Dawn and Sahar were married on a beautiful summer day at the family’s estate home in Riverside County, Southern California. Michael Jonathan Studios captured the many details of the day and Cathy at Parallel Media Productions was the videographer. Sara Harris from Blush + Brass Events was the Wedding Coordinator. The Persian food that was served at the reception was by Mission Ranch Catering. The beautiful flowers on the wedding ceremony arch and centerpieces were designed by the florist, Oceanic Flowers.
How did you meet?
We were introduced to each other by two of our friends who were dating each other and each knew us separately. However after meeting, we soon realized that we actually shared a large circle of friends and have even found pictures from several undergraduate parties/events that we both attended but didn’t actually run into each other! It’s like our paths crossed many times but didn’t meet until the timing was right!
How long did you plan the wedding after the proposal?
It was about 8-9 crazy months from proposal to wedding date.
The top 3 challenges/difficulties of planning the wedding.
1. Working the guest list down to a size that allowed us to stay within budget. We are lucky to have so many friends, family, and loved ones – but had a difficult time with where to draw the line.
2. Compromising and including the opinions of our parents. Both of our parents were very excited and engaged in our wedding planning. We felt very thankful for this, however at times, dealing with three different sets of passionate opinions got extremely stressful.
3. Deciding on whether or not to do our own vows – we went back and forth on this a couple of times throughout the process but in the end are extremely glad we did our own and strongly encourage anyone else debating, to do their own.
The top 3 most fun/easiest parts of planning the wedding.
1. Food and cake tasting!
2. The Costco run for three flatbed carts stacked with alcohol – We more then doubled what the online estimator tools recommended, and glad we did as it was all utilized!
3. Picking our ceremony songs and first dance song – We spent an entire evening listening through cliche’ love songs while sharing a bottle of wine.
What fun/unique feature of your wedding made you the proudest?
This is a tough one! We both are proudest of how unique and reflective of personalities the wedding was. We got married in my parent’s back yard and this allowed the both of us and our families to do a lot of the prep work ourselves which added a feeling of accomplishment when it ended up being a huge success. We wanted an intimate, fun-focused, and memorable wedding and feel that we exceeded our own expectations.
If you had it to do over, what would you change, add or do differently?
Invite more guests! We narrowed our guest list to about 250, but looking back at it we both feel it would have been worth the added cost to include more guests on our special day.
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