Weddingbee Blog

Well, this is it! The start of my recaps. It’s going to be the worst kind of recap though: the kind with no pictures. Sorry, next time, I promise. I’ve been posting sparingly over the past few weeks, but I hope most of you will remember me: the courthouse bride. I was married on September 9.

If you’ve been following my posts, you’ll know that Mr. Mary Jane and I hired very few vendors for the big day. So on Tuesday, September 8 (the day before our Wednesday wedding), I had some running around to do!

I knew my day would end with me picking up my parents at the airport in Fargo, so I woke up early in the morning and did a whole bunch of last-minute cleaning. I needed to have the home looking its best, you know?! Then I was off.

My first stop was a little hole-in-the-wall nail salon in a local strip mall. I decided, last minute, to get a manicure. I have awful, chewed up nails and I really didn’t want them featured in photos. An hour later, I was cruisin’ across town with new French tips.

My next stop was the jewelry store, where I had my e-ring shined up. Sparkly!

And finally, the fun part: flowers.
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Brides are often told that when they find the dress—the one that will become their wedding dress, the one that they will walk down the aisle in and dance with their husband at their reception in—that it will hit them like a ton of bricks covered in sugary fondant and glittery tulle. Starry-eyed, they will make their way to the cash register where they will gush, “It’s perfect!” no matter the number of zeroes on the price tag.

Wait–let’s do a Zack Morris time out here. Am I coming across as a cynic? Jaded? If so, I apologize; it’s just that I’ve been down a few miles of hard road called “finding the dress”. It’s a road that started shortly after Mr. French Fries and I got engaged, and has been filled with a few, ahem, potholes. You see, I thought that this would be a relatively simple task. But then I made the mistake of reading too many magazines and too many (well-respected) wedding planning books, and I stumbled across a quote to the effect of “this will be the single most photographed piece of clothing that you will ever wear”. Oh! Well, now that you put it like that, there’s no pressure! I can just traipse down the aisle in any old thing hanging in my closet! It’s just going to be ingrained into our family’s history.

Looks like ribbon sashes aren’t just a current trend. Everything old is new again!
Source

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Flower girls peek out from behind a tree at IA_Snowflake’s wedding. Check out those lovely DIY pomander balls.

Keep on loading your inspirational wedding pics to the gallery to see them featured here on the blog! Remember, your images must be under 1MB in size, or they won’t load.

While we were still sequestered away in our separate hotels, we exchanged our gifts.

I forced Mr. Gloss to write me a sweet, heartfelt note about how much he loved me. No really, I gave him the card to write it on and everything:

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Happy Columbus Day hive! In honor of the holiday, posting will be light. Enjoy your 3 day weekend (if you’re fortunate enough to have one)!

Mrs. Hot Cocoa’s flowers via Angel Swanson @ Weddingbee PRO

It all started two long years ago in a little dinner theater in Boston:

In that moment I felt many of the same feelings that I do now: chills of excitement, nervous butterflies, the warm flush of pure joy, and a thrilled hope for the future.
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Today marks the first of what I know will be many wedding anniversaries for us. How do I know? Because we aren’t going to make it happen. We aren’t soul mates. We were never “meant to be”. We chose this, and we are going to continue to choose to make it work for the rest of our lives and beyond.

I’ve written a lot about our wedding, 29 posts to be exact. If you want a detailed summary of the entire experience visit my last post about the wedding experience and scroll down to see a list of links to all of my recap posts.

For this anniversary post I went through a few thousand photos (literally) and chose 5 that describe some of my favorite moments of the day.

I can remember the way I felt at our “first look” so clearly. The endowment ceremony and time together in the celestial room the day before had been so calming. Everything felt so right, and we couldn’t stop smiling at each other. I was so sure I wanted to be with him forever.

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Here is some more great inspiration for the upcoming engagement shoot, and some great ideas for invitations. Lulusan (otherwise known as engagement photographer extraordinaire) discovered a great new blog! I can’t stop reading Le Love. I can totally see my more literary friends swooning over the love poems, but as for me, I am more of a “picture is worth a million words” girl:

(All images courtesy of Le Love)

Engagement photos:

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A conversation between Mr. Parfait and me:

Miss P.: I’m a reading person. I understand it better when I read it.
Mr. P.: I’m a radar person. I only understand things through radars, so if you wrote me a note, I wouldn’t understand it. You’d have to send pictures of your day in a radar!

