With the rise of the Delta variant, we have made the following changes for our wedding to mitigate as many risks as possible: --The entire wedding--ceremony, cocktail hour, and reception--will be held outside, with the reception taking place under a tent. "The morning after" brunch buffet station will be indoors in the Hayden Lodge, with both indoor and outdoor seating available. --While all of our vendors are fully vaccinated, all of our wedding staff and vendors will be wearing masks as an added precaution. --At this time, per Massachusetts guidelines, masks are not required for guests--but we ask that all guests be respectful of social distancing guidelines with any guests who do choose to wear them. When we sent our wedding evites, we put in a notice in both the invitation and on the top of every page of our website requiring all guests of eligible age (currently 12 and older) who choose to attend our wedding to be fully vaccinated. This is extremely important to us, because: --We have guests coming who are considered high-risk, including immediate family members. --We have several nieces and nephews participating in our wedding ceremony who have not yet been approved to receive the vaccine, due to their age. --We have guests coming with unvaccinated children under 12 at home. While we've made every effort to be as clear as possible on our stance on this, if you are of eligible age, unvaccinated, and missed this memo when the invitations were sent, please let us know as soon as possible. We will update your RSVP to "not attending." We thank you for your understanding. Please don't hesitate to give us a shout if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you so much for helping to make our wedding safe and fun for everyone--we are so excited to celebrate!

Due to Covid-19, the two of us, along with our families, have ultimately decided to postpone our wedding to 2021. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to planning a wedding during a pandemic, and what works for one couple and their guests might not be optimal for another. One thing we didn't want to skimp on was the guest list--and the two of us would love to have as many of you here to celebrate with us as we can--so for us, postponing to 2021 made the most sense. We wanted to be sure to let you know as soon as possible in hopes that you're all able to come celebrate with us! Also, there's one (mildly important...okay, very important) other reason why we elected to postpone our wedding to next September... We're already legally married! While many know off of social media, we wanted to make the news official. On September 19th, 2019, the two of us legally tied the knot at Waltham City Hall, in the presence of our immediate families. We were originally planning to share the news following "the big wedding" that was supposed to happen on September 19th, 2020, on our one-year anniversary. The reason we elected to tie the knot earlier was to be on the same health insurance plan through Drew's work. Even still, both of us have known for a long time that we wanted to eventually get married, so the decision to go to City Hall a year earlier made a lot of sense for us from both a loving AND practical standpoint! We are so excited to celebrate "the big wedding" with you on our 2-year anniversary weekend. While we'd love to be partying with all of you sooner, we know that September 18th, 2021 will be here before we know it.

It was a dark and stormy night in December 2015, and Gracie was at home in Brighton Center perusing messages she’d received on OKCupid. A message from a cute software developer stuck out--"The Giver" was one of his favorite books too! Gracie opened doctor_ew137’s profile and gleaned that there were no red flags--other than a shortage of information beyond the fact that he liked to snowboard, was 6’2” (a nice fit to her 5’9”), and that he’d only answered 30 questions compared to Gracie’s 450 (can you guess who is writing all of this right now?). Doctor Ew had relocated to Boston from CT after changing jobs the year earlier, and like Gracie, was feeling similarly worn out from the odd world of online dating. The holidays came and went and there was a lull in the pair’s messaging. Doctor Ew spent the holidays with his family in NY, and Gracie was home with family in MA. Being home with family meant one thing--time for Gracie’s mom to pester her about her most recent OKCupid matches. “Doctor Ew...his name is probably Drew! He’s cute! I like him! You should give him a chance!” her mom declared. As fate would have it, Mom was right--his name was Drew AND he messaged Gracie again and they set up a date for January 3rd, 2016. Start the year off strong, right? The two met at Devlin's in Brighton Center, equidistant from each other's apartments, on an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon. And after more online dates than the two of them wanted to count, there was something...different about this one. The attraction was there, but also the comfort--something about the date just put the both of them at ease. “Is this your first date? This is going really well,” the bartender assured Gracie while Drew was in the bathroom. “Like, really well.” 5 hours of conversations and cocktails later, Drew walked Gracie home and they were already planning their next date. Not much longer after, both of them deactivated their OKCupid profiles and never looked back.

After 3 1/2 years of adventures around the world, Gracie and Drew attended 15 weddings together and the two of them (well, mostly Gracie) were starting to catch a bit of the wedding fever themselves. Drew joked that he was going to propose to Gracie via a catapulted baked potato, but little did Gracie know that Operation Baked Potato was underway and it luckily would not involve anything being launched in her face. The ruse was simple: Drew and Gracie were going to drive to his dad's house in Narragansett, RI to pick up beach chairs and supplies on the way to meeting his family at the beach. As it turns out, over 50 of their friends and family members were waiting for them in the backyard of the house as Drew got down on one knee! He'd created a website for the whole thing and had been planning and prepping with the help of family and friends for over a month. Gracie of course ugly cried and Drew wore his sunglasses the entire time and it was absolutely perfect.