In all the stress of wedding planning, its important to reflect on what's important...
As if by fate, Jan was the only one home as she was jolted from sleep to the shrill and deafening sounds of the smoke detectors. She stood on her lawn and stared in a trancelike state at the fireball that was once her home. She watched horrified as the new drapes that she had just purchased for the living room seemed to dance around in a burst of flames around the still glowing Christmas tree. Even though there was a chaotic flurry of firefighters attacking the beast that was growing inside the house, she knew that her home could not be saved. As the activity swarmed around her, Jan was strangely reminded of the wonderful memories of camping and staring into the campfire as a child and how precious those fleeting moments are. That relaxing feeling of staring into a fire and feeling the warmth on her skin was now replaced by the emptiness of just losing all of her prized possessions in what seemed like a dazed nightmare. Had she left the curling iron on, was it the furnace, a faulty wire on the Christmas tree? The reason seemed so unimportant compared to the result.
She so wished that her husband of twenty six years was there beside her, but he was arriving home tomorrow from a business trip. She also thought of all the papers she had laid out on the kitchen table in anticipation of being able to spend time with her engaged daughter to plan her upcoming wedding. The last 5 minutes she had acted purely on survival instincts to get out of the house safely, fighting the urge to want to try and put out the fire herself. As she began to replay those moments in her head, she noticed that she had been hugging and clinging to an object that she had grabbed at the last second as she exited the house. Subconsciously, she had grabbed the one possession that she knew she couldn't replace. She loosened her grip and looked down on the one priceless item that she saved from the fire...
Married October 4th, 2008! Jason and Jennifer allowed us to brag about them on our blog! “We really like that your service allows us to both upload and download photos (it seems like most other services will not allow you to download the pics once they've been uploaded). And it’s so fun to see all of the pictures that everyone has taken!!”
Jennifer and Jason did it all to collect as many memories as they could. She promoted it to all her friends to bring their cameras to all their events and she is still receiving photos!
The other great thing that Jennifer's parents did was invent their own photobooth! Here's Jennifer's comments about the Photobooth: "Oh my gosh! The photobooth was great! I loved it. My parents actually made the booth - my mom used an imac connected to a camera and additional monitor and a button and printer - all items she purchased online. My dad went to the hardware store and made the frame for the photobooth and then my mom bought black velvety curtains and - tada - we had a photobooth! They hired 2 teenagers to run it all night, who made sure that the printer didn't run out of paper or ink. We also bought a plain scrapbook from the craft store and everyone pasted one copy of the strip in the book and kept one copy. I think we've got the best guestbook ever (I may be a little biased, though). It was hilarious to see what people came up with - the box of props certainly helped!!
My mom loved it so much that she's considering running it as a little side business (there aren't many photobooth rental companies in Milwaukee - where we were married). So, to make a long story short, I'm not sure that buying all of the pieces for the booth was ultra-affordable, but if you already have a laptop, photo printer, and camera, the software is out there... and I think even with buying the stuff, we came in under the price for an 8-hour rental, which is what we would have gone for.
Milwaukee Brides! Email us and Jennifer’s Mom can “hook you up!”. We love to hear your stories and successes. Keep them coming in!
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