NL2134

Carnival doesn't give you those locations until your final call 2 weeks before your sailing. They will take down preferences, but can't guarantee them.

The only exception to that is if you book the DJ, then you will have reception in the night club since that is the only room set up for DJ. But, otherwise, you won't know any location details until the final call, which can happen 1-3 weeks before cruise. Most people get the call about 2 weeks before. I got the call about 3 weeks before, but I've seen some people say it was closer to only a week prior. Like Carnival_Brides said, you can let them know your venue preference, but it can depend on availability, wedding size, and what other weddings they have that day, so there are no guarantees that you will get what you want. If there are multiple weddings that day, they may need to put each wedding into the venue best suited for the number of guests, rather than stated preferences.

That's the same price list we had. They also had another unpublished price list for alternate packages and packages with the photo books.

With the help of our parents, we ended up getting the whole package. That included all printed photos (they print posed photos on 8x10 and all others on 5x7), (1) CD, (2) 20x30 canvases, (1) 24x36 metal print, and the photo books. There were two photo books, one with posed photos and one with ceremony & reception photos. The books really are great quality. The pages are more of a thick cardboard and lay flat when book is open. They also come in nice leather boxes, although I wish we could fit both books in one box. They have been great for showing off the wedding to people that couldn't attend. The books are hard to see quality from a photograph, but I've attached some photos of mine so you can get an idea of what they look like. In the first photo, I have the other book and the box underneath the book.

We also really like the metal print we received, so I'd recommend that if you get a good deal on it. Although you can order those (from Shutterfly or elsewhere) after the wedding also for $100-200. And if you get the images on CD, you can always print the larger specialty items like that later.

Our photographer didn't mind our guests taking photos at all. And my brother & sister-in-law were photographing everything. The photographer even gave my sister-in-law tips for photographing and suggested some better angles. They even stood side by side to take some pictures and we kept whichever one turned out best (my SIL got a great one of my niece photobombing that the photographer missed in her shot). My original plan was to have sister-in-law take photos also, so I wouldn't need to spend so much on Carnival's photos. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see SIL's photos before I went to view Carnival's photos. Although, I'm not sure it would have changed the outcome. They both took some really great pictures and I'm glad I have both. They both got different types of photos and got things that the other one missed. I just wish I could have that quality of a photo book that included Carnival's photos and my SIL's photos in one book.

We wanted to try and stay away from the "typical" songs for the ceremony, but also didn't want to go too crazy. So...

Processional: A piano version of Nothing Else Matters by Metallica

Only a couple people recognized the song and those that did thought it was awesome that I walked down the aisle to Metallica. Everyone else just thought it was a beautiful song. And looking back, I thought it was perfect. Even though we did the instrumental version, we loved the meaning in the lyrics to that song. Here's a youtube link to the version we used:

Recessional: Beautiful Day by U2

First Dance: I Won't Give Up by Jason Mraz

This song actually goes along really well with our vows, which basically said we know that there will be hard times and we may not always be happy, but we promise to stick by each other do whatever it takes to make it work

Father-Daughter Dance: I Loved Her First by Heartland

Mother-Son Dance: What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong

Last Song: Mine Would Be You by Blake Shelton

We didn't even think about a cake cutting song, but I wish we had. The song that was playing didn't really fit at that time and was a bit odd.

If you still have this info I would greatly appreciate receiving it. My son is considering a Carnival wedding sailing out of New Orleans and they really need to know their options BEFORE the book. Thanks so much. email

v dot gelfo @ comcast dot net using actual . and no spaces, of course. Just trying to block the spammers.

I just got married on the Carnival Dream in New Orleans last month. I will e-mail you everything I have, which includes a lot of NOLA specific info.

I take several magnetic hooks-they stick to the walls because they are metal. Great to hang up your daily or spa appointment tickets or excursion slips.

 

I also take plastic hair clam clips to hold the drapes all the way closed.

 

Duct tape is a must, scotch tape, highlighters and post it notes come in handy.

