The World of Joel Szerlip

Jenn and I have almost been married a year now and I cannot believe how time has flown by. It seems like only yesterday I was proposing in St. James park in London and we began planning our wedding. It has truly been the best decision of my life and I look back on September 19, 2009 with nothing but pure joy. Recently we received our wedding book that we had the opportunity to work with a graphic designer on in developing. We spent hours on picking photos, thinking about placement, and ending up make final decisions on what goes where. I have to say the hours we put into the making of this book will not even compare to the hours we spend looking back at this book and this day.

I realize looking back that I never really took the chance to recap the day and all that went on. I remember the night before the wedding hanging out with Chris and Jake. We met Jenn’s parents for drinks/dinner at the St. Regis not knowing that they only invited us so that the bride to be and her brides maids were out toilet papering our hotel room. It was a great laugh when the three of us got to the room and saw the great work the ladies had done. Looking back it actually helped me calm down and just truly look forward to the day. One of the moments of the night before the wedding was walking down to the wedding location. I remember standing there and running through the day to come. I remember standing there and looking out at the golf course and ocean and just feeling like I was literally on top of the world.

When September 19th rolled around I just remember waking up and not feeling nervous. It wasn’t until the rest of my groomsman arrived at the hotel that the butterfly’s started to come. I remember walking walking outside a bit to early but standing around wondering what I was supposed to do. When I finally walked my mom down the isle I couldn’t believe the day had finally come. I remember standing at the alter looking down the isle at what is and will always be the most beautiful bride that has ever graced this earth. Her eyes sparkled, her smile was as contagious as ever, and I saw my wife, the love of my life. Sure I rushed my “I Do” and even missed some of the words on my vows, I was still a bit nervous, but I just remember looking at Jenn and knowing that there was no place on earth I would rather be then right there. The rest of the day flew by, the reception felt like it was only a few minutes long rather then a few hours. It was was truly the best day of my life and having this beautiful wedding book to help remember the day.

Jenn and I have been planning our wedding for over 5 years now. I mean we knew early on in our relationship that we were going to get married once we got done with college. Well after a year of planning the day is finally coming and I am honestly at the edge of my seat with excitement. I thought by this point I would not be able to sleep and would be full of nerves but to be honest there has been nothing better then looking forward to September 19th.

So with that being said tomorrow is the rehearsal dinner which takes place at 5:30pm and then we go for dinner. Friday I am hanging with most of my groomsman and going to play a round of golf and then Saturday is the big day. I truly am so excited and so ready for the day I cannot even put it into words.

On Sunday the day after the wedding we leave for Scotland where we are staying for 5 days and then going to London for 2. It is a short week trip but I think it will be an amazing honeymoon, nice and cold, and beautiful. I will not be doing daily updates from Scotland this trip as I am not bringing any electronics with me. I however will be writing down some notes from each day and posting them when I get back with a bunch of pictures and videos!

Anyways I am off to get married here in a few days and I will be back after my Honeymoon!!!! See you all then!

Another big day in the planning/preparation of the wedding has come and go and it was really a great day. Today we got to taste the food. What can be bad about that right? Without going into detail on the food (you will have to wait for the Wedding on that one) we had a really amazing day tasting food, going over the wedding plans, and just looking forward to the upcoming big day. Here are some pictures to show off the day!

Our Food Tasting Experience

Getting Ready for the Big Day!

Our Wedding Site, the Botanical Garden at the St. Regis.

Only 53 Days Until the Wedding!!!!!! We will be back with more posts in the coming weeks.

It is with great joy that I write this post today, as Jenn and I have completed our six week Pre-Marital class that we have taken at the church we attend The Grove. We have loved attending The Grove over the past 3-4 years, we feel it is a really great moving stone forward in our faith and has been a true blessing for both Jenn and I. With that being said this class has been a little disapointing. That is not to say that Jenn and I took away nothing from the experience it was just a really hard time for Jenn to be taking the class. Jenn’s new job at SCE has been tough on her, who is to blame she takes the train at 6:00AM each morning and doesn’t get home until 6:45pm and works extremely hard so the weekend is her time to just relax, so I can’t say we were going into this with complete open arms.

So did I learn anything from the experience. Although I really didn’t need it, it just confirmed what I already knew, and that is that Jenn is the perfect match for me. Its funny they have you take all of these different questionaires and surveys to see your compatibilty (I would imagine similar to something like Match.com) and yeah we pasted them all, but those tests don’t tell me I want to spend the rest of my life with Jenn, I do and this class although not necessarily the most enjoyable experience was just another reason why I cannot wait for September 19, 2009, our wedding day.

So what’s next? Well we planned/booked the Honeymoon which I will go over in another post, and now we are looking for our own place. At first we were looking to buy a place, but Jenn’s current job has a lot of mobility both within the company and location and we want to do everything not to restrict that, so we have decided to get an apartment for the time being. More then anything we are just beyond excited to get our own place. We stayed at home throughout college for a number of reasons, it allowed us to travel, it allowed us to save for us, for this time in our life, and it allowed us to plan and boy have we planned.

Since deciding to go the Apartment route we had contemplated living close to home in Riverside, or even going outside this area but to be honest we just never found “that place”. And granted we know this is a temporary location we really wanted to start out right, this is what we have saved and planned for so I think we have finally decided to live where we really want to, and that is in Irvine. Having gone to school their, and Jenn gone to school and worked out their we loved the area. We have the beach 10 minutes away, Disneyland/Angels Stadium is 20 minutes away, and all of the food and shopping you could want. We are really happy with coming to this decision and I can’t wait to start posting about the rental process and showing us start to move in this summer!

When Jenn and I got engaged I knew that we would be doing a lot of different things before we actually made it to the big date. One of the first stops on the road of engagement was taking engagement photos. Jenn and I chose to go with Jack Randall Photography who is going to be doing our photography and video for our wedding next year. Today Jenn and I went down to the Mission in San Juan Capistrano to take our engagement photos. I have never done anything like this before but we were lucky enough to have the owner of Jack Randall and one of his assistant photographers to take our photos today. The weather out here in Riverside looked merky but it was beautiful down at the mission and from what I could tell they did a great job. Jenn and I get to go back down to his studio in Dana Point to go pick some out. I am really excited to go see how they turned out, I would say between the two photographers they had to have taken a thousand pictures.

Let me just say that I went into this whole engagement photo day thinking “oh great I get to get our photo taken”, but it was actually a lot of fun. Jenn and I had a fantastic time and we just had a lot of fun playing with the camera. It was a little awkward to have someone taking your picture from every possible angle imaginable but in the end we really loved it and can’t wait to check out the pictures.