The placid atmosphere of the morning and early afternoon followed me as I gathered up my train and headed down the elevator for our first look. Aside from feeling slightly tingly with anticipation, my nerves remained calm even as I was instructed to wait alone, hidden in the hallway while they finished staging the scene. I stood quietly with my hands clasped in front of me, a tranquil smile on my face as I reflected on what thus far had been an enchanted day until Ryan, our videographer from Epic Motion, appeared by my side and signaled that it was time. As I turned the corner and saw Mr. Tartlet’s back through the double glass doors, I experienced what can only be described as an upheaval of emotion–the kind that feels like hundreds of butterflies are fluttering their way from your stomach into your heart. I heard myself emit a strangled sob/laugh (that was captured so well on film), and there wasn’t a coherent thought in my mind.
Well, almost. As I approached the exit, heels clicking rhythmically on the marbled floors, one thought kept interjecting itself into my reverie: “Hold the door open for Ryan, hold the door open for Ryan.”
{Photos by Aruna B. Photography}
I’m not exactly the superstitious type, but when it comes to the wedding I want nothing but good juju coming our way.
Image via Flickr, At The End Of The Rainbow, by Kate Shepard
I started collecting my “somethings” early on, the first of which was a silver sixpence. I originally wanted to get one of the year my parents married, but as Mrs. Husky pointed out, after 1947 they no longer contained silver. Instead I opted for 1946, the year my grandparents married.
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Check out this giveaway we have for you today! One lucky bride or groom will be the winner of a year’s supply of Bioré’s Blemish Fighting Ice Cleanser (8 face washes).
Bioré Blemish Fighting Ice Cleanser is formulated to cool skin on contact while whisking away over 99% of dirt and oil. The cleanser delivers a potent combination of acne fighters and soothing botanicals and helps to clear the complexion.
To enter the contest, we want you to share with us why you need to clear up your skin, including a photo of your skin now. Please post a photo of your skin in the boards (you can use the “Beauty” board), include some text explaining why you need to clear up your skin, and tag the post as “biore.” Finally, leave a comment on this blog post and link to your board post!
Bioré will choose the most compelling story/image to win the year’s supply of Bioré cleanser. We’d also love to see “after” photos of the contest winner for a follow-up post! 
You have until Thursday, July 14 at 11:59 PM PST to enter. Good luck!
I love when bees compare their inspiration boards to the real wedding. It is fun to see how inspiration changes over time and how things are executed. It was a lot of fun to look back at my first inspiration board and see how our wedding stacked up.
Credits: Cupcake toppers Birdcage Veil Pew Lanterns Dress Lights Amore Studios Dahlias Paris Hilton Spelled Converse All-Stars
Featured on Weddingbee
All-Inclusion Invitation Suites
“Make an elegant invitation statement without the fuss. Stylish invitation sets with matching envelopes, reception and response cards included.”
So, the rehearsal dinner was a part of the wedding that I kind of forgot about completely at first. If you go back to my budget post, you’ll see I didn’t budget for it. Oops. Oh, well, I’m not planning anything too fancy so it shouldn’t cost too much, and Mr. Cannon’s parents have graciously offered to cover the cost, so my booty got saved there. Now we’re trying to decide where to hold this special occasion.
Mr. Cannon and I agree that we should have pizza. We were thiiiiis close to going with pizza for the reception because, quite frankly, we really like pizza. So, it was a total no brainer to go for pizza at the rehearsal dinner. Somewhat recently, Toledo was blessed with a branch of a Detroit based deep dish pizza place called Pizzapapalis. It’s downtown near the ball park, and Mr. Cannon and I really like the pizza. They have a banquet space and offer pizza buffets for a reasonable fee. It seemed to be the perfect solution. We were pumped, and I asked Mr. Cannon to call them and get information about renting the space and setting up the dinner.
Image via Skyscrapercity.com/ Picture by Jay Smith Photography]
Here is where things started getting iffy.
Obviously the first thing on Mr. D’s and my to-do list was to start booking the big vendors. The most important thing was first: where we were going to get married. So we started to discuss the possible places to get married.
