It's Mrs. SAIGH to you...

I'm MARRIED! Finally, all the wedding talk is over (kind of), and I am no longer Melissa Specken... it's now Melissa Saigh (pronounced "sigh", rhymes with "thigh"). My husband (hehe) AJ and I were married at St. John's Catholic Church on October 2nd, and our reception was held at Interlachen Country Club in Edina. Everything was amazing!

We did the traditional wedding weekend... rehearsal and dinner on Friday night, wedding on Saturday, gift opening Sunday morning, and we left for our honeymoon Monday morning. I'm going to need a month to catch up on sleep, but it was all worth it. Our 236 guests flew in from all over the country and it was so great to have everyone we love in one room! As a bride, the most difficult thing about your wedding day, is getting around to each and every table to say hello and thank people for coming. In our case, AJ did most of the chatting and I did most of the dancing:)

My girls (6 bridesmaids and 4 personal attendants) and I started our wedding weekend with pedicures, manicures and custom spray tans with Extrados Salon in Wayzata. I am so unbelievably grateful to Miss Amy and her spray tanning talents, and for making myself and my girls bronze goddesses for the wedding! Extrados in Linden Hills was our "home base" on Saturday and I can not thank Leah and her staff enough for making my entire wedding party look like we came out of a bridal magazine. From 8am until noon, the moms, myself and my girls, all hung out at Extrados having our hair and makeup done. Leah was a phenomenal host, and she (and her staff) got all 13 of us ready to go and out the door for photos on time! I absolutely LOVED getting ready with all of my girls in the "bridal suite" at Extrados, and can't wait to see the photos taken by our photographer Brandis Alves.

It's so hard for me to remember details for the actual wedding day. I can honestly say I wasn't stressed (I was actually on Facebook and Twitter all morning) and almost everything went the way I had planned it. The weather was perfect, the fall leaves were starting to change color, and we STAYED ON TIME!!! The one moment I will never forget, is walking down the aisle with my Dad, seeing so many familiar faces... and then... the face of my future husband:) I also remember my cousins, Cavan and Ian Krekelberg, singing "Ave Maria" during our ceremony (I hope to post video or photos of this soon). Their voices were so beautiful and they made our family so proud!

Since my Dad is the fire chief of Hopkins, he had one of the trucks brought to the church for photos. It was something I was happy to do to make our wedding unique. Imagine a wedding party of 24, all dressed up in front of a big red truck! I can't wait to see those photos. After the ceremony and pictures, came the fun of the reception. And man oh man was our reception fun! Instead of having people "clink" glasses to get AJ and I to kiss, we asked people to sing a song with the word "love" in it. Our wedding basically turned into a Broadway production of singing guests. It made dinner interesting:) I also had my uncle Mark Boyle, who is the announcer for the Indiana Pacers, announce our wedding party as we entered the reception! All of the speeches (from my dad, to AJ's best man, to my maids of honor) were so funny, thoughtful, heart-warming and meaningful. To top it all off we showed our guests a 9 minute slide-show (produced by Sarah Sundahl), that did a fantastic job of telling our story in a short period of time. Again, I hope to post this video soon:)

Even our 1 week-long honeymoon in the Dominican (Punta Cana) was wonderful! It was great to just lay by the pool and on the beach with my husband, and not have to think or stress about anything. We stayed at an all-inclusive resort called "The Excellence". Minus the slight musty smell of our honeymoon suite, and the lack of air-flow and air conditioning at the Punta Cana airport, the honeymoon was a blast! We met so many great couples on our honeymoon from all over the world that we hope to stay in touch with:)

As fun as it was to be in wedding "la la land" for almost 2 weeks, it's so great to be back to reality in my safe haven of Minnesota! Lots of love to the Saigh and Specken family for making this whole thing possible:)

Xoxo,

Mrs. Saigh