I’ve been the one running the celebration.

The truth about being new

Most planners build their about pages around credentials, awards, and impressive-sounding portfolios. I'm going to do something different. I'm going to tell you exactly where I am in my career and let you decide if I'm the right fit.

Monarch Celebrations launched in 2026. We're a brand-new business. I don't have a portfolio of a hundred completed weddings yet. I don't have a decade of testimonials with the business name on them. I'm actively pursuing my Association of Bridal Consultants certification through 2026 because credentialing matters and I take that seriously.

What I do have is almost twenty years of doing the work — informally, for the families and communities I love, for free, because I couldn't help myself. I also have ten years as a medical technologist, three formal degrees that all relate directly to this work, and a level of operational discipline I've developed in a profession where there's no room for missed details.

Starting Monarch Celebrations is my honest answer to a question my fiancé Alex, my daughters, and my church community have been asking me for years: Why aren't you doing this for real?

So I am.

A baby shower at eighteen

The first event I ever planned, I was eighteen years old and six and a half months pregnant. It was my own.

Nobody hired me. Nobody told me to do it that way. I just couldn't help myself — the decorations, the menu, the music, the guest list, the RSVPs, even the favors for guests to take home. Every detail had to be thought through.

What stuck with me from that day wasn't the decorations. It was watching the people I loved put a pause on everything else in their lives — work, errands, the running list of things they were worried about — and just be present with each other. Eating together. Laughing. Telling old stories. Some of the women in the room had never been to a baby shower before, and they played games they'd never played in their lives. I remember thinking: this is what a celebration is supposed to do. It pulls people out of their ordinary hours and brings them home to each other for an afternoon.

That was almost twenty years ago. My oldest daughter Gabi is eighteen now. My younger daughter Gracie is ten.

Since that day, I've been the friend, the cousin, the auntie, the mom who somehow ended up running logistics on every gathering in our orbit. My sister's beach wedding. Gabi's quinceañera. Birthday parties for nieces and nephews. Baby showers for friends. Gender reveals. Holiday gatherings of fifty-plus people. Sunday afternoons at home that turned into something. Lab Week celebrations every year for the healthcare team I've been part of for over a decade.

None of it for pay. All of it because I couldn't help myself.

And what I realized, slowly over the years, is that this isn't something I do. It's something that flows out of me. What's new is finally putting the business card on the table.

Time is a non-renewable resource

Here's what I know from being the one in charge of celebrations my whole life:

When you're the host of your own celebration, you don't get to enjoy it.

You pay for everything. You plan everything. You coordinate everything. You're the one fielding the question from the caterer, the one wondering when the photographer is going to arrive, the one who realizes at 8pm that nobody started the music. By the time the celebration is over, you're standing in your kitchen surrounded by dirty dishes asking yourself, did that just happen? I missed it.

I can say this with conviction because I've been there. So have most of the mothers, aunts, sisters, and grandmothers I know. We pour ourselves into making the day beautiful for everyone else, and then the day passes and we're not even sure we were fully in it.

That's the part of celebration planning nobody talks about. And it's the part I most want to take off your shoulders.

A celebration is not a Pinterest board. It's not a sequence of pretty photos for social media. It's an opportunity — and time is a non-renewable resource. The hours your family will spend together at your daughter's quinceañera, your son's wedding, your mother's milestone birthday don't come back. What gets created in those hours is something the people in the room carry with them forever. Years later, they gather, and they say, do you remember that day? That's the test. That's what we're trying to make happen.

A lot of planners in this industry think about events in terms of dollar signs and aesthetics. I think about them in terms of the imprint they leave on the heart of a family. Both can be true, but only one of them is actually the point.

My job is to handle every detail so faithfully that you don't have to think about a single one of them. So you can be present. So you can hug your mother. So you can dance with your daughter. So that when the celebration is over, you can take a breath and feel that quiet satisfaction — we did it. It happened. It was beautiful — and let it stay with you.

That's why I do this. Not for dollar signs. For the imprint a well-celebrated day leaves on the heart of a family.

A career built on details

Outside of the celebrations, I've spent the last ten years as a medical technologist working in a clinical laboratory.

That work has shaped how I plan events more than any planning course could. In the lab, you operate under regulatory standards where there's no room for error and no excuse for missed details. You build systems for handling complex logistics under time pressure. You communicate calmly across language barriers, cultural differences, and stressful moments because the people on the other side of the conversation are scared, overwhelmed, or hurting. You learn that being detail-oriented and being emotionally present are not opposites — they're the same skill applied at the same time.

That decade of professional discipline is in the room with me at every event.

I also hold three degrees that map directly onto this work: an Associate of Science in Clinical Laboratory Science, a Bachelor of Science in Health Administration, and a Master of Arts in Family Ministry. The Family Ministry degree in particular trained me specifically in the dynamics of multi-generational family systems — the same dynamics that show up at every wedding, every quinceañera, every milestone celebration. The Health Administration degree is the operational backbone behind how I structure engagements. The Clinical Laboratory Science training is where the discipline came from.

I'm telling you all this not because I want the page to read like a résumé. I'm telling you because the words "I'm new to event planning as a business" can read two ways — as the disclosure of a hobbyist trying something new, or as the disclosure of a serious professional opening her first formal practice. I want you to know which one this is.

It's the second one.

A few facts

I'm Cuban. Family is from the Havana area. I grew up in a culture where there's always food, always coffee, always laughter — even, as the saying goes, when we're underwater. Family at the core of everything.

I'm a mother of two. Gabi is eighteen. Gracie is ten. They are, in different ways, my best teachers about how to plan around the people who matter most.

I'm engaged to my fiancé Alex. He runs the operational, technology, and marketing side of Monarch Celebrations. I'm the face of the work. We're founders together. He's the backbone. I'm the one who'll be sitting across from you at the discovery call.

I'm a medical technologist of ten years, with an Associate of Science in Clinical Laboratory Science, a Bachelor of Science in Health Administration, and a Master of Arts in Family Ministry. The combination shapes how I do everything.

I'm building something I've waited my whole adult life to build. And I'm going to be honest with you every step of the way about where we are in that journey.