[null, {"document_url": "http://coupleofcuties.blogspot.com/2011/08/anniversary-countdown-venue.html", "unformatted_src": "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0W36i1E_rL8/TkhkuBuaxdI/AAAAAAAAAc8/CQuhjitVCKE/s400/Emond_651.jpg", "src": "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0W36i1E_rL8/TkhkuBuaxdI/AAAAAAAAAc8/CQuhjitVCKE/s400/Emond_651.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Emond", "rendered_width": 400, "rendered_height": 264}, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null]

Anniversary Countdown - The Venue

The mister is running a 5K in Prospect Park today.  I feel so bad for him because it is pouring rain!  I've decided to stay safe and warm by spending the morning on the couch watching this new Paris Hilton reality show on demand.  It's always important to take a little quality time for yourself, girls.  Words of wisdom from someone who knows.

I know the blog has been a little quiet lately but life has not been.  There is so much going on around here.  The mister and I are celebrating our one year wedding anniversary next weekend.  I can't believe it has been a year!  We are planning to go back to the scene of the crime and spend a long weekend at the lake where we got married.  It was a great weekend the first time around but it went by so fast.  This time, we'll be going back just the two of us to enjoy all the fun stuff the lake has to offer.  In celebration of our pending anniversary, I'm going to post some of my wedding photos this week so we can all relive wedding memories together.
So, Post 1, The Venue!
Let me just say, I loved planning my wedding.  Yes, it was stressful, but only in the sense that I wish it could have been my full time job, wink wink.  Erik and I got engaged in December and originally thought we would get married in the Fall, but once we started looking at places and checking available weekends, our timeline somehow became a little accelerated, and we ended up settling on August 21st.
When we first got engaged, we had no idea where we wanted to get married.  I always thought I would want  a destination wedding, but it quickly became apparent that a destination wedding was not in the cards for us. We ultimately decided to get married in Pennsylvania, where I'm from and, looking back, I think it made things a lot easier for me seeing as how I tend to be a bit of a control freak when it comes to planning.  It was so important to me that we pick a place that had a special meaning.  I found it easy to become overwhelmed and intimidated when reading all the wedding blogs.  To me, it just seemed like everyone was tying the knot at their family farm, or their house upstate that they visited every year since childhood, or the summer camp where they met their fiance.   It was really annoying to me as I felt like we didn't have a place like that and I wasn't sure how we were supposed to find one in a few months.  We decided to start looking in the Poconos as it was close enough to both of our hometowns and would allow for a fun weekend getaway destination, which was important to us.  We really wanted all of our guests to enjoy the weekend and get to know eachother and have fun together.
We chose Mountain Springs Lake after visiting several (old school) Poconos venues because it was everything we wanted.  It had a great outdoor space for the ceremony, a bright, beautiful space for the reception and the most adorable log cabins for our guests to stay in.   A few minutes into our first visit, my dad and I both realized that we had actually stayed there for a week with the family exactly twenty years earlier.  Special!  Fate!  And at the end of the day, it meant so much to me that we could get married somewhere that my mom had been since she couldn't be with us on that day.

Finding the right venue really set the tone for the whole wedding and all the planning that was about to take place and I am still so thrilled with our choice.  It's not every day that something just feels "right" and this one of those times.  Take a look at some of the pics below. Posted by Carolyn at 8:39 PM