Weddingbee Blog

(photo courtesy of our friend, Tim)

This one photo tells you so much about our wedding day:

1) We were incredibly happy (duh), and this kiss was after we’d already had our ’Kiss’ but couldn’t stop grinning like idiots and kissed again before we started the recessional (we also hugged, which neither of us remember but we have photographic proof of it!).

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The Affianced was leaving her job, and in the midst of this we got our joint credit card bill and realized that neither of us had been tracking our spending on the card, and it was just after the holidays (hello, overspending) and I had just bought a car. We were suddenly overwhelmed with payments that needed to be made, and the awareness that the Affianced was about to lose her health insurance, and the realization that our original plan to put a certain amount of money a month into our wedding account was just not realistic anymore.

The best part of this is that it has made us really consider what is important. Here are some of the things that are important:

• Tea and milk. These are things that we must always have on hand for our sanity and our bellies’ happiness.
• Sweaters, because sometimes the heat needs to stay low.
• Food and medication for our menagerie, because they are our family.
• Board games/card games, because this is good, healthy entertainment.

These are all things that we can manage to continue to have without being overwhelmed.

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Sans rocks.

Yup. Another uber creative title from yours truly. Oh! And I apologize for my light posting lately—the last few weeks have been super stressful and I’ve been suffering a pretty severe case (admittedly self-diagnosed) of waitingforitalltocometogether. So I’m happy to report back that it’s all really happening, people!

In a big way. And to start the party right how about I show you my absolutely stinking gorgeous wedding ring? You know—the one you all offered so much advice about here and here? Yeah the ring. It arrived yesterday and it’s ridiculously amazing!

So without further ado, my wedding band:

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The wedding is so close, I can’t stand it! It feels like time is going in slow motion but still whizzing by. Surprisingly, I seem to have finally found my zen place about the whole thing. Yes, I’ve still got a few butterflies lurking in my stomach but for the most part, I’m just dang excited to get the party started!

Anyways, the cool thing about fast approaching the date is that, for the most part, there are no more projects to stress over because almost everything is done (I guess my obsessive habits earlier in the planning process have paid off, eh?)

So I took the opportunity to get together all my paper products that I’ve created during the past eight months and I’m so pleased with the overall results. It’s the perfect mish-mosh of shades of yellow and blue, with accents of ivory and raffia.

What you see here includes my programs, table numbers, invitation suite, chair sign, menu, escort cards and other random signage.

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After I chose and purchased my dress, I put it on the back-burner and checked it off my list. However, after several months of watching Say Yes to the Dress, I fell victim to one of the oldest bridal diseases in the book - the dreaded “dress uncertainty”. I saw beautiful gown after beautiful gown, and the months passed since I had seen and worn my own dress. Did I really love it? Was it really the right one? Should I have tried more, different styles, different stores? I checked the Kleinfeld’s website, and to my excitement, I saw that my designer, Henry Roth, was going to be doing a trunk show while I would be in New York visiting family. My mom made an appointment and I got very nervous. What if I didn’t love it? It was an awful lot of money spent to not love it, right?

So with my mom and two close friends in tow, we headed out.

I put the dress on, and, well, see for yourself (all pictures were taken by Mama Hermit Crab):

Oh yeah, I love this dress, it’s totally the right one.
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Hi hive! Thank you for your continued suggestions for Weddingbee Spring Cleaning categories. To find out more about Spring Cleaning, click here! We’ll kick off this feature with our very first suggestion from caitlanc, glass vases.

Sellers: if you have glass vases for sale, please post your item to the Weddingbee Classifieds by adding your item, and then return to this post and add the link to the item you’re selling in the comments, along with a quick description. Also pay attention to the comments in this ad to see if any buyers are searching for the item you’re selling by subscribing to the comments.

