THE JANUARY EDIT
Life with Frances
I’ve started off this year enveloped in love and positivity, because surprise, I married my special person on New Year’s Eve! We’ve had a whirlwind romance as we met in our later years, knew that each other was “the one” within a month of dating, got engaged a year and a half later, and decided within the first few days of December that we would get married on New Year’s Eve. While the world was seemingly put on hold, we knew that if it was ever the time to do something spontaneous and of the moment, that was the time to do it! We invited only our immediate family (to keep it safe) and had the best day ever on our terms. We hardly told anyone as I wanted to keep everything low key, and shared snippets and moments from our day by way of Instagram stories with no real footnotes or commentary. I was completely blown away by the outpouring of love that we received from personal friends, industry partners and even those that we didn’t personally know. It was an incredibly important reminder of how much people need each other and how important human connection and relationships are. There is no replacement for truly sharing life with one another and celebrating. How special is that to kick off the year!
Like many can attest to, last year was not the easiest! I’ve certainly had my ups and downs in navigating how to manage and pivot my wedding planning business. But I’ve also had so much to be grateful for from last year that continues to pour into this year. For one, pivoting my personal wedding planning business led me to this shared venture with Sheryl in creating the Modern Romantics. Being able to share what we do on a professional level for the everyday woman to do at home, truly has brought life to me and kept the ability and desire to create alive in me. Adam and I were also super fortunate to purchase our dream home last year (@themckendriehouse) and had spent a couple of months restoring and updating parts of our historic landmark home not only for us to live in, but to share with couples who were in need of finding a place to get married at, safely, during this time. Being able to pivot our business in this way and offer a location for intimate weddings and celebrations has been a dream that I didn’t even know existed in my heart. The house has also been a great backdrop for many of the shoots that we’ve done for The Modern Romantics as well, I am excited to share more of our home adventures with all of you this coming year! And finally, being married to Adam has to be the highlight of last year that continues to pour into this year, and for forever to come. I didn’t think that life would be so different in being married, and to a certain extent, many things remain the same with a deeper understanding of each other and how to live life together. However, I am discovering more things that I am learning now as a “wife”, such as…how to meal plan and cook for myself and another person 24/7! This was never an issue when I was living alone or when we spent a couple of days together, but cooking and preparing meals day in and out has proven to be a skill that I have yet to completely excel at. So this year, come along my journey as I dive deeper into preparing meals in the kitchen for my partner as a new wife, and eventually, for a family down the road.
Lastly, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to share some scenes from our wedding as we just got our wedding album back from our friend Olivia Marshall. If you didn’t know yet, she’s the photographer behind many of our shoots here at the Modern Romantics. It was only fitting to ask her to capture our day as we’ve spent so much time together last year in creating content for the Modern Romantics in such a beautiful way.
Thank you to all of you who have followed our journey in creating The Modern Romantics, we are welcoming this new year with so much new and refreshed energy. We cannot wait to share more of what’s on our heart, creatively and personally as well.
*Make sure you scroll down to read how life is going with Sheryl!
Because we couldn’t celebrate with friends, we sent celebration boxes to them so that they could celebrate with us as the clock turns midnight!
Inside our boxes, we included sparklers, macaroons and chocolates, and cans of rose for them to celebrate with us with.
This is the backyard of our house that has already married numerous couples during 2020, it was so lovely to be able to get married ourselves in this backyard and space that we loved so much! My friend Amy Burke did my bouquet and the arrangement on the table, and I did all the other florals to compliment on the arch and for the aisle. I loved getting married in our backyard and I loved even more that my precious little Willow was able to be our flower girl. I’ve always hoped that she would be able to be part of our day, and that reality makes my heart sing!
For our immediate family that were able to attend, we created “cake to go” featuring Lady M cakes so that they could celebrate with us in a celebratory fashion. These were a hit!
This was one of our favorite moments of the day. We created an intimate scene in the “bridal suite” of the house, lit up some candles, and had a private moment of slow dancing, all captured by Olivia.
I really do need to take a moment to publicly declare how much of a darling man my now husband is. At the eleventh hour, I told him I wanted to build a tunnel of lights. He was such a trooper to do this with me the day before, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with the magical result!
Cheers to love!
Life with SHERYL
This holiday season was sure one for the books! While my lovely counterpart married the love of her life, our little family is preparing to welcome a new love into our lives as well. Some of you may or may not know that early last year we went through a miscarriage. It was a really difficult time for our family but I truly believe that it brought us closer together as a family and made us all stronger.
We found out in May that we were pregnant with our Rainbow Baby and we were secretly overjoyed. Experiencing pregnancy after a miscarriage is so different than my first time around. I constantly felt on edge and reluctant to share or truly let myself be excited about being pregnant. You worry about every little thing - every movement, every symptom, never truly enjoying and embracing the idea of being pregnant. Even though I’m almost full-term now, I still don’t feel settled and don’t think I will feel that way until she is out and in my arms.
We did want to celebrate our little growing family by taking a few photos with a photographer friend of mine, Taylor McCutchan. It seemed very opportune, as we had decided to drive to Vancouver, Canada for the holidays and would be passing through Taylor’s neck of the woods on the way up to Canada. We decided to stop and take photos at Castle Lake in Mt. Shasta. It was truly the most picturesque spot and Taylor did such an amazing job at making us feel so at ease. Arya was a superstar model after waking up from a 2 hour nap in the car (thank you children’s melatonin) and we had the best time together - throwing rocks into the lake, touching sap for the first time and just taking in the brisk air.
Spending the last few weeks cherishing the simplicity of the 3 of us!