ELISE & DAN

Every love story has its own unique beginning. Mine began almost 10 years ago when I decided to take a wedding planner's position with The Daley Hospitality Group at Old Daley on Crooked Lake (formerly The Crooked Lake House). My sole responsibility was to execute every couple’s dream day. Over the years I have planned over 200 weddings and truthfully, I never really thought that I would find love where I help celebrate the love of others, but destiny and life works in mysterious ways!

I met Dan in August of 2016 while he was attending his friend's wedding. Something about the connection between us felt different, and by the following year, we were engaged! There was no doubt for either of us where we wanted all our closest family and friends –all 350 of them!! - to celebrate with us. If the coincidences could not get any more specific, The Crooked Lake House was the venue that my grandparents held their wedding in, in 1955. After that, everything seemed to fall perfectly into place.

With all my experience in the industry, I knew exactly how I wanted our day to be, right down to the tiniest detail. It was finally time to plan! My shower was set, my bachelorette in Florida booked, and our wedding date solidified for August 1, 2020… We all know what came next!

As if things were not crazy enough, life had other plans for us, and we found out we were expecting our first baby in April of 2021! Cue another cancellation....move the reception to July of 2021 and get married in a very small ceremony on October 1, 2020. We welcomed James Daniel into our lives in March of 2021.

With the pandemic still very much present, Dan and I knew that with a guest list of 350 people there was no way to be able to have that many people in any space, so again, we changed the date! At this point, we were already married and had a baby, so we were really looking to have a celebration with the ones we loved most and what better night to party than New Year's Eve? Finally, in June of 2021 the wedding-and-event-world started to get back on track – there was hope that we were going to pull this off!

But SURPRISE! Enter baby number two! After everything we had been through, we were keeping our date; nothing was going to make us change it again! COVID continued to haunt us and our guest list of 350 quickly dropped to 250. With 70 guests cancelling the week between Christmas and New Year's due to contracting COVID, being exposed or being worried about possible exposure. Here I was 25 weeks pregnant with a 10-month-old at home redoing my seating chart for what seemed to be the 500th time!

At last, December 31, 2021 was finally here and it seemed to be nothing short of a miracle! Although the day was not exactly how we planned in the beginning it was every bit as perfect as we had hoped! Our vendors really stuck with us through the good and the bad and knocked it out of the park. The Old Daley Staff, the food, service staff, florals, entertainment, and our favorite people coming together to celebrate our love – it was all such a dream!