okay, i’ve made y’all wait long enough. let’s conclude this story already so we can move into post-wedded bliss! after everyone had traveled upstairs to the reception hall, we got IN THERE!

i don’t really have photos of the food because it was gobbled up immediately, but 4 rivers catered so it was barbecue and macaroni and cheese, which was the biggest hit and i could not get seconds. one of the main tips people kept giving me was to make sure i ate because brides often forget. but i love food, so i am not most brides.

after, my sweet mother made a speech that opened up reminding everyone in my family (and informing the newcomers) that when i was in montessori school i sang “a whole new world” at my graduation, accompanied by a sixteen year old boy who worked at chuck e. cheese. i don’t remember, but he must have been my first crush, right? i don’t have a photo of her during the speech, so take this one of her simply being radiant while dancing:

then ellie made her speech, which she had planned, and then completely abandoned. that’s my girl!

and then we had our first dance as MARRIED FOLK!! we danced to duke ellington’s version of “rhapsody in blue,” which is one our favorite pieces of music ever, and also one of my favorite sequences in fantasia 2000, haha.

and then we were both immediately done being the center of attention so we kicked off the actual dancing. someone made sure to tell the dj “we’re all gay,” so the tunes were tight. it also resulted in some amazingly chaotic photos that i will share with you now.

this culminated when “dancing queen” came on, and it became my personal dreamscape.

thank you all for being a part of that personal life achievement.

after this, we cut the cake! which actually means we went outside to the ice cream truck that had pulled up playing its siren song!

i cant be sure, but i think it was a hit.

again, i wish i got seconds, but the ice cream man drove off into the night without me.

as the party wound down, i kept trying to help clean up but no one would let me?? so rude, but whatever! jake and i had a little staycation planned at universal’s cabana bay, so we packed our cars up and drove to wind down at their bar. that’s where i discovered my wallet was missing!

through my excellent deductive reasoning, i figured out that it had been thrown away. into the trash. my whole wallet. i had had it in a bag of food i ran to get on my walgreens run, and for some reason, the venue staff thought it would be good to just toss it! i proceeded to get blazing drunk and yell about it for an hour, encounter trouble entering our room because of lack of ID (in my wallet!), and cry a bit (a lot). thank you to the friends and strangers who took pity on me, and also a smaller thank you to whoever from the venue went through their trash the next day to find it.

all in all, the fact that i managed to go basically the entire day without having a major breakdown is shocking and impressive. i woke up the next day with my beehive still in and makeup half on, but my lashes made it off, so that’s something! jake and i both had fully succumbed to colds that we spent the next few days fighting off (i had been taking like fifteen vitamins a day for weeks trying to avoid it), but since it was forty degrees out we didn’t feel so bad using all of our honeymoon time on laying in bed and watching trash tv.

thank you for following along the best day of my life! i still haven’t written thank you cards so this will have to suffice for now. i love all of you so much, and i will never stop telling you.

all fancy photos in this post were taken by madeline barr!