You might say that this story starts with the color yellow. Erin Martin’s wise mother assigned each of her quadruplets a special color for easy organization of everything from baby booties to lunch boxes to gym towels. Erin, the youngest, was given yellow—the color of intelligence, sunshine, joy, warmth, energy, and optimism—a color she loves to this day. It’s no surprise, then, that the color yellow played a big role in her wedding to Jerod Stimpson in
November 2008.

“We’d planned it so quickly, and all of a sudden, here it is.”
—Erin Stimpson

It worked perfectly for the fall wedding the couple planned.    “I really wanted to get married in the fall,”  Erin says.  “I really love the rich, warm colors, and it just feels like a romantic time of year to me.”

But with a mere six months to plan—and commuting from Dallas where both she and Jerod work—the bride-to-be really needed some expert help. So she turned to her mother. “Mom did almost everything,” she says with a smile. “And because we decided to marry in Victoria, where I grew up, we had to move pretty fast to get the right venue.”  That turned out to be the Our Lady of Victory cathedral; Erin went to school there and grew up knowing all the priests and nuns.

They decided on The Holy Family Activity Center for the reception. “That was an easy one,”    Erin says.   “You could dress it up any way you wanted; it was so easy to decorate.”

She chose a Pronovias wedding dress from a Houston shop.     “It was the third dress I tried on,”  Erin says.  “It silhouetted my body nicely, I felt, and yet it was a simple mermaid style that I could dress up with jewelry. With my lacy veil, it felt just perfect, very comfortable.” The bride selected emerald-green dresses for her six bridesmaids because that went well with the fall family of colors she had chosen.

“I had a great florist in Carol McCracken,” she says. “She’s very creative, but she loves fall colors, too, so she had a heyday, going with lots of earthy, woodsy colors.”      The bride decided on bright-yellow orchids as the centerpiece of her bouquet and a single blossom for her bridegroom’s corsage.

The wedding day dawned crisp and clear.       “I was nervous before,”     Erin recalls,     “but the ceremony went fine. We’d planned it so quickly, and all of a sudden, here it is. But surrounded by my family and all that love, I calmed down quickly and just got into it. I was so happy!”

And that’s where this lovely story ends, with the warm, happy notes of yellow. Mr. and Mrs. Stimpson’s life will forever be filled with the sunshine of their special day.