Buyers: if you’re looking for glass vases for sale, you can do a couple things:

• Identify yourself in the comments as LOOKING FOR (glass item you’re looking for, and quantity).
• Subscribe to this thread, so you’re informed of new glass vase items that are being listed for sale in the Weddingbee Classifieds. ***

Here are some glass vase items currently for sale in the Weddingbee Classifieds (see all decor items for sale here):

Mrs. Penguin is giving away 24 inch tall glass vases. There are 12 available for free, but you must be able to pick them up in Berkeley, CA. See listing here, and please comment on the listing (not here) if you’re interested.
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So, from the very beginning I knew I wanted a photo booth. I’d never actually been to a wedding with one, but at every restaurant or bowling alley I’ve been to that has one, I find myself drawn to them. I decided to avoid the fauxtobooth and go for the real thing. I stocked up on props from the dollar store, like masks, glasses, mustaches, leis, and sheriff badges and just let our guests get creative.

I picked Party Booths to run the photobooth and they were awesome. A couple of nights before the wedding I talked to them about allowing my guests full access to the pictures right after the wedding. The guy asked me if I was sure I didn’t want to go through them first to weed out any of the obscene ones. What?? People get that crazy in the photobooth? And yes, apparently they do. I don’t think that in the moment people realize that every guest at the wedding will also get to see this seemingly private photo moments behind the curtain. Well guess what, we do get to. Here are some of my favorites:

Fro Yo Bridesmaids

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I used a photo from our engagement session and created my own design for our Save the Dates with a little help from Photoshop and my honey. Then I ordered 4×6 magnets in our customized design from OvernightPrints.com.

I contemplated ordering from vistaprint.com since I have ordered from them before and their prices are always cheap. But they didn’t offer the magnets in the postcard size that I wanted, so I went with OvernightPrints. I am so glad that I did because they arrived quickly! In less than 2 weeks, I had our glossy magnets in my hot little hands.

The first thing that I did when I ripped open the package was count them.
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Mrs.Cayemitte looked stunning in her simple headpiece and elegant gown.

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.

I’m always interested in how people reveal their preferences and values by how they spend their money—that’s why I shared my budget early on. (I’m still planning to share the outcome with you, but I’ll probably save that for the end.) And since I just completed the dreaded name change, I thought I’d share with you the process and the cost.

The order and prices may be different in different jurisdictions, but here’s what I went through in Los Angeles County.

1. Get a certified marriage certificate from the County Registrar/Recorder. Cost: $14. This is the necessary first step pretty much everywhere, and one of the most annoying part of the process for me. I spent two hours in line at the Van Nuys office, so I’d recommend trying a different time of day (Tuesday at 12:30 appears to be a bad time to go in).

Before you get your copy, you’ll want to make sure that your marriage license has been recorded, otherwise they’ll take your $14 and you’ll have to come back later and pay (and wait in line!) again. I don’t know how long it takes after the wedding for the document to be recorded—our officiant mailed the license in on March 22, and the date of recording on our certificate is listed as March 26—so I’d probably wait a week or two weeks at least before attempting the first step.
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source

Remember that 100 Push Up Challenge I started a couple weeks ago? Many of you indicated interest in the challenge, others of you reported being a Challenge drop out. I’m half way through my 3rd week. I see how there would be drop outs now. The first 2 weeks went pretty well. I was feeling pretty hardcore with my push ups. Then, Week 3 came and I got really scared.
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Okay, let me break it down for you. I’m a crier. In general, I’m a big emotional pile of mush and when I go to a wedding, forget it. And well… I don’t think it would be the worst thing in the world to have a few criers in the audience. Okay I’m totally lying – I want to see tears. I want people watching our ceremony to get all balled up inside and squeeze out a few in our honor. I have issues, I know.

In the hope that we have a few tears, I made some very easy tissue packets for the ceremony. There are quite a few different versions out there that I’ve come across so I decided to make some of my own.

front and back…or back and front – depending on how you look at it…I’ve clearly lost my Type A edge

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Me: Do you want to scrap everything and get married next week?
Fancee: No. Do you want to scrap everything and get married next week?
Me: No. Just checking.

