Weddingbee Blog

Mr. Mary Jane and I wanted to give our parents and grandparents something special to remember our wedding by. Aside from the obvious framed photo, I decided to make some photo books for them. There are a lot of options out there at various price-points. I chose Shutterfly for a few reasons:

1. I’m generally happy with stuff I get printed there.
2. I have ordered a Shutterfly photo book before, and was impressed by its quality.
3. We received a $20 coupon for Shutterfly when we started our registry at Target.

I started the process by narrowing down our wedding pictures. We were provided with over 500 shots, and I had already whittled it down to about 150 “good ones” (in which neither of us was making a strange face or generally being odd). I went through them again and found about 50 that I really thought were great and/or meaningful to include. I also threw in some shots I’d taken (e.g. one of our rings, some from the picnic), and some that my dad and FMIL Mary Jane had taken during the cake-cutting at our house.

When I finally had the photos selected, I painstakingly edited each of these photos for blemishes, red-eye, and other distractions. Then I color-adjusted all of them so that there were two types of photos: color and black-and-white. I decided to omit sepia, vintage-toned and otherwise treated photos because I really wanted a crisp-looking album.
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Soooo setting up your wedding registries is supposed to be fun, right?! Right.

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We were six months out from our wedding date (the supposed golden time for registering), and I was about to leave Baltimore for my rural medicine rotation for an entire month. I started worrying that our registry “experience” was never going to happen, and that I would end up doing the whole thing online - ha, little did I know.
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While the ladies were mugging it for the camera and playing around in the streets, the boys were hard at work downtown, setting up the minimal ceremony decor that I had painstakingly boxed and labeled and sent with them the night before.

Because we had two venues and not a whole lot of time in either one (in New York, time is money!), our wonderful DOC was busy setting up the bulk of the DIY stuff over at the loft and us girls were busy getting prettified, so the boys were left to set up everything at the theater. Because of this, I left the theater relatively “as-is”, which was okay, since we wanted that theater feel anyways. I’ll show you pictures so you can see what I’m talking about, but you have to wait through just a couple more posts for that.

We loved how edgy and hip the outside of the theater felt, and we didn’t mind one bit that it wasn’t very “wedding-y”.

I didn’t notice until I was writing this post how phallic that show poster was… ah, theatre people!

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When I told the hive about our officiant-choosing dilemmas, I got a lot of helpful suggestions, like finding a non-denominational minister or having a friend get ordained to perform the ceremony. How did you all get so smart?

After a lot of discussions and meeting with a Reform Rabbi from a Los Angeles synagogue that we really liked who was willing to do just about anything we wanted in a ceremony except co-officiate (which I didn’t want anyway), Mr. Spaniel and I finally were able to agree… to find a non-denominational officiant! The truth is that neither of us are religious people, and while he liked the rabbi in general, Mr. Spaniel wasn’t really comfortable with the concept of being married by a rabbi at all. Although it was a difficult compromise to make at first, I realize now that a secular wedding really suits us much better.

We began the search for our officiant where we begin all wedding-related searches: online! After asking the lovely ladies on the boards for some recommendations and doing a few Google searches of my own, Mr. Spaniel and I shot off some emails to a few prospective officiants and talked to our parents for more ideas. We liked the idea of a Unitarian Universalist minister (there are two UU churches in our neighborhood!), since we didn’t expect to find anyone already in our lives to do our wedding. But—serendipity!—it turns out Mr. Spaniel’s family knew the perfect guy, who is a good friend of his parents’, has a nice speaking voice, and is already ordained by the Universal Life Church. Seriously, when do the stars align this easily?
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On Jersey Shore (bear with me), what strikes me is the time, energy, and resources those young gentlemen put into their appearances. In the quest to stay fresh to death, no tanning booth goes untouched, no bottle of gel goes un-squeezed. No collar goes un-popped, no button goes… buttoned.

That’s the situation right there

Women are undoubtedly under pressure to look their very best for their wedding day—have been for ages, right? You can’t flip through the pages of a bridal magazine—or fast-forward through a Sunday night WeTV wedding marathon—without an inundation of beauty advice, dos, don’ts, cautionary tales, and/or the threat of David Tutera knocking on your door to give you a what-for.

But what are the expectations for men?
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Since picking our beer themed venue—Mr Pretzel and I have developed a crush on the neighborhood it’s in. Serious crush. We go out of our way to visit, shop and hang down there a couple times a month. If we are even remotely in the neighborhood we find a reason to swing by… and maybe peek in the windows of our venue—not that I’m a “venue peeking Tom” or anything… no that’s not it at all.

We’ve enjoyed learning more about the history, charm, and novelties that the neighborhood offers. We fall more and more in love with the location each visit. I’m hoping that our guests can see the charm too—there’s just a little bit of worry that they will be thrown off by the “non-weddingy” surroundings and will think they made a wrong turn or are in the wrong neighborhood. Ummm, yeah, that would kinda suck.

What makes it “non-weddingy”? The Georgetown neighborhood in Seattle is semi industrial. It’s flanked on one side by the interstate, by Boeing Field (where Boeing does flight test on new airplanes) on another, by a railroad on another… The venue itself has some cool history as the Pre-Prohibition era home of Seattle Malt and Brewing Company.

Source

The Brewery was built in 1903 and operated until 1915 when Washington adopted Prohibition. At one time it was the 6th largest brewery in the world. What, you ask, did they brew there?

