Hi and welcome to my blog, my name is Marlene, I am 23 years old and I am currently in the process of planning my wedding to my fiancé Timothy (24).

I met Tim about 4 years ago when I was introduced to him through a mutual friend at a local pub in Penrith, Sydney. I remember when I met him he was so different to everyone else…he was very quiet, sweet and very polite; I couldn’t help but take a liking to him straight away.

At the time I wasn’t looking to enter into anything serious too soon, but with Tim, the more I got to know him the more I wanted to be around him. Surely enough as the months went on it became more and more clear to us that our relationship was something beyond what we had initially anticipated, for both of us it was like nothing we had ever felt before. So when Tim then finally asked me if we could start to officially date I didn’t hesitate one bit! To say the least the last few years have been the best few years of my life, a fairytale from the get go!

We were dating for 2 and half years when Tim proposed to me. He went the traditional way about it and asked my father if he could have my hand in marriage about midnight the night before we were going with his whole family to Europe! He proposed to me when I least expected it, inside the Vatican, when we were on tour in Rome. Out of the blue he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him!! It was the most romantic, amazing experience of my life!

And a very funny story at that! In a nutshell, his Mum had the ring in her handbag and managed to get lost just minutes before Tim was about to propose! However, Tim kept his cool and when his Mum was finally found she asked us to take her back through the Vatican, anyway, when we were alone in a secluded part of the Vatican, he popped the question! Apparently his initial plan was to propose to me through the tour guide’s microphone so everyone on our tour could hear but lucky he didn’t because I would have been very embarrassed! Fate most definately stepped in there!!  After dinner, our tour guide announced to our whole tour group the great news about the engagement. After being bombarded with questions from Americans and photos we then headed to the Trevi Fountain under the moonlight where legend has it, if you throw a coin into the fountain, you will return to Rome, so we both threw a coin into the fountain with the hope that one day in the future we to will return to Rome, maybe to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary, you never know?

Following our amazing experience in Rome, we headed over to Ireland, my place of birth where I met my whole family for the first time! It was amazing!! They had already heard about the proposal from my family so me and Tim were again welcomed with engagement celebrations which was so unexpected. I was thrilled that I got to celebrate such an important time in my life with my family I had just met! And that I got the opportunity to not only meet them but introduce them to my new fiancé!.

All in all I couldn’t have asked for anything more, it was definitely  the best 4 weeks of my life to date.


After Tim and I got back from our trip to Europe, we got stuck right into the planning. We decided that for our honeymoon we would like to visit New York for Christmas and New Years so we decided that we would have our wedding late December 09.

When deciding on where we were going to have it, I remembered that a few years ago I had a Christmas party out at a lovely function centre in Kurrajong Heights that I absolutely fell in love with, the name of the function centre was Loxley on Bellbird Hill!! It wasn’t far from where I live so as soon as Tim and I we able we took the scenic drive to Loxley to find out more details about what kind of packages they offered. As it turns out it, Tim loved Loxley and agreed that it was everything we wanted and more so we put the deposit down, and booked in the 19th of December 2009 for the summer wedding we always dreamt we would have. The church then followed, which wasn’t hard, it was only 5 minutes down the road from Loxley and it is a very small historic church called St Gregory’s, we fell in love with it the minute we saw it and booked it as soon as we could.

After booking the wedding date, the church and the reception, we decided that we would get in early and book in the videographer and photographer of our choice, so after doing a lot of research we booked in Abraham Joffe for the videography and New Creations for the photography, they were both very pleasant to deal with and their work was second to none.

So, so far everything has gone very smoothly, nothing has been really stressful YET lol and I am enjoying the process of planning my wedding. Only 9 and a bit months to go to the wedding and time is flying so I better get cracking on all the finer details.

Until next time
Marlene