This is just a tiny peek at the teasing I must endure on a daily basis! Lucky for Mr. P., he’s awfully cute and, thus, awfully forgivable. But it’s true what I said, and since I understand (and like) things better when I can see the words, I’ve saved some passages and poems that I hope to incorporate in the wedding. I can picture parts of these in the ceremony, on reception banners, and in our wedding album!

You, you only, exist
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.

To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes festival!

-Rainer Maria Rilke
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For a week or so, talk of announcements and Thank Yous and presents for parents has been pretty much on hold. This is (mostly) because we’re still waiting on our pro-pics. Sure, I’ve got plenty of friend-and-family photos, but I want you all to really experience our wedding (by being bombarded with all the photos, all at once!).

Well guess what? Our pro-pics are alllllmost ready! I’m hoping to pick them up on Monday.

[Shawna Noel Photography]

Are you ready for some recaps? I’m gonna start cranking them out next week!

Back in June we set a date for engagement photos, and my, that crept up on us! (Another post forthcoming about how we chose our awesome photographers!) Three weeks before the shoot I realized I had nothing to wear! My chest was (still is) quite swollen. Shoot. Surgery aside, I was certain engagement photos are a good enough reason for a new dress. Right? Right??

Because of all this post-surgical recovery hoo-ha, I knew I’d be able to pose, but to play? To ride the Pirate Ship or Xtreme Frisbee? Probably not.

I should mention we decided to do our photos at a nearby amusement park.
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Yay!! This past weekend Mr. Fro Yo and I went to Home Depot and picked up some materials to get started on our wedding signs. Here’s what we got:

• 2 pieces of wood for a fence ($1.79 each)
• A can of white paint ($9)
• A foam paint brush (59 cents), and
• Wooden stakes ($6 for 12, we didn’t need that many but couldn’t find fewer that were the right size).

So we got to work. Mr. Fro Yo measured the boards:

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Finding the Blogosphere…

I’d been hearing about blogs for a few years and had read a few, but I definitely wasn’t a real member of the community. I then started a small blog to keep in touch with my family after I moved away to Seattle. I didn’t update it regularly or do much with it other than use it as a Christmas letter. Instead of sending out a letter, I sent out Christmas cards with a web address on them and then filled a blog with the year’s big events and lots of pictures (gotta keep their interest). Most of the people in the family liked that, but Mr. Moonbeam’s parents insisted we still send out letters for those that are less web savvy. Most of the people in my family live close enough to someone that can show them the website, so I didn’t have to worry. After that, I started a blog about some of the things I made here and there, but with no large project looming; it just sort of languished. Then we decided to get married and I got sucked in. There are so many great blogs out there and Weddingbee had so much content. New ideas every day, of things I just had to do that would get weird looks from people I was talking to about them. “What, you didn’t know that all brides these days wear crazy candy colored shoes?”

Weddingbee, specifically has meant so much to me. Since leaving my friends, great apartment, beautiful neighborhood and fantastic job in Seattle, LA has hit me kind of hard.
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I’m blogging live from our new house as we finish a long day of painting and house projects. Being here is solidifying the very real move that I am going to make to live with my Lamb Lover after we’re married. I’ll leave my old city and embrace the new.

This reality has reminded me a lot of the words that Ruth spoke in the Old Testament. They are a favorite at weddings. Mrs. Cheese used them, and they’ve been suggested on several wedding websites. They’re beautiful and the bond described is so representative of the marriage relationship.

The words, however, were not about a marriage relationship at all. The short story is that Naomi, her husband, and her two sons moved to a new town to find food during a famine. Naomi’s husband dies and her sons marry two local women, one of them Ruth. Then the sons die. Naomi cannot support herself and tells her daughters-in-law to go back to their families and remarry. One daughter-in-law goes back, but Ruth says to Naomi:

“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”

The story of Ruth, of course, doesn’t end here.
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After taking a day to recover on the boat, we arrived at our first port of Cannes, France at sunrise. Since our excursion was an early one, we had a chance to enjoy the beautiful view of the coast before our tour.

Still dark…

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