love, hurricanes, and flying goldfish

So it's official. We conquered the mystical creature I call the Bridal Show. And by conquered, I mean we prepped and planned, drilled and glued and didn't have an aneurysm. I consider this conquering. I consider this a success. All the hours of stress and meetings collided into one beautifully designed booth,

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crisp clean marketing materials (designed by my Nate the Great),

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and one KILLER wall.

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A wall unlike any other. A wall heavier than any other. A wall that would soon end one poor little creature's life.

The day started like any other really. Alarm going off, hair being done, peacocks frolicking in the garden. You know, typical. But what seems to start well, does not always, you know, end well.

Let me back track. When we came up with our ingenious plan for our booth, we didn't account for two very important things. 1) This show was going to be at La Caille, and 2) we are not engineers. When we pictured Bridal Show, we thought of florescent lighting and little curtain rooms. The kind of little rooms that would have some type of bar high off the floor enclosing our little slice of wedding marketing bliss. Lovely polyester, billowing in the breeze. What we sooo did not expect was a beautiful little patio with only a 2 foot tall barrier to protect us. Where, we panicked, is our lovey poly-blend covered bar on which to lean our newly constructed wall? The clock was ticking, bunnies were bouncing and we had to find a way to make do. So, we took a chance, because what else did we have. We leaned our 8'x8' wall tenderly against the glorified cement step, shoved our two lovely antique dressers against the wall in desperate hope that our little sandwich would hold our pictures through the day.

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To our delight, it seemed to be working.

For about an hour.

Suddenly, in the middle of our 90 degree, Utah, July day, came some sort of freakish hurricane strength gust of wind.

Our beautiful wall lurched and screeched. Every bride nearby gasped in horror. I could feel it coming and there was nothing we could do. Nevertheless, I lunged forward over our little dresser clawing at the wall in a vain attempt to stop the inevitable destruction.

I failed.

The wall shot down the hill. Our beautiful fish bowl shattered with a sonic boom, the dresser was launched into my leg and our poor little goldfish rocketed across the sky.

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We all stood in silence. Frozen in our places. Our faces plastered with "no-way-that-just-happened" looks.

All our hard work. All of our beautiful pictures. Our fish?! Un-be-liev-able.

It was totally crazy. Totally devastating. And totally a miracle.

In my attempt to rescue the wall before it's demise, my leg was attacked by the dresser and my finger was sliced (ironically my middle finger),

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but we feel so blessed that no one was seriously hurt, which was a real possibility. That is, no one besides the goldfish whom we have not heard from since.

The other blessing was that the other dresser, which had Cali's beautiful Mac desktop on it didn't even budge. Which made no sense. But nonetheless, it was completely unharmed. Crazy.

The great staff at La Caille, our AWESOME booth neighbors (the coolest family behind Diva Bling Jewelry), and total strangers came to our rescue including one passerby who donated a small first aid kit to me. People are awesome. I'm a big fan.

In the end, there was nothing to be done, but carry on. Although most of the pictures were destroyed, we were able to salvage some of them and still show off some work with the slideshow on the Mac.

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All in all it turned out to be a very successful day, and I don't think our booth was empty for longer than about 5 minutes the whole day.

Most of that was thanks to Cali(of Beautiful You)'s sister Heidi who was a-MA-zing!

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She walked around the show with our cards in bags full of candy talking us up like crazy, and ambushing people for free makeovers done by the uber talented Cali and Catherine.

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(yours truly getting some touchups)

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Heidi even got the DJ to mention us more than 10 times through out the day over the loud speakers. Thank you Heidi!!

She also got people to come and enter in our fabulous drawing for a FREE engagement session and makeup done by Beautiful You. Which leads me to the very exciting part of our post......

We had over 200 entries

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but alas, there can only be one winner, and thanks to Miles that winner is..................

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PEGGY BURCKHARD!!!!!!

Come on down!!!

She and her cute fiance will be getting free engagement pictures and free bridal makeup (fiance's makeup is optional :)

Call or email our shoot coordinator Kate at info@amylittlephotography ASAP and we'll get you all set up.

Congratulations!!!

Thank you everyone who stopped by our booth and made what could have been a devastating day, a totally memorable and FANTASTIC one.

And thank you to Cali and Catherine for being an absolute dream to work with. I love you both!

Most especially thank you to my schnickle fritz husband. What a dream man. You are my best friend. Thank you thank you hun, for doing all the heavy lifting, both physically and emotionally that day, and for encouraging me to step out of my comfort zone. Most of all thank you for believing that I was capable of succeeding. I could do nothing without you.