My husband is Greek Orthodox, so we had an Orthodox ceremony for our wedding. We wore the crowns, or stefana, walked around the table, and half of the ceremony was in Greek! It was just like "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", and our friends loved how meaningful and beautiful it was.

Our big and beautiful bridal party! We each had eight attendants and there were three junior attendants, my little cousins. The dresses are from Alfred Angelo, the only store that had both flattering dresses and the right shade of blue that I was looking for. My goal with the wedding was to make it look like one big sunset, because our reception site, The Oasis on Lake Travis, is famous for its beautiful view of the sunset over the lake. The bridal party are all doing the "Guns Up!" hand sign for Texas Tech University...except for one errant groomsman on the right who is doing the hand sign for a competing college in Texas. He'll learn someday!

My wonderful husband and me on the deck surrounding our third-story reception hall at The Oasis. It had rained all day long until right before the ceremony began, and right as we were doing the toasts on the deck, a beautiful sunset appeared. It was beautiful--we couldn't believe our luck!

When I asked my florist, Stephanie with Bouquets of Austin, that I wanted my wedding to reflect a sunset, she had amazing ideas. She suggested lemons, oranges, and brightly colored orchids floating in the glass containers as pops of color on the table. The floating candles reflected the light beautifully, and the blue table runners pulled everything together. The tables looked so elegant and different than anything I'd seen before. Everyone loved them!

My darling husband surprised me by playing "In A Sentimental Mood" to me on his saxophone while a groomsman accompanied him on the piano. He is not the sentimental type, and I cried and couldn't believe how lucky I was. It was a very personal touch that all of our guests enjoyed. I had surprised him earlier in the reception-when we came up the stairs to the deck for our grand entrance, I had a group of our friends from the Texas Tech band playing our fight song to welcome us! He loved it!

My mom had just begun learning how to play the accordion when we started planning our wedding, and she joked once that she wanted to play The Chicken Dance at our reception. She's very shy, and as the date got closer she refused to do it, so I bribed her brother to bring it to the reception site. After a few of our signature daiquiris, I had the DJ announce her. She played the Chicken Dance for our entire 250 person reception, and everyone danced and laughed. She was so happy, and that made me happy; she had been a wonderful, supportive mother-of-the-bride during the whole planning process.

This is one of my favorite moments of the reception. I had dreamed for months of a big, beautiful party and all of our friends dancing to "Shout" with us, and it was better than I'd imagined. This is the "little bit softer now" part, and it was an absolute blast. Our DJ, A-Town DJ, was amazing, and kept the whole reception going until 1 AM, when our reception site was closing.