Love Is Sweet.

This past weekend, my kids picked pears with their great-grandmother. They picked a lot. I wasn't sure what to do with all of them, but the help of my husband's aunts The Lady and Son's cookbook came to the rescue. Pear honey. This would make a perfect favor at your reception if you're planning a wedding. This pear honey would also be a great favor for a dinner party or a bridal shower brunch.

Pear Honey

20 oz can of crushed pineapple (include juice)
8   cups pears (peeled, cored, and diced)
10 cups sugar
1   lemon (zest and juice)

Combine all ingredients and cook until pears are tender and mixture thickens. Approximately 30 minutes. Place in sterilized jars and seal while still hot.   

10 Year Wedding Anniversary - Our Personal Party Tips

I titled, tagged, and labeled this post with "our personal party tips", because looking back on our past ten years, it truly has been one personal party! My husband and I are like many married couples. Like many of you, we were best friends before we got married. We met in university. We knew each other five years before we tied the knot. We laughed together, we had a lot of fun together, and we shared everything with each other. I knew when I first started dating him, that he was the type of guy you married. It was his integrity and his solid moral character that drew me to him. Ten years of marriage, and a couple definitely has their ups and downs during those years. I'm so happy to say that we are still friends. Best friends with each other. I think about what makes our marriage work well, and I know it's because my husband and I both have a personal relationship with God. Because of our commitment to Him, it strengthens our commitment to each other. For my husband and I, divorce is not an option. And to be quite frank, when you take divorce off the table, you might as well have fun with the person you've chosen to spend the rest of your life with as opposed to living together in misery!

There is no place in the marriage that my husband and I share for pride. That's not to say it hasn't been there. We're both human. But when either of us displays any amount of pride, automatically problems arise. My husband is a sacrificial leader for our family. This is huge. And it's very rare to find in couples. Marriage takes work. We're only ten years in, with many more ahead of us, but we recognize that we both have to make the choice to keep our marriage our number one human relationship. It's a choice to respect each other. It's a choice to work together as a team. And it's a choice for us to remain passionately in love with each other.

(photographs taken by our friend Tyler Geel)

I think back to our wedding day. For some women, their wedding day is their most special day of their whole life. For some women, it's the day when they feel like a princess. For some women it's the day that they have envisioned and dreamed about since they were a little girl. Neither of those were true for me. It was a special day, true, but I had had an extremely stressful week leading up to it. I'd had a stressful six months leading up to it for that matter. For me, my wedding day was a day that signified the start of going to bed and waking up with my best friend. Our wedding day was just a day, and every day since then is truly our celebration. Our marriage has always been more important to us than our wedding day.

10 Year Wedding Anniversary - A Look Back At The Bridal Party.

My wedding dress was sewn by my mom. I didn't want anything fussy. I wanted to keep my dress simple. Sleeveless. I picked out a regular dress pattern that we just lengthened, turning it into a bridal gown. My mom made the train of my gown out of lace and carefully sewed small pearls onto it. My "something old" for my wedding dress were covered buttons taken off of my mother's wedding dress and placed on my dress to attach the bridal train to. I had an idea of what I wanted for a veil. One of my aunt's in Canada owned a wedding gown boutique and when I was up visiting for Christmas, she surprised me by having me come to her shop and trying on a variety of styles and then giving me my veil of choice. I chose a simple veil with pearl detail on it.

(photograph taken by our friend Tyler Geel)

Our sweet friend that made all of our wedding decorations and decorated our reception hall and the church sanctuary, also made our wedding bouquets. Each of the girls of our bridal party held a single white calla lily. I carried a long stemmed arrangement of five calla lilies.

I personally feel like there is nothing worse than asking a friend to be in my wedding and then asking her to pay five hundred dollars on a bridesmaid dress she will only wear one time. Back when all bridesmaid dresses matched, I chose a dress under fifty dollars for my girls. From a {said in a whisper} catalog. Because my bridesmaids lived on extreme ends of the continent, and hours away from me, it was an easy way for them to get the same dress without too much hassle.

(photographs taken by our friend Melissa Pritchett)

Since I was born and raised in the Philippines, one of the details we wanted in our wedding was a small piece of that culture. We asked our groomsmen to wear a barong tagalog. We had a family friend living in the Philippines pick out the design and mail them to us.

10 Year Wedding Anniversary - A Look Back.

 (photograph taken by our friend Tyler Geel)

In June of this year, my husband and I are celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary. We're looking forward to a vacation abroad without our kids to celebrate. Thinking back on our wedding, I smile at how different some of the details of our day would be today. At that time in my life, I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted for our wedding. I wasn't one of those girls that as a child, had dreams and visions of what her wedding would one day look like. I was down here in Myrtle Beach planning our wedding on my own. I had just graduated from University and moved down to be closer to my soon to be husband. My parents were in Canada and my friends were spread all over the continent of North America. At that time in my life, it never occurred to me to hire a wedding planner!

(photographs taken by our friend Tyler Geel)

We planned our wedding on a small budget. Although my parents never gave me a formal number, I wanted to be respectful to them and tried to keep prices as low as possible. They not only paid for our wedding (which consisted of two hundred and fifty guests) down here in South Carolina, but also put on a sit down reception (of a hundred guests) up in Canada a couple weeks later. So with all this in mind, I tried to keep our wedding day budget around 5,000 dollars.

(photographs taken by my husband's aunt)

This is how we were able to achieve our wedding on such a small budget. I was very thankful for my husband's paternal aunts. Since I wasn't familiar with this area at that time of my life, they gave us great suggestions on a budget friendly photographer, a budget friendly caterer at nine dollars a guest, and helped keep our wedding running smoothly on the big day by instructing the bridal party when to walk, letting us know when it was time to cut the cake, when to take the "professional" pictures, etc.

(photograph taken by my husband's aunt)

My husband and I asked a lot of friends and family to participate in what we knew were their strong areas. For example, a friend of ours played the piano for our ceremony, my husband's classical guitar professor (Tom Yoder) played during the reception, another friend of ours sang a solo during the ceremony and took great photographs (in fact, better photos than the "professional" photographer that we hired), my husband's cousin made our wedding cake for us, and another dear friend of ours made all of our wedding decorations and spent the week of our wedding decorating the church and reception hall. One of the details I wanted for our wedding was inspired by Martha Stewart's Pews In Bloom, and I had our friend recreate the look.

(photographs taken by our friend Tyler Geel)

My husband's father owns a landscaping and plant nursery business, and he created a beautiful setting using plants to transform the reception hall of the church we were married in. He provided all of the lives plants (the palms and ferns) we used for the front of the church building as well as inside of the sanctuary.       

(photograph taken by our friend Tyler Geel)