A handy tip for taking duct tape: I cut about a 5 foot piece of duct tape off the roll then rolled that piece around a straw. So, I ended up with a very convenient mini roll of duct tape, without the big empty space in the middle of the roll, and I figure that 5 feet should be enough for most emergency needs. It only took a couple minutes and was very easy to do. You probably could do it without anything in the middle, but I think having the straw to wrap around made it a lot easier. Or you can actually buy mini "camping" rolls of duct tape that are very similar, but cost a bit more than DIY rolls.

Magnetic clips were super useful for hanging daily schedule or important papers on the wall for easy access. I had a list of cabin numbers for each person in our group and it was nice to be able to keep in clipped on the wall by the phone.

Post it notes were great for leaving messages on doors for others in our group. I did also notice that some cabins had brought magnetic dry erase boards, which I thought was brilliant. They had them attached to their cabin door with marker on a string, so they could write where they were at or leave messages for others in their group. Next time I go on a cruise where we occupy multiple cabins, I'm definitely doing this.

The rest of the cruise was very relaxing and a really great experience. All of our family had a great vacation and everyone is sold on doing future cruises. And it was really nice seeing our families interact with each other. They all got along really well and after the trip most of my family members are now facebook friends with his family members.

I would definitely recommend the cruise wedding to anyone looking to do a smaller, low key, wedding with minimal planning. You may not have as many options on some things as far as customization, but that was the biggest selling point for me, because I didn't want the stress over picking out every detail or seating charts. Carnival really has it set up where you can book it, fill out a few forms with minimal choices, and just show up and have a great wedding. It was an awesome experience for us that we will never forget.

So, I think that is the end of my wedding review. Feel free to ask me any questions you may have. I know that past cruise brides were immensely helpful when I was planning, so I don't mind helping the upcoming brides in any way I can.

And more...

Okay, so the cruise was amazing. We were very lucky and had our parents, siblings, and nieces, & nephew join us on the cruise. Including us there were 14 in our group. We did make sure that their cabins weren't too close to ours though. Since it was our honeymoon afterall, we decided to splurge and get a spa suite for ourselves. Part of the thinking in this was that none of our family would spend the additional money to get rooms on the spa floor. His parents did also book a suite, and actually looked at getting the spa suite right next to us, but we easily talked them out of that one. My family was 1-2 floors below us, on same part of the ship, and his family booked on the other end of the ship. But, even with everyone spread out, it was easy to coordinate and meet up with everyone.

Our cabin was amazing! It was so nice having the extra space of the suite, especially on morning of wedding when we were getting dressed and I had me, 3 bridesmaids, mom, flower girl, and photographer all in the room with me. And vanity area outside bathroom was super useful. On previous cruises I've only had interior cabins, so this was definitely a change. In the future, I would probably be okay with a balcony room, but don't think I could go back to interior room again. Although, I really didn't spend much time on balcony because every time I sat out there the movement of the boat and the water sound would put me to sleep almost immediately. We also had an awesome room steward.

In Cozumel most of our group decided to swim with dolphins at Dolphin Discovery. We booked independently, rather than through Carnival. It was a lot of fun.

In Belize, 7 of us went cave tubing. We booked independently through Butts Up Cave Tubing. Our guide was really great. My mom had recently had foot surgery, and there was some walking involved to get to the tubing area, but they went really slow and helped her wherever needed. I would definitely recommend booking through them for this excursion if interested.

Then at Mahogany Bay, we got all dressed up again and had my sister-in-law do a wedding beach photo shoot. We figured this would be a good location since there is beach really close to port and scenery was supposed to be beautiful there. We got up and off the ship early to try and beat the crowds to the beach. There were some people, but it wasn't too bad at the far end of the beach and most people were pretty accommodating at clearing space for us. But, getting out early was also good because it started getting hot out there. The photos turned out AMAZING. This was definitely one of our best decisions we made. We also did a few photos on ship deck after returning from the beach. I knew my sister-in-law had a professional quality camera and was good at photos, but I wasn't prepared for how good she was. She was really great at setting up the shots and even touched them up on photoshop on her computer before showing them to us. There are definitely some frame worthy shots. So, attached are those photos.

And more photos.

Here are posed photos from Carnival's photographer.

Okay, wedding photos...

