Cutest Ever

As we await photos from some of our recent weddings, I thought I would share this sweet story. As I was reading my daily blogroll, I came across a story on shop friends about David and Tien who met in grade school and are searching for fun ways to incorporate their history- and whales (read on)- into their big day. See their Save-the-Dates above- too cute! Here is their story told by Tien:

"David and I met in first grade (when I fell head over heels for him--must have been the short shorts and bowl cut) and gradually became better and better friends as we passed through elementary school, middle school (I still liked him, this time it must have been his excellent grades and his CD Diskman!) and high school. We never dated, though we were always the couple kids would push together at dances or make fun of should we be caught in the same hallway together. It was cute, I guess...as well as heart wrenching, since I actually did love the boy.

Fast forward a few years after college....and one day I get a voicemail from David Lau, who had heard through the grapevine that I had returned from a two year long adventure in Shanghai. Just like that, he had looked me up on our old elementary school directory (asking my dad for my cell number) and asked me to dinner. It was all easy as pie after that :) I remember listening to the voicemail over and over, thinking "oh my god, oh my god, oh my god...Wait, Tien, you're a grown up now. Stop it!" I'm glad I never did. A year later, he proposed the night before Thanksgiving, proving that someone out there was definitely listening to the little kid in me twenty years ago. To celebrate our past together, we wanted to hold our ceremony right where it all began, in the little lunch courtyard of our old elementary school.....but in the end were told that the school was now condemned for earthquake safety and thus was off limits. Crushed, we decided that the only logical thing to do was to just move our special ceremony to the reception site, St Regis Hotel. Originally, the thought was to give our guests a look into our history by inviting them literally back to where we began as students and friends, then give everyone a real party at the St Regis. Now that we lost the nostalgia element of the wedding, we were faced with the not-so-appealing possibility of just a plain ol' hotel wedding. The place is beautiful and stylish, but we {are}in need something to make it more personal. By the way, to explain our thing with Whales...I once made a card for David that said "I will love you forever" but screwed up on the "will" and had to turn it into Whale. I drew a whale to roll with it and after a while, it became our word to mean, "I will/whale do whatever it takes to love you."

Adorable! To see some of the great suggestions they were given check out this post on Style me Pretty and this post on shop friends. Their story reminds me of one of my favorite weddings I have seen in print (below). I absolutely fell in love with this wedding when I saw it in the pages of Martha Stewart in 2006. This is the wedding of Minhee and Truman Cho of Paper + Cup Designs. They, much like Tien and David, met in grade school. They were married at the Fuller Arboretum where they had attended a school field trip together. It was all in the details- shiny, polished apples with guests names and table numbers, mismatched socks for the groomsmen, hand-bound "school" journals, etc. As Cat Seto of shop friends says, "the weddings I remember the most are not the ones that have the most glitz and glamour, but the ones that tell a story and make me leave feeling that I have been privileged to be a part of something special." I couldn't have said it better myself!