Mandi and Chad met while working at a wine bar together. Dating coworkers was strictly forbidden, so naturally, Mandi quit and found another job! Six years later and they are getting ready to eat, drink, and be married!
Give us the details! When? Where? How?
There’s a local river festival every year in Wichita, and one of the big events is a medallion hunt. The newspaper prints clues every day and the winner who finds the medallion gets a huge prize. Every year we’ve been together, we’ve tried to hunt down the medallion. Chad wanted to go by a park he was saying he thought the medallion was at, but I didn’t see the logic! He kept making the clues fit where he wanted, and I thought it was too early on in the contest to really make sense of just a couple of clues. Little did I know, he’d planned for us to look through this park, and call out to me saying he’d found it. When I’d turned around, he’d be on his knee with the ring!
I ruined his original plan! We wound up going to grab a bite to eat, then stopping at the carnival that the River Festival was hosting. Chad won a game of ski-ball and let me pick out a giant pink fish for his prize. Then we walked to the car, and in the car he said “well, I’m glad you like the fish I won for you, but I have something else for you,” and he pulled the ring box out! I said yes, right away, of course! I was so NOT expecting it, I’d been wearing a baseball cap and overalls shorts! He totally surprised me, and it was perfect!
What has been your favorite experience planning the wedding?
Planning crafts! I love to create and craft things, so planning our center pieces and invitations together has been a blast! We make the decisions together and I’ll do the actual crafting, and we’ll save so much money!
How do you stay sane under the pressures of wedding planning?
We try not to let the criticisms from others get to us; it seems like everyone has an opinion! We are on the same page as far as planning and ideas goes and we’ve both decided that as long as the two of us are happy with our plans, the opinions of others do not matter. We’re each others’ touchstones, whenever we need a sanity check we can just ask each other what it is we want.
At Joy we believe that even though a wedding lasts a day, joy should last forever. What does that mean to you?
Our wedding is going to be the most fun and joyful day of our lives to date, but we’re committed to making our marriage last forever. Our vows are special, sacred, and for forever.