We had an amazing photographer! Bojana is supposedly one of Carnivals main photographers and gets called to do any big promo shoots they need. Before getting on the ship, our wedding coordinator had said that we hopefully get her, because she really is the best. She has a history as a European model, so a lot of her shots have a modeling quality to them that you don't typically see in wedding photos. So we got some unique photos that look really great.

We were very please with her during the ceremony & reception, but nothing particularly special to note. My sister-in-law did take a lot of photos also and kind of shadowed her at times and she was very kind and didn't mind it. When we met to look over the photos, she even gave my sister-in-law tips on photographing people and best angles to get. Which was great since we did a beach photo shoot with my sister-in-law later in the week.

We met up with her after the muster drill to do the photo shoot. Unfortunately, it was raining outside as our ship was leaving New Orleans, so that really limited our photos. So, we didn't get any photos outside at all. By the time the rain stopped, we were further down the Mississippi and the water is all brown and muddy, and the sky was grey, and it wouldn't make a good background for photos. But, we went all over inside the ship and got some great shots. Some of them required weird positions, some even kind of painful, but we trusted that she was the expert and knew what we was doing, so we obeyed every request without question. For which she was very thankful and said that she loved working with us because some people try to fight her on her requests.

We met with the photographer the next day to look at all the photos. She had all of them printed for the meeting. The posed photos are printed on 8x10 and the candid shots are on 5x7. She also had the photo books assembled, but photos were not permanently attached to pages at that time. We had planned on spending about $2,000 on photos. We had originally thought that the $750 package would be fine, but increased our budget based on reviews from past brides on cruise critic. Luckily, our parents had notified us earlier that day that they also wanted to chip in on photos. Because we had a hard time narrowing it down and ended up buying everything. Husband was so impressed that he ended up tipping her more money as we were looking at them, which I think was crazy since we were about to give her A LOT more money to purchase photos, so adding more to that wasn't needed. We probably could have spent more time to narrow it down if needed though. It probably wasn't a good idea to meet with her at 10pm, because we may have been more patient to spend more time looking through them if it were earlier.

And like others have said, the books really are amazing and really good quality, so we bought those too. Those are very nice to have for showing off to people when you get home, because they are beautiful and a very concise view of the wedding. And they will definitely be looked at in the future. Actually, husband and I made an agreement that if we ever fight, get mad at each other, or get into a rut in our relationship (which is pretty much unavoidable at some point), that we will pull out those books to remind us of how amazing of a day that was. But, thinking back on it, I probably would have skipped the books. They are beautiful and great quality, but they were really expensive. I probably could have assembled similar, although not quite as nice, books for a lot less. Plus, it would have been nice to have included other photos from the day/cruise into the books, so we had a good photo book with ALL our best photos. Especially since we did a beach photo shoot later in the week that resulted in some really great photos. So, I really wish I had one nice book that included both photo shoots. If I hadn't done the other photo shoot, I probably would be a lot happier with the Carnival books, since my biggest disappointment is that I have good photos that they don't include.

So, attached are some of our best photos from Bojana (Carnival Photographer) for the ceremony & reception. I'll also post some of the posed photos. And I will write a separate post describing my beach photo shoot and showing some of those photos.

I don't know if its any different if you have your own officiant, but they schedule you to be in the ceremony room for 30 minutes total. I know they had us scheduled to start at 1pm and they had another ceremony scheduled for 1:30 (with a 1-hr reception) that they needed the officiant for. So, we had to be done, with the license signed and everything, within 30 minutes from time ceremony started (wedding party started walking in right at 1pm sharp). The other ceremony was in the room next to us, so they didn't really kick us out of the room, but all official duties had to be done by then. Really, we kept ours short and sweet (no readings or anything) and our ceremony lasted only about 10 minutes anyway. But, they were pretty strict about making sure we kept to the schedule and were where we needed to be at exactly the right times.

From your other posts, it sounds like they are still requiring that their officiant be present to kind of oversee it, so you probably need to meet the same timing requirement. They probably want 20 minutes from start of processional to end of recessional. Then that leaves 10 minutes to oversee signing of the license real quick or whatever. Then they did family photos before heading to reception.

