Our Wedding Weekend Pickleball Party
Kicking off our wedding content by sharing how Johnny and I met, how he proposed, why we chose our wedding date, and ALL the details on our pickleball wedding welcome event!
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It’s been one year after our wedding and I’m finally rolling out all of the photos in blog posts about each of the wedding week events. I loved sitting with them the past year and keeping (most of) the photos private and for us and our families to enjoy. It’s also is quite the daunting task to condense the best weekend of my life into a few blog posts, and try to capture the energy and love of it all. But I’ve tried my best and there will be new posts about the wedding on my site all week long.
This post takes you through from the beginning– how Johnny and I met, how he proposed, why we chose our wedding date, and then ALL the details on our pickleball wedding welcome event!
How We Met
Johnny and I were freshmen in college at the University of Richmond when we met through the business fraternity that we were both in, and we were friends up until we started seriously dating our sophomore year. We fell in love a few weeks into dating and (which I mentioned in our vows), and I knew he was going to be my husband almost immediately. After graduating, I moved to Philadelphia to pursue a career in marketing/fashion, and Johnny moved to NYC to join a Big Four accounting firm. Three years later I decided to pick up and head to NYC to move in with him, and I resigned from my corporate job to run this blog full time. Johnny has since moved from accounting to financial strategy and we both work from the city, which we LOVE as all of our siblings live in NYC, as do most of our best friends. We luckily have a ton of overlap in our friends from college, and the majority of our bridesmaids and groomsmen went to the University of Richmond with us.
The Proposal
Johnny’s family has had a home in Vero Beach, Florida since around 2011, as his grandparents used to live in Vero. Maybe six years ago my parents decided to visit Vero Beach on a WHIM, and on that day they put in an offer on a home in the John’s Island Club in Vero Beach. Long story short, but now both of our parents coincidentally have homes in Vero Beach, a few miles down the road from each other.
We are luckily extremely close with each other’s families and now spend Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve all together. So it was only fitting that Johnny proposed to me, the day before Thanksgiving in 2021, on the beach in Vero Beach. It was the best day of my life (up until our wedding 😂), and made even better by the fact that we got to be with our families and my best friend (who surprised us by flying in!) to celebrate immediately after our engagement.
Quickly after that we decided that we wanted to have the wedding in Vero Beach, so that we could have the rehearsal dinner at Johnny’s golf club, get married at our church (the First Baptist of Vero Beach), and then host the reception at my family’s beach club at John’s Island Club.
The Wedding Date
We decided to have the wedding on February 11, 2023– right before Valentine’s Day (which also happens to be Johnny’s birthday), and our dating anniversary. I never thought I would have a “winter” wedding, and was telling my former coworker (from my years on the marketing team at Lilly Pulitzer) that when she corrected me and said that it wasn’t a winter wedding but was a ‘resort season wedding’ since it was occurring during the Florida resort season… so I started using that phrase moving forward. 😂
The Pickleball Party
We knew we had a lot of guests coming in for the wedding weekend on Thursday, so we decided to throw together a casual pickleball tournament for anyone who would be in town. As you’ve definitely seen me share, my family loves pickleball. And the only people we know who love it more than we do are my in-laws. 😂 We coined the event “Pink Dinks,” and hosted it on the pickleball courts at our club.
John’s Island Club catered it with chips and salsa, quesadillas, and margaritas, and we had some of the pickleball pros organize a fun tournament for anyone who wanted to play. It was the perfect way to greet everyone who came into town early, exchange all of the hugs, and catch up! It was super casual, upbeat, and very us– and I think it helped set the warmest tone for the weekend ahead.
Outfit Details
my dress: Wiskii // bow: Amazon // pickleball sweater: borrowed from my mom // Johnny’s shorts: Lululemon // Jacqueline’s dress: Frankies Bikinis // Debra’s dress: old Lilly Pulitzer