We could get married in my hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. The thing here was the fact that I had not lived in the area for almost seven years, and I no longer had ties with my home church. I was raised Catholic but left the church went I went to college. As a girl, I had always dreamed of getting married at this church:
St. Ambrose Cathedral in Des Moines, Iowa. Such a beautiful church—just not my church. / Image via Wikipedia
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
As you may have noticed from my borderline-bombastic blogging, words are my friends. I don’t like to admit they can fall short. However, I easily concede that photographs can capture an expression, a texture, a single moment in time, in way that text can’t always touch. (Of course, text can sometimes do what image cannot. …I had to say that or they’ll take away my library card.)
I assume this is why we all seem to rank wedding photography at the top of our priorities. (Although, wouldn’t it be funny if you hired someone to document your wedding day in words? Like a wedding prosateur? NEW DREAM JOB.) Sure enough, in the days that followed our wedding, I was thrilled to see guest photos. Then the professional images rolled in, and I was thrilled again. This post is about both of those kinds of pictures: the ones you paid for and the ones your friends took with their iPhones.
We begin at noon on our wedding day. I had just finished primping, and PDog was apparently upstairs, looking into our future.
I didn’t want to do the first look sneak-up-tap-on-the-shoulder thing.
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At the end of my bridal shower posts, I alluded to how the bridal shower really changed my thinking on my upcoming nuptials. I, like many other brides-to-be, am guilty of losing the forest for the trees in the world of wedding planning. I spaz out over transportation miscommunications instead of recognizing that if I didn’t have loved ones traveling from near and far to join me in my celebration, there simply wouldn’t be any car logistics to be figured out. I have fits of hand-wringing over the difficulties of having a sizable bunch of bridesmaids who live all over the country instead of taking the time to be grateful that I have such a large group of young women who I can lean on in times of happiness and difficulty. I groan and moan over guest lists and room capacity instead of taking the time to appreciate the dozens of people who are just as excited as we are to mark this new chapter in our adult lives. I grunt in frustration when people pepper me with questions about details and plans, labeling them as nosy or overbearing, rather than titling them as helpful and cooperative, eager to participate in this memorable journey.
It’s just too easy to let all of the little stuff in wedding planning get you down. The costs associated with DIY projects, the headaches regarding who needs to be where when and how they are getting there, the tug-of-war over guest lists and responsibilities.
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Have I told you how we snagged our photographer? About two weeks after the engagement, at the same coffee date where I asked MOH Ginger to be my MOH (she almost cried, and it was sooo cute), I was chattering about how nervous I was about paying for a wedding while leaving financial wiggle room for my future “must-have” whims later on. So Ginger casually mentioned that her boyfriend’s friend’s wife is a photographer, and a pretty darn good one, but isn’t full-blown professional yet. She offered to reach out to her to see what she had to say about rates and her willingness to take us on.
Imagine my absolute elation when MOH Ginger emailed me with a response from our photographer—Hillary Shorts of Short’s Shots—saying she had STUNNINGLY LOW rates and very flexible terms, and would do our engagement photos FOR. FREE. She pointed us to several albums worth of wedding photography she’d already done, and she had just the look we were going for! No, she didn’t have the super-swanky lighting or vast array of props that pricier photogs offer but, honestly, I couldn’t tell the difference for our tastes. She had great detail shots, captured emotion, and made excellent use of natural light. So we pretty much booked her on the spot, pending a face-to-face meeting with her.
We met her at a Starbucks one weekend and were smitten. She’s adorable and was at the time pregnant, which made her even cuter. (I have the babies rabies, and drool all over anything baby related.) We all totally hit it off, and she said several things I loved, chief among them: “I don’t like to do a whole lot of ‘pose-y’ shots—I will do some, but I’d rather capture you naturally.” Yes! Thank you, please!
We scheduled our engagement session for Ybor City, a historic area with great architecture, which she chose for us after we told her we weren’t huge “photos on the beach” or nature people. Since we’re getting married in a botanical park, we figured the pavement-and-brick shots would balance out our portfolio of love quite well. I was especially excited to get to know Hillary more and see how we clicked.