I actually didn't try anything but the fruit. But the fruit cups look beautiful and tasted just as good. And having several people with sweet tooths, we really loved the swirly sugar things in the fruit cups. The fruit that came standard at my embarkation wedding was pretty much the same as Carnival_Brides shows in pictures.

I did have one person specifically comment that they loved the sushi stuff. And they loved the set up of fruit cups and the veggie cups, but those come standard. And someone said the chicken nuggets were pretty good.

We went with just the standard menu options, rather than try to waste time customizing. Overall we had good reviews from guests on the food, but I didn't really get many comments about any specific item. They just said in general that they were really impressed with selection and quality of the food that was provided.

I'd probably suggest to keep the chicken nuggets, since many of the choices are more extravagant and some people, and kids especially, liked that there was a simpler option that they were familiar with. I know husband and I are very picky eaters and besides fruit & veggies, the chicken nuggets were the only item we would have even considered trying. The alternative menus looked just as scary to us, but we figured that there was at least one safe food available. And everyone likes chicken nuggets.

I think this was our tipping breakdown that we had brought with us:

Day of Coordinator: $40

Photographer: $40

Officiant: $20

DJ: $20

Bartenders: $20 (total to split)

Servers: $20 (total to split)

But, the servers there were so great that husband decided to tip them $20 each (x3). Then he gave the bartenders $20 each also. Then there was the Wedding Hostess, who we hadn't expected, so we tipped her $20 (she actually goes on the cruise & is available anytime during cruise if needed). She is actually the one who set up our guest book table & added the ribbon & flowers to our cake. Everything went so perfectly that my husband actually borrowed some cash from his parents during the reception because he wanted to make sure that each person involved (each server, each bartender, etc.) got a tip from him because they did such a great job. We had originally planned on just a joint tip for servers to share and for bartenders to share, but he thought they deserved more. So, I think that is about what we paid for tips... it could be more or less since I wasn't the one handling the tips and I know he added to what we had planned, but it should be close.

As far as tipping the officiant, I would probably skip it since he isn't actually officiating your wedding. The info I received from Carnival states that tipping isn't necessary. And he will still get paid out of your wedding package for the time spent there. But since he isn't actually providing you a service, I don't think you need to tip him.

Sorry if I seem a bit over exuberant in pushing for NOLA. I just know that my experience there was amazing... and being just a few weeks ago, that excitement from it is still rather fresh. But, really no matter where you have it, the experience is going to be what you make of it. I've seen happy brides from many ships and ports, so I know that NOLA isn't the only one that does it right. But, I can tell you that at least NOLA has great people there to coordinate and does know how to do it right.

I just had my wedding on the Carnival Dream out of New Orleans. I was extremely pleased with it. We had people coming from all over the country, so it was a good central location. We had several people drive and it was much closer/quicker for them to get to NOLA than having to drive to southern Florida. Although, either location makes a great destination for those just coming for wedding or wanting to vacation there a few days.

Port of New Orleans is also fairly close to the airport, so taxi transportation isn't too expensive. We had looked at going out of Port Canaveral, but it's like 60 miles to airport and transportation looked pretty expensive.

And I can't speak for anyone at the Florida ports, but the people I dealt with for the Dream in New Orleans were absolutely AMAZING. The wedding coordinator for booking, Gabby, was super helpful and really good at responding quickly. But, once on board, I could never say enough good about the onboard coordinator, Jill. She was perfect and made everything run so smoothly. Her husband is the onboard minister, and they were such a great team. I really couldn't imagine finding people better than them to run your wedding for you. I learned to trust Jill almost immediately and just let her handle everything so I didn't need to stress at all, which she did super well. Our photographer was Bojana, and she is one of the top photographers for Carnival. She has a history as a European model, so a lot of our photos have a unique modeling quality to them that turned out super gorgeous. We had planned to stay fairly cheap on buying the photos, but after seeing them we ended up buying the whole package (luckily our parents chipped in some).

