15 Facts on Our 15th Anniversary!

Today is mine and Chris’s 15th wedding anniversary! Yay for us! In honor of the Baby Brown’s who got married young and dumb 15 years ago, I’m sharing 15 fun facts about our wedding!

1. Chris’s grandma made EIGHT wedding cakes for us! She made seven small cakes in different flavors and then one big, giant, beautiful wedding cake. They were gorgeous and delicious!
2. About three hours before the wedding ceremony, my dad accidentally bumped into the wedding cake table and it collapsed, shattering the glass tabletop and getting glass shards in all seven of the wedding cakes Grandma Brown made. The only one we were able to salvage was the big cake. My dad couldn’t even talk about that incident for years after the wedding because he was so sorry, but Grandma Brown was very gracious and said, “Well, life happens!”
3. The groomsmen and Chris all had to wait in a Sunday school room for half an hour while the guests filed in before the service started. The room only had tiny, child-sized chairs, so they all sat around in those in their nice tuxedos and Chris read them children’s books aloud to keep himself calm.
4. The night before our wedding, Chris and I went out to dinner all by ourselves. We went to the Melting Pot and had as normal of a “date night” as we could have, given the fact that we were getting married in about 12 hours. We had all kinds of friends and family in town that we had been celebrating with all week, but the night before the wedding, we just needed some time for the two of us to remind ourselves what all this hoopla was really about. To this day, it’s my favorite date night we’ve ever had.
5. The night of the wedding, my family stayed out in a beach condo and I stayed with them. Ginny and I shared a room and at 7:00 in the morning, she woke me up by singing, “Going to the Chapel” at the top of her lungs.
6. The week of our wedding, our flower girl (the daughter of a good friend) cut her own hair, right in the front, right to the scalp. Her mom was so mortified that they didn’t come to the wedding! (Remember that, Lisa?!?!?)
7. The morning of the wedding, my dad cracked one of his front teeth in half. He spent the morning looking for a dentist who could see him for an emergency crown on a Saturday morning. Thankfully, our dentist was a family friend who came to the rescue! I didn’t even know anything happened until weeks after the wedding. (Now that I think about it, my dad was a wreck on my wedding day! ha!)
8. For my something borrowed, I wore my mom’s pearl earrings. For my something blue and something old, I carried a handkerchief that had been carried for both my sister and my christenings. It has since been carried at my sister’s wedding and all of our kids’ christenings and for each event, my mom has monogrammed the child’s initials and date of the event. My something new was my dress.
9. I had more guy friends than I did girl friends and I made them all ushers at my wedding, so we had more ushers than we did in the bridal party.
10. As Chris and I left the wedding reception in our convertible getaway car, the first thing he said to me when we were alone was, “I have a little problem…” He had forgotten his passport back in Orlando and we were supposed to leave from Pensacola the next morning on an early flight to St. Maartin for our honeymoon. The photographer captured the exact moment he told me this in a getaway picture that still makes me laugh because of the shock on my face. (We ended up calling the hospital after midnight that night and getting some very kind person to find an original copy of Chris’s birth certificate because his original one had been washed away in a hurricane and never replaced. We had to meet some random stranger in the Miami airport parking lot to have some paperwork signed by a Notary just an hour before our international flight left. I get sweaty palms thinking about that whole stressful mess even today!)
11. When we got back to our hotel room on the night of our wedding, we ordered pizza and bought a six pack of beer from the liquor store since neither of us had eaten anything during the whole afternoon. We sat on in our honeymoon suite with our feet dangling in the giant bathtub, tracking down passport documents for Chris. I love that memory.
12. The morning after the wedding, I started getting text messages from all of my guy friends. Apparently, they had each tried to pick up my sister and she told each of them to meet her at a different bar after the reception and then she didn’t go to any of them. All of my guy friends were destroyed and I kept telling each of them, “I’m sure she had a good reason for not showing…” But, no. There was no reason.
13. We had an open bar wedding and when we got our pictures back from the photographer, there was a whole series of pictures of our 22-year-old friends leaving the wedding in groups, each with cases of beer and liquor bottles under their arms. All of them smiling proudly like total goons. My parents saw those pictures and almost had a heart attack.
14. My parents also never received a liquor bill for our wedding! The liquor was provided ahead of time and we were going to settle the final bill based on consumption after the event, but the company never sent a bill! My mom called several times, but no one ever sent one! It was easily thousands of dollars of beer and liquor that we never had to pay for!
15. I spent the entire morning of my wedding, worried that Chris would ditch me at the alter. For real. We were so young and he was such a… free spirit (that’s putting it nicely) at that point in his life. I seriously worried he just wouldn’t show up. Every time someone came up to ask or tell me something that morning, I would brace myself for them to say that no one had seen him.

Christopher Brown, I am beyond grateful that you showed up on our wedding day and that you’ve shown up in our lives in an active, loving, and committed way every day since. I can’t believe how much we have changed and grown in these past 15 years, but there’s no one else I’d rather be on this adventure with than you. Thank you for being my roots in the ground and the courage in my heart all these years. I never knew people could be this happy. xoxo