You could say that I have been planning for Emma's baptism for quite some time now. From the church, date, location, dessert table, you name it! I had envisioned it turning out in the most perfect way. Well, things didn't go quite as planned.

“Things don’t always go as planned, they come out even better than imagined. ”

— Feuna

I'm a sucker for tradition.

I had my eye on the church where I got baptized in. I thought, why not have my daughter be baptized in the same church that I was baptized in by the son of the priest who baptized me? How cute would that be? Well, things don't always go as planned.

The church.

The church was under renovation and the completion date kept on getting pushed out. I didn't want too much time to pass before we baptized our daughter, but I was adamant about having the baptism there. Since the date kept on getting pushed further and further out, we decided to do the baptism at the church we got married in. I mean at least there's a tie in there somewhere...we got married there, and we baptized our daughter there. Thankfully, we were able to have the priest that we wanted to baptize Emma. Seriously though, how cute is it that his dad baptized me and now he's baptizing my daughter? My heart gets all gooey with that type of stuff.

Here's the kicker, and it just happened this way, we baptized our daughter on our anniversary at the church we got married. We couldn't have planned it that perfectly! God works wonders. They always say there's a reason for everything. And honestly, God's plan was way better than ours.

On another note, I'm so grateful that we had the church all to ourselves. As with any kid, they get tired and cranky. So in trying to get her to smile or just to cooperate in taking pictures, my brother-in-law began singing Down by the Bay, Emma's favorite song. Within seconds, everyone was singing and trying to get her to look at the camera. It was quite comedic.

The guest list.

Next was our guest list. Initially, we wanted to invite all of our close family and friends; but with Covid, we had to cut back on our guest list. So we kept it super simple. We just invited our immediate family. It was intimate. It was perfect.

The location.

The location where I wanted to have the luncheon was now out of the picture. It would have been way too big from our smaller guest list. In my original planning, I had both of our immediate family, close friends, and many of our cousins on the invite list. Because of Covid, things had to change. We needed to cut back on our guest list, which meant that the location that I'd been dreaming of having it at was out of the picture.

The dessert table.

Pictures don't do it justice. For something that was planned somewhat on the go, it came out perfect. Another setback that we had was the sizing of the table. I was told that we'd get a 6-foot table for the desserts. So when purchasing everything, we had that size in mind. When we got to our venue, they had put out two 4-foot tables instead. So we had to improvise. Instead of having our favors on a separate table, we decided to add them as decoration to our dessert table. Quite frankly, it came out really cute!