We had such a blast, and she provided us with so many amazing shots that we were totally blown away. After we posted them on Facebook, we had several comments from people, both there and in real life, commenting how well she did her job, how classy they are, how…US they are. And given that we are getting her at an absolute steal, I can honestly say it’s one of the vendors I’m most proud of out of the whole shindig.
The quest for the dress is almost finished! Thanks for hanging in there. Trust me, this has been exhausting for me too. Unfortunately your patience will not be rewarded.
I make Mr. LP read every blog post. Sometimes I even quiz him on it just to make sure he memorized every word. Unfortunately, that means I will not be showing my dress. Not even the designer/style number. See, Mr. LP likes to say that I am nosy, but really I learned it from him.
Since there are no pictures of the dress or any description, we are going to breeze through this part real quick. After Running of the Brides, we took some time off of the dress search to regroup. In my mind, the dress at La Bella Moda was always the one to beat, but Mama CS required some warming up to it. Finally, one day as if she had an epiphany she said to me, “You know, I really like that one dress you tried on.” Hallelujah. So appointments were made for when I came home for Thanksgiving.
We also made an appointment at a bridal store in Philadelphia. I can’t even remember the name of the second store that we had an appointment at, and that is OK because it wasn’t that great. The store is filled with sample gowns at a discounted price, and the woman who owns it is supposed to be like the dress whisperer. Apparently she can find anyone their perfect dress. Obviously that is false advertising because she didn’t find mine.
I know I said we were going to breeze through this, and three paragraphs later I have clearly lied. Basically we went back to La Bella Moda. The dress was fabulous. We went back two days later to get the seal of approval from Papa CS. Dress purchase. Bing, bang, boom!
V for victory!
This post sucked in the picture department, so to reward you for sticking with it…
We chose this particular resort for a few reasons. The first was that it was nice and close to the airport, since we didn’t want to travel too far on this trip. The second? It was self contained, and meant we didn’t have to leave if we didn’t want to. Perfect! How about an island tour?
As our special day began to wind down, I couldn’t help but have a huge cheesy smile plastered on my face. It’s true what they say you know; the whole day flies by in a flash. When I realized it would all be over soon, I took a few extra moments to stop and look around at what was happening around me…
Our beautiful friends and family that had come from far and wide to celebrate and support us, including my amazing brother who requested a special song for us to dance to.
The details and projects that I had worked on for so long finally came together to add the special touches I had always hoped for.
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Hive, I hate goodbyes. I hate them so much that growing up I avoided them at all costs, even to the point of hiding when anyone I cared about was about to leave. But apparently I’m grown up now, and goodbyes are something that I need to learn how to do.
I started blogging here over a year ago. As the youngest bride to ever blog for WB (I did double check this, but correct me if I am wrong!), I had so much to learn along my wedding planning journey and you guys were there each step of my slightly crooked way.
A while back, I talked about some healthy goals I had taken on in order to be my best self for the wedding. I’ve been incorporating most of these goals in a big way (except drinking water, and I don’t even want to depress myself trying on those stupid black shorts).
Today and right now, I feel good. I want to bottle this up and tap into it whenever I need to. That’s the great thing about blogs, the opportunity to preserve the kinds of moments you want to hold on to forever.
The fact that I feel good right now is no random accident and I have to remember that. All of the books I’ve been reading, yoga I’ve been doing, and weights I’ve been lifting have helped me tremendously. I’m capable and strong and unique.
Personal Photo of my first 5k last year
My biggest goal in all of this body-image “stuff” is finding peace with it all.
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Now that Mr. Gazelle and I are in Vancouver for the wedding it is time to take care of a few last details. I finally got to have my make up trial! I booked my make up artist, ML Makeup Artistry, on the advice on my photographer, and boy, did she make a great recommendation!
First up I had to scour the internet for a little inspiration for my makeup trial. I turned to Reese Witherspoon because she always looks effortlessly gorgeous and not overly made up.
WireImage.com / image via Redbook Magazine
I don’t tend to wear a lot of makeup on a regular basis. Meghan worked to make my make up beautiful but I still felt like me. Want to see how it turned out?
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