Emily + Marcy in San Diego | June 2, 2012 

Emily + Marcy in San Diego | June 2, 2012
After falling in love in grad school, these two scientist brides planned a flawless wedding ceremony in a butterfly garden at Balboa Park with incredible guest involvement.

Photography by Holly Steen from Cakes and Kisses Wedding Photography and Katie from Katie Gardner Photography

Emily: Marcy and I met in 2007 when we both started graduate school at UCSD. We became friends over the school year and after a few months of hanging out and having lunch, we shared our first kiss at our graduate program’s retreat in the mountains underneath a sky full of stars. It was marvelous! It was important to us to take each other on proper ‘dates’ so we went to Pelly’s Miniature Golf Course here in Del Mar* for our first official date. We both have fond memories of that first date which is why we chose to take our engagement pictures at Pelly’s! As things progressed Marcy and I started to talk about becoming engaged. We wanted to make each other feel special by both proposing, so that’s what we did! Marcy proposed to me on March 14, 2010 (Pi day for all us nerds!), and I proposed to her on April 10, 2010. We presented each other with rings we had previously picked out together. Wedding planning can be extremely stressful so I would recommend recruiting all the help you can get. My bridesmaids have been lifesavers and I can’t imagine having our wedding without our friends and family close by our sides. 

Marcy: The first look was out of this world and remains one of my favorite moments out of a whole day of wonderful memories. Overall, I was just so impressed how the many moving pieces came together to make one seamless (to us, at any rate) event. Right when we got engaged, I remember reading wedding blogs where the brides talk about how their one friend is a DJ and the other is a seamstress and so on and I thought “I am a scientist, my friends are scientists, we don’t do weddings” but it turns out that our friends have hidden talents and honored us by contributing so many personal touches to our wedding. My aunt and cousin designed and put together the centerpieces, and it was just phenomenal.I remember being nervous early in the day while getting ready, but after stepping in my wedding dress and then seeing Emily so beautiful in hers, the stress melted away and I felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be and was able to relax and enjoy it.

Emily: Marcy and I got married June 2, 2012 on a beautiful day in Balboa Park, San Diego. Before the ceremony, we did a “first look” since neither of us knew what the other would be wearing. Seeing Marcy in her wedding dress for the first time was incredible; it’s a moment I’ll never forget. The ceremony took place in a butterfly garden tucked down in an alcove full of natural beauty. We worked with our officiant to design a ceremony that was truly ours; we picked out everything because it was meaningful to us, including a handfasting ceremony where we literally “tied the knot.”

The idea of community is very important to us and therefore we chose to have a beautiful marriage certificate designed (a hybrid between a quaker marriage certificate and a ketubah) that everyone at the ceremony signed. We really couldn’t have done it without the support and help of our friends and family. They really made the day come together. In addition, we took a group picture of all the wedding guests after the ceremony concluded, all 63 of us!

The reception was in the Museum of Photographic Arts, and it was spectacular. We got to use the photobooth; which was a ton of fun. We had everyone put a photo strip into our guestbook so we will have crazy pictures from all of our friends and family to remember forever. The exhibition that was up during our wedding was a fun and upbeat display about Jazz music that just happened to match our colors perfectly. Everything went smoothly and it was a truly perfect day. Everyone told us that our wedding was the most fun they had ever had at a wedding. We had one surprise up our sleeves and that was our first dance. We had been taking dance lessons in the months before the wedding and had choreographed our first dance to “Brighter Than Sunshine” by Aqualung. We did it flawlessly (for the first time in our dresses!) and blew everyone away. It was exhilarating! We mingled and danced the night away until it was time to go. It’s true what everyone says, it’s gone in a flash, but our wedding day was filled with so many moments that I will never forget.