Kimberly is my sister in law, I married her brother when she was 4 years old. I’ve watched her grow up, pulled her teeth, babysat her, cried with her, let her kidnap my children for road trips, face painting, game and movie nights, helped her redecorate, paint, move, had numerous heart to heart conversations and depended on her for just about everything.

If I need a helping hand, there is Kim. If I need someone to help me think it through, there is Kim. If I need someone to hold me together as

Emma wanted to wear her grandmothers wedding dress, ok. She had her grandmother make her a beautiful orange jacket to go over top, great. Now what? We thought about and tried jewelry, she absolutely did not want a tiara of any kind. We thought about headbands, hair clips, simpler things that maybe we could adorn with buttons since that was the kind of theme she was going with. She wasn’t happy with anything we came up with. So now what?

The more I thought about the dress and the fact that it

When Emma was planning to marry she didn’t want a bridal shower. She had only ever been to showers that were in her words “skanky” and “embarrassing beyond words”. Well that’s not who we are and I know that if I turned the party over to her sisters, sisters in law and aunt that those words would not come up or even be spoken.

The other problem in that most people are so accustomed to bad shower games and icky presents that it’s hard to get people to attend, especially if you’re inviting

I’m a big fan of marrying your best friend. People talk about it all the time but I’m not sure how many people really do it or understand it. Your best friend should be the first person you think about when something funny happens and you’ve just got to tell someone. Your best friend should be the person you can talk to about anything or nothing, the person who giggles with you when you do something embarrassing, the person who understands that sometimes you cry for nothing but you still need a

When we started planning Emma’s wedding she didn’t have a vision of how she wanted it to look. She did however have some specific ideas; 1. she didn’t want a cake, she doesn’t like cake, she likes pie, 2. she didn’t want flowers, she wanted buttons, refer to the article titled the button party, 3. she wanted to sit on her great grandmothers swing, refer to the article Emma’s swing, and 4. she wanted to wear her grandmothers wedding dress.

These are the orders we started with in planning her

In preparing for my daughter Emma’s wedding we decided to make it a family event as much as possible. This would include her old family, her new family, the in-laws, the out-laws, everyone she loved.

This wedding reception was to be very unique, I know people say that all the time when really they just come up with more bling and a different color, but this was going to be fairly different and so it would require a lot of handmade things, which also means time!

Emma doesn’t really like cut