My Best Friend's Wedding

Thursday I went to Dallas to witness one of my very best friends, Jen, getting married. She had a very small wedding with just family and me as well as one of her fiance Ken's best friends. Ty graciously stayed home and kept the kids so I could go celebrate with her. As I wrote her card before the wedding, I realized we'd been friends for 20 years now. I've actually known Jenny since pre-school at Children's New World and we went through elementary school together at Parkland but we can pinpoint the weekend we became "best friends." The August of our freshman year of high school, we went on our church's trip to Borger, Texas for an annual youth rally. The girl I was supposed to room with couldn't go, so Jenny and I roomed together instead. After that weekend we were pretty much inseparable for the next four years. In some ways we were complete opposites: she was the head cheerleader and I was the shy girl at school, but I guess it worked :) I have so many wonderful memories with Jen: the South Dakota mission trip, Leaders for Christ every summer, watching the meteor shower in her backyard every August, listening to the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack and Chicago's greatest hits incessantly, our love for the movie The Cutting Edge, watching Gone With the Wind twice in one night, driver's ed, the Kettle, running the host stand at Applewoods Restaurant with our super cool heat sets, and of course our entire Senior year of Calculus and the wonderful study parties (I'm not being sarcastic--they were the highlight of high school--so fun. Our teacher Mr. Schultz always joked that we shared a brain so he let us have our desks pushed together in class except for tests and let us turn in homework with both our names on the same paper since we did everything together.) After college Jen went to OU and I went to Harding. This was before facebook and e-mail had just started so we actually wrote paper letters back and forth.

One of my favorite memories is after we both graduated from college. I was living in Little Rock and she came up one weekend to visit. We were feeling sad that neither one of us were dating anyone so we went wedding dress shopping and pretended we both had just gotten engaged and tried on lots of pretty dresses. We then went and bought a white cake and had our names and our fake fiance's names put on the cake and came home and ate it all :)

This week, Jen got her beautiful wedding dress and her cake and it was every bit of the fairy tale she had dreamed about ten years ago. She and Ken got married at the Bell Tower at Adriatica in McKinney. It was a small outdoor wedding and so beautiful. I was so blessed and honored to get to witness her day and dream come true. I wish them a lifetime of happiness and pray God's blessings on their marriage.

Picture of the Jen before the ceremony

The Bell Tower

The first level of the Bell Tower where the ceremony took place

The ceremony

The reception was at this beautiful wine bistro

The cake was so pretty and every layer was a different flavor. Jen and Ken both picked their favorite flavor. Ken has two children and they each picked their favorite flavor as well. They did such a great job of incorporating the kids into the ceremony and the reception.

Jen and me