Wedding part four- the 'engagement party'

Our Engagement party was set to be held at the Empire Hotel in Annandale and subsequently became the venue for our 'surprise reception'. The Empire has a few different spaces that can be rented and we went with the French Quarter section for the decor and comfy arm chairs. We chose to have cheese and meat platters as well as gourmet pizzas (they really are good!) as our food and it didn't disappoint. There was so much food and when they started clearing at around 6pm there was still plenty left. We had a bar tab with house wine and tap beer which turned out to be really good because The Empire has a lot of good craft beers on tap. A few people went to the bar for some beer tasting which was pretty cool to see at a 'wedding'. 

It was here we told about 40 of ours guests that we were actually married and they weren't really at an engagement party. The responses were really great. I expected a few people to get upset, maybe a tantrum here or there but there was none of that. Just smiles, a few cheers' and then drinks...of course. I spent most of my time mingling, sitting down to rest, eating and repeat. Weddings are exhausting and this was no different even though it was a small wedding. I only had 60 guests and there were plenty I didn't get a chance to have a good chat with. Lucky for me, they were understanding and everyone had a good time anyway. 

Since we were all quite spread out, there wasn't much scope for us to get in to speeches, so at the end of the night when there were about 10 of us left, I pulled my speech out. I'm pretty shy when I speak in front of people, so to calm the nerves we decided to do a speech circle where each person said a little speech to congratulate us etc. This was probably one of my favourite parts of the day. The words spoken by my friends are ones I will remember forever as they were so sweet and touching. 

And that concludes the wedding posts! Yay, I'm married!