted and has been excelling at what he does. All of the long hours and hard work paid off, but like any analyst, one must start applying and looking for associate positions since that is the next step if you plan to stay in this type of business. 

So a few months ago, Will traveled and interviewed with firms in multiple states, New York, Boston, and Washington DC to name only a few. We decided to take New York off the list pretty earlier on just because it wouldn't be an ideal place for us to live. Washington DC was next off the list since there weren't that many options that Will was interested in. But a great opportunity came around for Will and I to move down to Houston where his firm has another location that is in need of an associate. Yet again, Will has gone above and beyond in his current role and has proved how strong his work ethic truly is. And the rest is history!

I can't begin to explain to you all how happy I am with all that God has done in my life and I am beyond excited to see what kind of adventures God has in store for us in Houston. Even though I have never lived in a state other then North Carolina, yet alone more than two hours hours away from my parents, this move isn't our "final destination". An associate role generally goes for about two years and from there we will decide what we want to do.

In the coming weeks and months, I would love to hear from y'all on any recommendations you might have for places to go and things to do!
   

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