Weddingbee
The Dude and I have known a couple things regarding our wedding reception from the beginning: 1) we want everyone to dance like crazy and have a great time, and 2) we don’t want to play “typical” wedding dance music. You know, the kind of music that middle-aged white people dance to? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. The YMCA. Celebrate. The Hustle. Anything resembling ’80s hair metal. I know it gets people on the dance floor, but I Just. Can’t. Do it.
Instead, I’ve been trolling through our CD collection over the past few weeks, picking out some potential alternative dance song gems. My ultimate goal is a list of poppy, indie songs-with-a-beat, that are danceable enough so that people who have never heard them will want to get out there and boogie. Throw in a splash of Top 40 hip-hop (I like Kanye and T.I.), a classic Prince song or two, and some Electric Light Orchestra for the Dude, and we’ve got ourselves a party!
We can do our best to select cool music, but we can’t help it if people dance like this.
I admit, when this whole wedding shebang began, I was very naive. I have been obsessed with everything weddings for quite sometime, but even despite that, I never understood all the drama when it came to the issue of the guest list. I just figured we would invite who we wanted and no one we didn’t. Easy peasy, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong, SO VERY WRONG!
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I kid! I kid!
Our list venture began innocently enough; we asked both sets of parents to come up with a rough list of the people they would like to invite while we came up with ours, as well. The only problem was, when it all came together, we had over 450 people! Now, we weren’t planning on having an intimate affair, but this was no Platinum Wedding either!
So, we took a good long look and got real about who we should and should not be including.
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Isn’t this wedding date tote bag a great idea?! Thoughtful Day created this tote which coordinates with one of their wedding invitation designs.
Don’t forget to check out all the professional inspiration from the top wedding vendors in the industry in the PRO Folio!
Here is a peek into how the bees budgeted for live entertainment for their weddings! Be sure to check out the rest of the posts in our Real Bee Budgets series!
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Mrs. Quiche’s Live Entertainment
Band: Steel Drum Band
Price: $400/hr x 2 hr = $800
Ceremony music (Calypso Trio (included for ceremony) & hired for an additional hour): $100
Speaker/Microphone/iPod hookup (for after) - $225
“Our resort offered a number of options for live entertainment, but initially, we didn’t want to spend the money on it. For example, the reggae band was $3,000!
In the end, we wanted to have authentic Jamaican flair & hired a steel drum band. What a great decision! They were awesome. We changed our minds about having them at the reception & decided we’d rather have them at the rehearsal dinner. It was awesome!”
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Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry for such a long hiatus! Rather than make excuses for my laziness, I will just say that I’m back in full blogging force. I finally received our wedding pictures from our photographers, Cly Creation, and all the pictures are just absolutely amazing. I’ll definitely post them soon, and I can’t wait to share them!
But first I wanted to finish up the post I’ve been meaning to finish - here are a few more last minute things that kept me busy just days before our wedding:
1. Petal Cones
I know that I wanted petal cones for our ceremony, but it was tough trying to figure out how, because the chairs in the ceremony room had rounded backs. It was something that bothered me at first because there would be no way to hang the petal cones on the chairs like this:
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Happy 4th of July everyone! In honor of Independence day, posting will be extremely light this weekend. Enjoy the holiday!
It’s time. Today’s wedding day for the Lattes! It’s been a crazy couple of weeks filled with lots of packing, moving, crafting and last-minute planning. Don’t worry, I’ve been going picture happy so I promise to share with you all of my projects after the wedding. So… escort cards, photo booth details, favors, programs and so much more to come.
But I will leave you with this picture of us getting our marriage license. It summarizes much of what has been going on… we’re both tired from running around all day (that particular day, I had my makeup trial, Mr. Latte delivered some OOT bags, and we were behind on our “To Do” list), but were excited that our big day was near!
Oh hive, I just want to give you a big, fat THANK YOU for your positive enthusiasm, creative energy and most importantly, your unending support throughout the Latte wedding planning process.
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So today marks the big 1-0-0 for the Star household. I can’t believe how quickly everything’s coming up!
I’m beginning to feel a little frazzled and like I need another month or two! Luckily for me, I’ve seen many a bee get stressed and feel like she couldn’t possibly get everything done, but totally pull it off with time to spare! I know we can do it.
What’s helping me to stay sane is a little organization. At the beginning of our engagement, I started out with one long list of things to do. Talk about overwhelming. On top of that, I was getting email reminders from The Knot every few weeks nagging me about all the “unfinished to-do list items” that I had piling up. No bueno. Then I stumbled across Mrs. Cheese’s post about how she was keeping her last minute to-do list from terrifying her by putting items into either a “sooner” or “later” category, according to the urgency of the task. It sounded like an awesome idea to me and so I created a Google Document with my to-dos organized in this format and spread the word to immediate families and the bridal party that they could take a look at it, too, if they were wondering how they might be able to help.
Unfortunately, this method of organization still wasn’t enough for my frazzled self and I still found myself staring at this impossibly long list and wondering where to start. And my bridal party, as awesomely helpful as they’ve been throughout this process, was having trouble looking at it, remembering that it existed, etc.
Enter: Fairy Bridesmaid, the most organized woman on the face of the planet.
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A Real Conversation in the Swan Household:
Miss Swan: [Choose your own random wedding detail and insert here]. Can you help with that? Thanks, boo.
Mr. Swan: I’m excited about getting married, but the planning is a lot. There’s so much to think about. [Isn’t he cute? He doesn’t know the half of it.]
Miss Swan: I know, and we’ve been doing this for about 10 months now. We’re almost there. ACK!! I haven’t done anything all weekend. Maybe I should do something today. Ughh….
I spent a whole lot of procrastinating this past weekend and definitely not enough on the wedding. I don’t want to be left out there scrambling the week before, BUT I think I am getting tired… of planning. In some ways I feel like I can’t think anymore about the details. I’m not necessarily the world’s most original person when it comes to wedding decor and details, so I feel pretty tapped out (escort cards, anyone? I will figure that out somehow). The funny thing is that I am not doing a ton of projects or things myself, and I’m still staring at a pretty long to-do list.
Given that we are now in the home stretch of planning, we should be amped right now.
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