Weddingbee Blog

Mr. Chick and I met ten years ago in college and we have been dating ever since. He is laid back and has an outrageous sense of humor. I am outgoing and spontaneous, but I am also intense and OCD. We are both oenophiles, and we love doing crazy things like skydiving or going to Italy on a whim. We bought a house together three years ago in Houston, Texas, and we have a kitler (kitty who looks like Hitler) named Blue. Mr. Chick is a great groomie who puts up with my constant yammering about wedding plans, and he has been very participatory and helpful throughout the entire process!

Blue!

You might be wondering why I picked the name Miss Chick.

I’m a pretty unconventional gal. Born a very chubby baby, I’ve laughed at pictures of me attempting to look at my toes, but failing due to the triple chins. When I started eating solid foods, apparently I became very picky about foods touching each other, and grew into a super skinny, awkward girl wearing blue framed glasses. My appetite and appreciation for a variety of foods developed after we moved from Taipei to Tucson, Arizona, at age nine. From then on, I was nicknamed “the bottomless well” because of my ravenous appetite and fast metabolism. My all time favorite food was and still is… wait for it… fried chicken! Since Weddingbee does not have an icon for a drumstick, I think the chick is a pretty good alternative!

We are having a non-denominational wedding and reception in the US, followed by a small reception in Taiwan. Our friend Javier, who we have known since we started dating, is officiating the ceremony in Houston. We want to celebrate our ten years of courtship with a big party that will make my Taiwanese family and Mr. Chick’s New Orleans family feel equally at home. We will have a small banquet for about fifty people in Taipei, Taiwan following our US wedding. We started planning our reception in Taiwan last December. I have such fond childhood memories of Taiwanese wedding banquets, so it was great fun to go to restaurants for tasting items to include in our own banquet. People were very warm and receptive, and it took almost no time at all to have everything reserved and arranged, including engagement cookies (it’s Taiwanese tradition to announce your engagement by sending your family and close friends fancy tins of tea cookies). We’ve decided on having our banquet in a small town about one hour away from Taipei. It will be at a small cottage overlooking a river. They specialize in teppanyaki style cooking (think Benihana, but a lot nicer) and they use fresh, unique ingredients.

Now we are setting up our wedding in the States, which is a very different process. Thank goodness for wedding blogs like the Weddingbee! Without them, I think I would seriously be drowning in confusion. With encouragement from my awesome MOH sister and virtual bridesmaid Nandita, I applied to become a bee! My style/theme of the wedding is vintage chic, but informal. I love DIY projects and I already have a running list of crafts to do for the wedding. My vision for the wedding: on a farm somewhere, with lights strung up between the trees. A dance floor and tent, in case of rain. A buffet of delicious dim sum dumplings. Lots of handpicked wines, good music, Martha Stewart lace luminaries lighting up each table and on various paths, and us dancing into the night with our family and friends!

We have changed our ideas several times throughout our search for a venue. We’ve looked at a couple of traditional wedding venues (mansions or event halls) and realized we do not want anything conventional. We then looked at art galleries because I thought it would be fitting for someone in the museum field. However, after looking at several galleries in Houston, it became clear that they would not be big enough. We moved on to looking at historic or grand spaces and we settled on the Wortham Center Grand Foyer, which is where the Houston Opera performs. It is a civic building, so it was cheaper than any venue we’ve looked at up to that point. Unfortunately, they’ve heaped a lot of hidden fees on to our bill. Now we are looking for a new venue. I’ve recently fallen in love with farm/barn weddings, so we are looking at several farms outside of Houston. It is an exciting time!