The husband and I decided to have an outdoor ceremony in my parents backyard. I hadn’t given much thought to my dream wedding, but once we got an engaged, the two of us immediately realized we wanted a wedding that was a little more unconventional. We wanted to avoid the standard hotel ballroom fare. Since we knew we had to have a summer wedding (in order to work around football season) we figured an outdoor wedding would be perfect. And where better than on my parents’ 5 acres in Wisconsin.
A backyard wedding sounded so cute and quaint. It wound up being a larger undertaking than I could have ever imagined. From figuring out a rain contingency plan (shoving everyone under the circus-sized tent) to renting all necessary dinnerware to figuring out how we were going to get and store ice, the whole wedding was as far from the cute little backyard wedding as I could have imagined. But after it was all said and done, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Despite gale force winds, the tent blowing down the night before in the huge storm that hit us, the DJ losing power 3 times, the caterer being short on servers (meaning that some of our friends had to help serve dinner), the wind almost blowing the tent over again AND nearly canceling our fireworks show, it really was the best wedding ever, and it’s because we had an elegant backyard wedding whose entire purpose was to forgo formality and have fun celebrating with friends and family.
I’d never want to do it over again, but it certainly was a fun time.
-jess