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So remember my habit of falling in love with very specific items that I can never actually obtain? Well, I realized that Mr. Parfait totally doesn’t understand the “never actually obtain” part… because he just gave me an early Christmas present:

MmmMMmMMmmm…now that’s what I call bootilicious!

I spotted these boots in a UK bridal magazine a few months ago. Like all of my object-crushes, I was resigned to loving them from afar.
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I’ve mentioned before that Mr. Pudding and I were in a 2 year, long distance relationship (LDR). After being together (off and on) for four years in college, we both decided that we were not yet ready to commit to moving to another country. Our relationship was at a “make it or break it” point, and there was no better way to test its strength.

Our LDR taught us that we desperately, intensely, passionately wanted to be together. Now, don’t get me wrong, being in a LDR is rough. I spent many nights upset and crying because I wanted Mr. P beside me, not 600km away.

Still, there were definitely some advantages to our situation. The thing about LDRs is that they can be extremely romantic - the constant hellos and goodbyes are very exciting, and it is hard to be mad at each other when you’re only spending a weekend together.

So, I thought that it would be fun to share my list of top 10 things that I loved about being in a LDR:
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Rainnee84 is selling her brand-new Augusta Jones gown. Based on the Betina model, the Chantilly lace dress was custom-designed for the Mon Amie shop in Costa Mesa, CA. She’s asking $1500 for the size 4 gown.

Have a wedding item for sale? Post it with pictures in the Weddingbee classifieds and you might see it featured on the blog!

Other great items for sale:

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No, not on my finger, but on my ears.

I am kind of a bwaaak! bwaaak! (supposed to be a chicken squawking) about buying things over the internet, particularly if I know I can see and touch them in a store. So before I could take the plunge and buy one of the pair of earrings that I found on the internet, I decided to visit some stores in the Fashion District (mainly Seventh Ave between 37th and 38th Streets) to see some earrings in person.

There were many good, affordable options but I didn’t find anything that really grabbed me. So after searching high and low on the internet, and several storefronts, of all places I headed to Macy’s, which is typically a place to be avoided at all costs, at least in NYC (like a poultry factory farm—too close quarters).

Lo and behold, I found my earrings for $50.

Courtesy of me

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Due to a family emergency, I spent the bulk of this past Saturday night in the ER. I won’t get into the gory details, but let’s just say it involved a lot of stitches and blood for my poor little brother. I got a call at about 1:30AM and was in the ER until about 6AM. Fun times.

But this post is not about that (and for the record, Lil’ Bro TM will be fine, after some serious dental work). It’s never a pleasant experience to be woken up in the middle of the night, getting called to the hospital. In fact, it can be downright overwhelming, scary and anxiety-inducing. I’ve never been one to handle medical procedures very well (I’ve passed out several times in the doctor’s office, once just from listening to my doctor verbally describe a procedure).

Luckily, Mr Trail Mix was with me for the whole time and I was truly thankful for his presence. He got cash from the ATM after we got outside and realized I had no money to pay for a cab. He got us coffee and snacks while we were waiting for 2 hours for the oral surgeon to come down. He made Lil’ Bro TM laugh in spite of his injuries. He held my hand.

In short, he was the best type of support I could have asked for during an uncertain, frustrating and scary situation.
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My parents threw a big ol’ full-scale wedding for their 25th anniversary in 1995. My mother wore a gorgeous Carolina Herrera* couture gown that was absolutely fantastic. A few months ago, she suggested that I take that dress and have it made into a short rehearsal dinner dress. I thought it was an amazing idea.

We pulled it out of the storage closet, and it was still beautiful and in perfect condition. We played with it for a few minutes, then put it away so that it wouldn’t get damaged by us or the 60-pound poodle that was also jumping around with us.
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I asked Mr. Nachos to take a peek at the things I registered for to make sure there wasn’t anything he didn’t like. He jumped on the computer, looked through it all, and thought it was great. Then, I told him to go through and add anything he wanted that I missed.

(notice WB on the left computer, BBB on the middle, and ring shots as his background on the right)

And a monster was born. He pulled up things like this…
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Since we couldn’t go back to Mexico for our honeymoon right after the wedding because it’s the wrong time of year, we used a very scientific method for determining our destination. Ha! In reality, all we did was say to ourselves, “Where can we go that will be sunny, warm, not too expensive, and not too long of a flight?”

For the past 10 years or so, I’d always dreamed of going to Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas for a honeymoon, but it didn’t meet the criteria of not being too expensive or too long of a flight from California. Le sigh!

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So after countless other dresses, and our 45 minute adventure at Filene’s Running of the Brides, during which I realized that the past 5 months of wedding dress shopping had all served to confirm I had in fact already found the dress I wanted to wear, I immediately called the bridal salon that had my dress and made an appointment. Although at the time I felt like I’d been pushing it to wait so long after finding the dress to make a decision, I’m really glad I spent that time looking at other dresses and drooling over expensive creations in magazines. The experience only served to reassure me that I was naturally drawn to all-lace dresses - it wasn’t just a weird fluke that made me hallucinate that this was a good idea. It seemed so opposite to what I (and everyone else) expected, that I think it threw me for a loop at first!

In the end, I was so confident going into the bridal salon to buy my dress that it was sort of easy for me to negotiate with them on price. I think having so much time to ponder (OK, agonize over it) made me less prone to the giddy “oh my gosh I have to have it!” where a store knows you are willing to pay whatever price to get the dress. I walked in completely calmly, asked to try on the two dresses in my ’file’ (their record of dresses I liked), then said about the lace one: “I’d love to buy this dress, but what’s the best price you can give me?”
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