And the ship is beautiful! It is a large ship with a lot of people, but we never felt crowded on it. And, for those people who question going on a cruise after the history of breakdowns, the Dream was the first ship to get extra backup generators installed after all that mess, so it's probably one of the safest ships out there. We had 13 people come just for wedding and 12 people cruised with us. Everyone had such a great time. Most of the non-sailing guests regret not joining us. Half our sailing guests had never cruised before and they are all hooked now. My FIL even came home and put in for retirement from his job because he had such a great time relaxing on the trip and couldn't stand working after that wonderful of a vacation. We did the Western Caribbean itinerary and I don't think it gets much better than that. Every stop was beautiful. We are now planning an independent trip to Belize at sometime because there was so much more we wish we could have seen there.

For marriage license, in New Orleans, are responsible for obtaining license yourself, where I think Carnival gets it for you in Florida. You are supposed to apply for it in person 3 days before wedding, but I think you can get minister to sign waiver if out of state if you can't do 3 days. But, you still need to make sure you are in New Orleans early enough to get it on weekday prior to the wedding (or go within 6 months earlier when touring ship or something). But, applying for the license was a very easy process. You just have to show up at the office with all the paperwork done and required ID. I went ahead and got to town on Tuesday, applied for license on Wednesday, did some sightseeing in NOLA and relaxed for a few days, then all guests got to town on Friday and wedding was Sunday. I actually loved the excuse to go to NOLA a few days early (by myself) to relax a bit and sightsee... it also let me kind of enjoy the fact that I was getting married in a few days, rather than dealing with last minute planning and wedding stress.

I can't tell you it wouldn't be just as awesome out of Florida, but I couldn't imagine it getting much better than what I experienced in New Orleans. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Could you send me that price list, please?

I'd love to get an idea of the price range for extras.

 

pinklily116@yahoo.com

 

sorry, I couldn't figure out how to private message you!

I just sent you an e-mail with everything I have.

I have some price lists for the extras, but I had booked under their old packages last year and I know rates have changed for nearly everything. If you PM me your e-mail address, I can e-mail you what I have, but rates have likely gone up on a lot of it. But, it may at least give you some place to start.

My advice is to make sure you ask your coordinator to send you everything as soon as you sign the contract. You may need to ask specifically for some of it though, as they often don't volunteer the options.

Yeah, the coordinators are based by the ship. Gabby is the coordinator for Dream and Fantasy and she was awesome to work with, but neither of these ships are out of Florida.

Congratulations! Remember to not sweat the small stuff and don't forget to enjoy your day. Try to remember every amazing detail because it does go fast.

And definitely get someone to take A LOT of photos, even the things that seem insignificant. My sister-in-law and brother had their digital camera & video camera in hand at all times and photographed everything. At the beginning of the day she told me she would be really annoying and always have a camera in my face, but that I would appreciate it someday. I had a couple requested shots to, like getting picture of grooms face when I first walk into the ceremony. Everyone always looks at the bride and photographs that, but I wanted a picture of what I saw and his reaction (which was perfect). But, they got some pictures I probably would have forgotten, like the guest book table & food table, and I'm glad I have those. And if your guests take a lot of photos, you may not need to spend as much on the professional photographer photos.

But, my biggest advice is to let go a bit and trust the coordinators to do their job, so you can relax and enjoy the day. Once I stopped worrying about making sure that everyone was where they needed to be and just let them handle that, my stress went to nearly zero and I was able to just enjoy everything. All the little details, which we all stress over beforehand, none of them will matter anymore on your wedding day. You won't even notice those things. Which is good because you should be concentrating on being happy and enjoying the moment. And have fun!

The 1.5 hours went quickly, but since we had a small group it was okay since we actually were able to talk to everyone during that time. It was sad to see the non-sailing guests go though. And we definitely had a few that said they really wish they would have booked the cruise, after seeing the ship. But, everything with the wedding was so awesome and went so smoothly. I really have to give a lot of credit to Carnival because they really do know how to make it work.

After that, photographer asked if we could do posed photos after the muster drill, so she would have more time, which we were fine with. So, my new husband and I went back to our room to just relax for a few minutes and take in all the excitement of the day. We had about 45 minutes until muster drill. He actually took about a 20 min. nap during that time and I started to unpack some of our stuff. We also had champagne and really yummy chocolate covered strawberries waiting in our room for us.

