Wedding Date on Feb 23, 2019

Cherie and Kirsten met in Sydney and bonded over a shared love of chicken nuggets and the Pitch Perfect soundtrack. Their relationship moved very quickly as Kirsten was moving to London for work in just three months (this *may* have played a role in Kirsten drunkenly telling Cherie she loved her after just two weeks 😉). They thought it was over, but could never quite quit each other and after a year and a half, they found themselves both in New York. There, just before moving back home to Sydney, Kirsten surprised Cherie with a Central Park picnic proposal. After lots of ugly crying (GIRL, us too), Cherie said yes! Once home, Cherie planned her own proposal to Kirsten in front of the Sydney Opera House and their relationship finally came full circle. We were both working at a professional services firm in Brisbane, and were friends before we finally got together. Things moved pretty quickly but three months in, Kirsten was moving to London for work. They said goodbye and “broke up” but then proceeded to call and message each other every day before finally admitting they were in a long-distance, committed relationship. Cherie tried to get a transfer to London but instead landed in New York, and Kirsten eventually arrived in the big apple too. After eighteen months apart we were finally living in the same city. Just before we left New York, Kirsten planned a picnic in Central Park. Kirsten had tricked Cherie into getting her nails done during the day and created a personalized book with little cartoon characters of themselves with their quirky sayings and picked out an engagement ring. She completely caught Cherie off-guard, and Cherie burst into tears and managed to say ‘yes’ between ugly crying. After moving to Sydney, Cherie then planned a proposal back to Kirsten in front of the Opera house after a romantic dinner at Quay. She had arranged for an engagement ring sourced from the same jeweller Kirsten had commissioned in New York. Kirsten is infamous for doing the worm, and her family and friends kept asking us if she was going to do it on the day. I insisted she wouldn’t be doing it in her bridal dress, so we hired a choreographer, Jeffery Hu (@hu_jeffery), arranged personalized letterman jackets and learned a surprise hip hop dance routine to a mix of Beyonce and Rihanna, just so she could do her famous party trick. Whilst we love to carve up a dance floor, we are certainly not professional dancers, and it took us about eight hours (three private lessons with Jeff) plus hours and hours of practice to learn the three-minute routine. We were working out quite a lot and took advantage of the large mirrors in the gym to practice. It was quite embarrassing as we had one airpod each and were flailing about, so we're sure the people doing yoga next door thought we were really weird. I love song parodies and had recently done one as the maid of honor at my best friend's wedding a couple of years before. Kirsten asked if I would do something again, and I told a little white lie and said "no" as I wanted it to be a surprise. I had already secretly started writing lyrics, and mixed the music which was a medley of "Stronger" by Kanye West, "Say My Name" by Destiny's Child and "No Fear" by Dej Loaf. Kirsten's mum was jumping up and done like she was at a Beyoncé concert, and still to this day, I have people sing "Kjy bae, Kjy bae, when no one is around you, secretly I call you embarrassing nicknames" instead of "say my name, say my name, when no one is around you, say baby I love you if you ain't running game" to my face when the song comes on. We are so glad we hired (@cloudherdfilmco) to film our special day! They did a full-length feature (about 12 min) and a few shorter snippets for Instagram too. Cherie told them that there would be a few surprises (i.e. bridal wedding rap/song, and a hip hop dance routine) and they were so keen to help out! Working with them was a dream, they had some great ideas and totally captured the vibe of our wedding, and we loved loved loved the soundtrack they used for the video ("Better Than This" by Reagan James). We hadn't heard the song before but immediately downloaded it on Spotify after we watched the video. We loved all of our vendors but especially enjoyed having Cara, our celebrant (), who was Kirsten's sister’s celebrant and flew down from Byron Bay to be with us on our special day. Massive shout out to (@scottsurplicephotography) who made the photo shoot really fun and not at all awkward (which I thought it would be) and of course, who captured all the key moments and edited some amazing content from the day.