wedding part ii

after taking all those pictures we headed up the hill to our reception. boy were we excited - we were finally married! i was on cloud 9 and brian just could not believe it. married! i was mrs. stensler! pretty amazing if you ask me. when we got to the clubhouse, one the catering staff met us outside to see if we wanted any particular drink to be waiting at our table for us. i certainly wasn't going to pass up a drink on my wedding day so i ordered myself a beer. brian declined anything. i took one look at his awestruck, semi-shell-shocked face... and ordered him a beer as well.


the dj started playing "center field" and we followed our bridal party in to our reception. i had gotten the garden wedding that i had always hoped for, but i wanted to incorporate brian's love of baseball as well. "center field" seemed like such a fun thing to walk in to. "put me in, coach!" then we got down to business: FOOD. it was lunchtime and we had just gotten married, so we were HUNGRY. and man was there a lot of food! we had a big buffet with three different entrees and eight different salads.


jimmy, alice, paul, kerry, brian, me, ed, jackie, dave, and kirsten

we had asked the photographer to pull us away during lunch for some additional photos, so we wouldn't miss out on socializing with our guests. unfortunately he didn't and i'm not sure why not. the upshot was that we got to eat at least. i was famished and scarfed down a bunch of food but brian was too nervous to eat much of anything and didn't even touch his beer.


my beautiful bridesmaids jackie, alice, kerry, and kirsten


those boys! dave, ed, brian, paul, and jimmy




brian wanted to shoot our photographer by this point.

after we took some more pictures we went back inside. it was time for the fun stuff! we got to cut our beautiful cake - with a baseball on top, just for brian. (our tables were also "named" for different ballparks instead of just numbers, and our favors were small bags of jelly bellies and baseball gumballs.)




and man was it ever yummy. chocolate with chocolate raspberry filling and vanila buttercream frosting. delicious. and there was no smashing in the faces either. my makeup and i thanked brian for his restraint.


we danced our first dance to eric heatherly's "swimming in champagne." it was so nice to have a moment together with no one else vying for our attention. we both agreed that our first dance was our favorite part of the reception.


then, sadly, it was time to go. we were both so tired from all the excitement and activity of the day, but we were having so much fun with our guests that we didn't want to go. but we still had to. our guests saw us off in a shower of rose petals and then we hopped into brian's truck, which had been detailed and then decorated by the boys for the occasion.


we were married! it was off to spend our wedding night at the pacifica beach resort hotel, and then in a couple days we were off to our honeymoon in aruba!