We stayed in our wedding clothes all day, because we wanted to wear them to dinner that night. So, we got a lot of congratulations at the muster drill and while walking around the ship. After the drill, we met up with our awesome photographer to go our individual posed photos around the ship. I'm out of time for now, so I'll discuss photos further in my next post. :)

With only 25 guests, it was great that we actually had time to actually talk to everyone and socialize. The dance floor never got really crowded, but people did dance, or sat and talked, and everyone had a great time.

After the toasts, our wedding coordinator immediately asked if we wanted something to drink and went to the bar for us and make sure we had drinks in our hands for the rest of the reception. She was awesome!

The only negatives that happened were again related to the DJ. On our CD, we had included the song "Fish" by Craig Campbell to be played at some random time during the reception. If you haven't ever heard it, it is a pretty fun song that gets you thinking he's about to say something completely different. Here are the first verse & chorus:

The first time we did it I was scared to death

She snuck out in that cotton dress

Jumped on in and we drove to the lake

Put her hand on my knee and said I can’t wait

I had everything we needed in the bed of my truck

Turns out my baby loves to...

[Chorus:]

Fish, she wants to do it all the time

Early in the morning, in the middle of the night

She’s hooked and now she can’t get enough

Man, that girl sure loves to fish

We thought it would be fun and suits us since my husband did get me into fishing with him. We had made it pretty clear to just mix it in somewhere when people were dancing and having fun. Well, he went right from the father-daughter dance into paying that song, so that is the song that was playing when we cut the cake. And of course nobody was paying any attention because they were focused on us cutting the cake and doing toasts. But, oh well.

Then, later in the reception, the DJ starts paying a lot of hip-hop & R&B music. We had requested current top 40's, country, 80's-90's music. We specifically crossed out and wrong a large NO next to it on the form, and wrote in the comments no rap/R&B/hip-hop music. We also specified that, with few exceptions, about 1/4 of our guests were in their mid-late 30's and the rest were over 60, so play music appropriate for those age groups. I think 50 Cent was playing (with nobody on dance floor) when our wedding coordinator came up to us and said "What is this music? This isn't the type of music you requested, is it?"... we told her it certainly isn't what we would have chosen and she went to yell at DJ again and took care of it. The rest of the music was okay. Except we did request absolutely (in large red letters & highlighted in yellow) no choreographed or line dance type things that are so popular at weddings, like shuffle, electric slide, chicken dance, etc. He did play YMCA, but we didn't get upset because people were actually out there dancing to it and he never tried to pull everyone out onto the dance floor to participate in anything.

So, we weren't exactly thrilled with our DJ, but we took it all in stride, didn't let it upset us at all, and still had fun. It helped that we had an awesome coordinator that handled everything so well.

So, going into the reception.

The coordinator was out in the hall with us to direct us on when to enter and signaled to the DJ when we were ready. He announced us, we walked in, and music started playing for our first dance... except it was the wrong song. The DJ had started playing my father-daughter dance song. But, our coordinator picked up on it right away and ran into the DJ booth to get it fixed, which happened very quickly. As you will see in my review, this wasn't the only time she had to go in to yell at the DJ. He really is the only part of the wedding that we weren't thrilled with, but we just let dealt with it and didn't let us really bother us. For the most part, we didn't really even pay much attention to the music anyway during the reception. Anyway, they get the right song playing and we start our dance. We had taken some dance lessons prior to the wedding, but hadn't informed any of our family or friends about that, so they were pretty surprised. It didn't quite go as planned though. Unfortunately, groom's shoes kept sticking to the floor and as a result, he stepped on my dress a few times, which totally threw us off our choreography. But, we added a few extra steps, probably missed a few, and just kept moving. And we started cracking up with laughter about it. All our guests saw was us having a really great time dancing a really nice dance. They had no clue we messed up at all and loved that we were laughing and smiling and having such a great time. And our photos look like we are having a great time. The DJ was supposed to announce to have everyone join us part way through the song after we did a dip... it took him about 30 seconds or so after that... after us awkwardly trying to figure out how to continue our dance after we ran out of steps. But, again we managed. Then the next strike for DJ was when the song abruptly stopped at the end, before the song was actually over. Between having others join in late, and cutting song short, did make it a very short time to have everyone else come out to dance. But, whatever. Then we did father-daughter dance & mother-son dance. DJ did correctly announce that we wanted everyone to join in with the mother-son dance, rather than it being a solo dance.

