OUR Engagement Session!

We promised in our recent update post that we would tell you all about our experience with our engagement shoot. Grab a glass of wine and some popcorn because the pictures are stunning!

Friday night we went out on a double date with our friends Amanda and Evan. Shelby and Amanda have been best friends since the day Amanda was born. They are about a year apart and their moms have been best friends for years. Amanda is an amazing makeup artist and YouTuber who promised to do Shelby’s makeup for the engagement session on Saturday. So the plan was for a double date with Evan and Amanda and then for her to sleep over so makeup could start early in the morning. It was 9:45 when we got a text from Kalahan and Sean, letting us know that they were almost to their bed and breakfast. The text read “We were looking for a night cap somewhere and we went to 3 gas stations and they didn’t have any wine! Or alcohol for that matter! Do people not drink in CT?!” Right then we knew this weekend was going to be so much fun! We told them that since all the package stores were closed, they would have to find a bar. We happened to be at Cafemantic, an amazing restaurant with great drinks and food, so we told them to join us. The restaurant closes at 10, but since we knew the bartender, Mike, he let them in. Mike was a bartender at Shelby’s Dad’s restaurant a few years ago. He had become an amazing friend and we sat with him every Friday for a year at the bar. We grabbed some chairs, and squished Kalahan and Sean in at the table. We all laughed and bonded over whiskey sours and amazing food for an hour and a half past closing.

The next morning, we wake up and Amanda starts Shelby’s makeup. We filmed the trials and final look for Amanda’s Youtube channel. We will share that as soon as it is up!

We arrived to our farm, all 6 dogs with us. We drove them out to a field in the back of our property, with Kalahan and Sean following behind. I swear we are crazy. The looks we get when we say we have 6 dogs is hilarious. Trying to get all 5 of our large dogs to stand together for a picture is a joke. We really need a reality TV show for how crazy our life is with our fur babies. However, with lots of help from Shelby’s mom and Sean, we got the picture. We were completely tangled in leashes, being pulled in different directions. Spruce has his ear flipped inside out, Aspen has his lip caught on his tooth, and Birch and Maple are looking away, but we did it. We got the shot. Was it worth the craziness? 100%! We absolutely love our family portrait. If you plan on having dogs in your pictures, DO IT! They are family members too! Just make sure you have amazing helpers, shoutout to Candy & Sean! (Keep an eye out for this picture as we are waiting to post it until after our save the dates go out!)

After the craziness of our dogs, we popped some champagne, all of us said cheers and laughed at how much fun we were having so far. We drove home, dropped off the dogs, got changed and took Kalahan and Sean to the Mohegan Sun Casino. For those of us who live in Connecticut, and have seen the casinos before, it is pretty normal for us to see these giant buildings appear over the trees in the middle of nowhere. However, for most, casinos are much smaller in other states. When we told Kalahan and Sean we were going to a casino for dinner, I am sure they did not think much of it, but when we pulled up next to them in the parking lot, the two of them looked at us with their jaws dropped in amazement. It is hilarious to see the differences from their home state of Washington to ours. We joked about the “packy” as in package store, or liquor store to them and how their casinos are similar to a strip mall while ours are similar to those in Las Vegas! We compared how they do not have bugs, besides spiders, while we have tons of bugs, like mosquitoes. They have elk, we don’t, we have fisher cats, and they had never heard of them. We played a fisher cat scream for them and talked about how scary it is to wake up to what sounds like a lady being murdered. When we arrived we had dinner at Ballo, and somehow we ordered the exact same meal as them! We split the burrata and a pasta dish that none of us could pronounce, and they did the same thing. All of us split the truffle Mac and cheese. Make sure to ask for the flaming mac and cheese wheel (not on the menu!).

We joined Kalahan and Sean at their Airbnb in Old Saybrook to get dressed into our second outfits. Kalahan was kind enough to re-curl Shelby’s hair while the guys learned the history of the 1700s home. We then went to Water’s Edge Resort for pictures on their beautifully manicured lawns and beach. Shelby grew up playing on that beach since her family has a timeshare at the resort, making it a meaningful location for our pictures. Once the sun set, we all looked at each other and decided the night was not over!

We packed up our gear, got changed and drove to Mystic to walk around under the moonlight. We ended the night at the Daniel Packer Inn. Their bar makes you feel like you went through a portal to a pub in Scotland. The walls are all large stones and it is a tiny room, with only 5 or 6 tables, tightly packed against the bar. We sat right up against a fireplace that had an old musket hanging from it. We ordered wings, nachos and drinks while listening to two older gentlemen sing and play the harmonica and guitar. It was such a great ending to our amazing weekend!

Kalahan and Sean have become our best friends! We liked the same food, drinks, and everything else we talked about, we just clicked! Who knew that a couple who lives over 3,000 miles away, would feel like family the second we met them? We have so many similarities in our lives, the same passions, and the same humor. We absolutely love our photographers Kalahan & Sean. I say it all the time, but you have to love your photographers, it makes such a difference in the pictures, and the experience. You spend more time with your photographers than you do with anyone else on your wedding day, including your spouse! We are so glad we took the time to interview over 20 different photographers. That’s right, 20. It was long and exhausting but look at what we got out of it! Best friends and AMAZING pictures…

Make sure to check out Kalahan and Sean’s blog post about our engagement session here!