wedding recap: dinner and dancing

our wedding reception was a blast!! every time i write a recap, i want to say “this was my favorite part of the day”, and i got the urge to type that again! of course every party of the day was my favorite, because it was all amazing. but i really loved our reception!

if you’ve missed any of the other recaps, you can catch up!

• sneak peek
• the honeymoon
• the rehearsal
• getting ready
• the ceremony
• photos & partying

(many photos in this post were taken from friends’ facebook albums, with several from my friend katie. she and her husband have a photography business and take awesome photos. we’re so lucky that terry was able to snap some great photos from our wedding day in addition to the ones that our photographer took, especially since i want to do my recaps now, and we don’t have our other photos yet! )

our wedding reception was held at fox hills resort in mishicot, wi. everyone there was an absolute pleasure to work with, especially heather – my contact for all of the wedding planning, and they did an amazing job on our wedding day!

dinner was supposed to begin at 6pm. well, the wedding party arrived at ~6:05pm (fashionably late!), so dinner got started a bit late! plus, brad and i had to cut our cupcake, first!

we asked our baker (my cousin’s wife, jenn) to make a large cupcake for us to cut. she did an awesome job! it was a raspberry chocolate cupcake, filled with chocolate ganache, with cream cheese frosting. can i get a yum?

after our cake-cutting, the dj announced the whole wedding party and we came in to let’s get ready to rumble from jock jams! (lol, dorky i know, but i loved it!)

once we were up at the head table, our pastor said a prayer over dinner, and then we ate!

i don’t have any photos of the food, but our guests had a choice between chicken monteray, sage roasted pork, or pasta primavera. all of the meals came with roasted baby red potatoes and another vegetable (i don’t remember what it was! oops…). each person also had a chocolate covered strawberry at their place. servers came around and offered wine to everyone for the toasts (the head table got champagne!).

i hate clinking glasses to make the couple kiss. (not knocking it if you had it at your wedding – i totally join in on it at others’ weddings! i just knew that i wanted to eat my dinner, and if we did the clinking thing, we’d never get to eat!) so, we decided that if people wanted to make us kiss, they had to come up and tell a short story/memory of brad or me.

i had seen this at a couple other weddings and really liked it! it’s so much more personal. i loved hearing the stories our friends and family told! my maid of honor (liz) and brad’s best man (nick) gave really good toasts too!

after dinner, the cupcakes were served. then it was dancing time!

brad and i had our first dance to first day of my life by bright eyes.

(so sad i don’t have a photo of this yet.)

then, brad and his mom danced to in my life by the beatles.

(no picture of this yet either. )

then there was a lot of dancing! we did a grand march.

our wedding party had to make a bridge and “caught” us in it so we had to kiss to get out.

it was a blur! lol. i felt like it was in a spinning dream during this part. it was crazy being caught in the middle of everyone with all the lights going crazy. ahhh!

we also did a bouquet and garter toss. guess who caught them?!?

liz and keith!!

keith actually didn’t catch it, brad’s friend (a groomsman) curt caught it, then handed it off to keith during the dance! so the four of us got to dance to somewhere over the rainbow by israel kamakawiwo’ole.

of course, we had plenty of photo opportunities with friends during the reception!

all of my best girl friends from high school made it!

at least one person from our group has had to miss every one of our weddings except mine. it made me so happy that everyone could come!

my best friends from wash u also made it to the wedding!

these girls came from dc, boston, nyc, and la just for the wedding. seriously – i couldn’t ask for better friends!

and i thought i was tired by the end of the night.

but keith took a red-eye from california and arrived in wisconsin at 6am on the morning of the wedding to be an usher.

what a trooper!

after that, people pretty much danced and drank the night away! we had tons of food come our around 9 or 10pm to fuel the dancing and drinking! our dj* was supposed to stop playing at midnight, but people were still having fun, so he ended up playing until 1:15am! it was so so so awesome.

*i couldn’t find their wesbsite, but the company is called moonlight productions and the dj’s name is ryan. if you want more info on him, just ask.

***

i’m sure (i hope!) our photographer got more and better photos from the reception, so i’ll have to update this post once we get our pictures back from her!

*****

have you ever caught the bouquet/garter at a wedding?

i never have, but liz has caught it at least 3 times that i can remember: my cousin kris’s wedding, my cousin li