Then they went immediately into cutting the cake. The waiter guys there were really awesome. We hadn't planned on tips for them, but shortly after the cake cutting groom decided that we definitely needed to tip them because they did a great job. Luckily we had brought some extra cash just in case. But, it was real quick just to get the photos: slice the cake, feed each other, pour champagne, drink champagne, etc.

Then the wedding party toasts. Best man did a good speech about how much trouble him and groom got into as kids (most they didn't get caught at). My sister (maid of honor) did a really emotional speech (with tears in her eyes, breaking voice, and nearly making everyone else cry) about how she can see how happy groom makes me and welcoming him to the family. My sister-in-law/best friend (my high school friend married my brother) gave a really fun speech about how we had decided back in high school that we didn't want to be best friends, because friends can come and go, so we decided to be each others "mattress" - a comfortable spot that you can always fall back on, you always know its there waiting for you at the end of the day, and you can trust that it will be soft and won't hurt you when you need it. That concept had always been kept between us, so everyone really loved hearing that. After that, my 6-year old bridemaid/niece decided she wanted to give a speech and asked for the microphone. So, she gets up there and in her cute kid voice says, "Um, welcome to the family, Uncle Boots" (which is her nickname for my husband because she went through a phase where she called people by random words and that one stuck for him)... is was so adorable.

After that, all the obligatory stuff was done, so we were able to socialize and enjoy the party for a while.

The reception was pretty amazing and we all had a great time. Our group didn't do a whole lot of dancing, which I kind of expected with only 25 people, but people did dance and people chatted, and had a great time. And they really liked it after they realized that the premium liquors are all included in the open bar! :D

The food spread was beautiful and everyone really liked the food options. We had seriously debated changing the appetizer choices and had looked at all the alternate menu options, because we weren't sure people would like all that high-class, odd sounding food. But, most people absolutely loved it all. We had a lot of compliments on the food choices and the quality of the food. And I loved the look of the fruit cups with the sugar decoration and that they put veggies in cups with dressing.

When we first got in there, they really try to do all the scheduled events right away. So, you immediately do your first dance, then father-daughter dance, then mother-son dance, then ceremonial cake cutting, then toasts... all right away, one right after the next. So, some of that felt a bit rushed and like they were just pushing to get through it all. But, after that all was out of the way, were able to relax a bit and socialize with our guests. They don't actually serve the cake until last 1/2 hour of reception though.

The cake was absolutely delicious! We ordered the vanilla cake with the upgraded Bavarian cream filling. The filling was definitely worth the extra cost. We had enough cake left over to eat at dinner for most of the week. They were supposed to do a custom design on the cake. I had e-mailed them about a month prior to wedding and sent photos of what I wanted (a criss-cross diamond pattern in the icing) and they had agreed that it could be done at no additional cost. But, when we got to the wedding, it was the standard Carnival wedding cake design (swirled piping on sides), not what I had asked for. But, it wasn't a big deal... the cake was still beautiful. I had provided ribbon & flowers to be added to it, which the coordinator took from me and had assembled on the cake. They did a great job with it and I was happy with the end result.

I love the bags! Amazing! I've been debating having them but you might have just sold me! :) They were awesome! Where did you purchase all of the stuff?

I bought most stuff on Amazon. Some came from dollar stores. Pens, highlighters & post-it notes were bought at Staples during back to school sales. Some of it (bags & lanyards) I found by just doing google search for discount/bulk of whatever item I was searching for.

The Bubba Mugs I bought from Target... well multiple Target stores. During the time I debated buying them, Bubba Mugs stopped making this size/style in navy blue. So, I ended up having to go around to 8 different Target stores buying the last of their stock of the navy blue mugs. I also did smaller travel mugs for the kids that I personalized with their names, which I bought at dollar store.