~

Now that it’s officially mid-May, it’s officially four months until our wedding, and that is really cool. We’ve been together for over two years – two years! – and we totally still like each other. This whole getting married thing, when it’s not stressful (which is only a very little bit of the time), is really fun! We like it.

source

But sometimes it just seems like too much. Recently Meg from A Practical Wedding wrote this totally awesome post about money. And I knew a lot of this stuff already, this is how I was already thinking – or that’s what I had thought until I was struck by this:

Don’t be afraid to say no. If you don’t care? Don’t buy it. If someone is making you sign a contract that doesn’t feel right? Don’t sign it. If it doesn’t feel right? Put away your wallet. If you do this, things will somehow fall into place.

I read this and I realized that I don’t want to spend three thousand dollars on food. I just don’t. I have eaten food at weddings, and it has been good, but I have not walked away thinking that it was the best food that I had eaten in awhile (with the exception of one wedding, and at that wedding they made the food themselves!). And if I am going to spend that much money on food, it should be damn good food.

So I came up with a plan. We will have pies, provided by friends and family, and we will have mimosas. We will have coffee and tea from Tealuxe or somewhere delicious, and that will be it. And some people will say “Just pie?” and other people will say, “JUST PIE!” and that will be fine. Sara from 2000 Dollar Budget Wedding posted something that I love, and this part is sticking in my head:

It did not matter whether every last detail conformed to the signature colors. Instead of saying, “What a beautiful bouquet,” the guests said, “What a beautiful love.”

So there. Pie it is.

The minor complication (ha!) comes in when we consider that this is not about me planning my wedding – this is about us planning our wedding. And it turns out that Fancee, as an event planner in her former life, wants to feel taken care of on our wedding day instead of worrying about what might not be going right. And it turns out that I don’t feel safe renting an urn for our tea water and not being assured that our water won’t taste like coffee. And who’s going to set up? Clean up? Where to we get utensils? (I know there are answers to these questions… they just feel overwhelming.)

And I think this comes back to the rule of: Forget DIY. It doesn’t all have to be DIY. And I feel really confident that we are considering taking things into our own hands, and we are considering different ways of doing things, and we are really trying to work out the options. And it’s going to be hard, I think, for me to say we’re spending $3,000 on food. But it’s easier when I remind myself that we are getting a planner in there, and people who will help us set up and clean up and decorate, and they are people we like.

So more points for the process. And we’re still planning to have pies. It’ll just be post-brunch pies. Because that’s how we’re doing it. So there.

source (BenJerrysBride)

At any point did you just decide to scrap something significant for your wedding?

I’m super Type A (in case you missed that memo), so knowing all of the details for our trip, making sure we got travel insurance, and working with a really knowledgeable travel agent were all crucial pieces to me. It’s also why we booked our honeymoon nearly two months ago. So, with our ideas in mind, I contacted Laura at Bliss Honeymoons to help us out. Let me just say – she and her team get a big “A” for AWESOME. Seriously. Absolutely recommend her (and her team)!

We chatted on the phone for a bit so she knew what we were looking for, and within a week, she sent us an awesome proposal with three different options. The best part? All three options were around the same price. The hard part? Deciding between the three. Actually, not really. That was the easiest part and most obvious part.

So, what did we choose?
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Hi hive!

Spring is here, and the Penguins have been cleaning out our closets. And even 2 years after our wedding we continue to find a lot of wedding items that we’ve been meaning to sell or donate. It’s been really hard for me to get rid of some of the glassware I researched so hard to source, but I know it’s time—I really don’t have any need for a lot of the bulk stuff I acquired. I bet a lot of married hive members are in the same situation!

So, I think it’s a good time for some spring cleaning for the hive!

For the next few weeks, we’ll choose a specific item daily—vases and glassware, for instance—and encourage married bees and hive members to list their items they’ve been meaning to get rid of to the Classifieds section of Weddingbee. If you list an item within the category that we’re featuring that day (or have one already listed!), feel free to post the link to your item for sale/swap/free in the comments of that post, and if you’re LOOKING for items that fall into that category, subscribe to the post and check out all the new items that pop up! Hopefully we can unite sellers with buyers!

Later today we’ll debut our first item up on the blog, but for now, if you’re a bride and looking for a specific item to be featured, comment below! Some ideas are:
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