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After reading about all the lovely themes that brides come up with for their weddings, I was feeling a bit sad, or maybe just melancholy, that we didn’t have a real theme for our wedding. I knew we’d never come up with a concept that would cover the whole wedding weekend, because that’s just not us.
Ultimately I’ve been accepting that our wedding will be formal and romantic, but it will have a couple of quirky twists to it. One twist is my dress—it’s very unexpected. Another twist is having twos of so many things and having so many people involved. But that’s not really a theme, is it?
I didn’t think so. Not when there are so many real themes out there. Whether it’s color, icon, flavor, or culture, we just didn’t have anything like what every other couple seemed to have.
Bird wedding theme / Image via Perfect Wedding Zone
We’re jumping right in, hive. It’s dress time!
First and foremost, you all must know that I was obsessing over this one dress for the longest time:
It’s Demetrios 3137. I’ve looked at and written about it so much that when I searched for it in Google images a few months back, my Weddingbee user pic came up. No lies.
That being said, I went wedding dress “shopping” three times in the first four months of my 26 month engagement.
The first time I went was on Long Island with my BFF/maid of honor numero uno, Copper. They didn’t have my dream dress, but I still tried on several dresses that were just “eh”… I had no idea (and a very exact idea) of what I wanted.
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(The alternate title to this post was “Did a Wild Animal Tear Apart Our Apartment?”)
We’re jetlagged, we’re tired, we’re checking our emails constantly for an email from our photographer, we both have colds, our apartment looks like the host of WWIII, and we both are having our first day back in the office…oh yeah, and we’re MARRIED!!
The wedding was amazing. I can’t believe that it’s over already. I really wish that we’d booked the venue for a couple more hours so that the night could have lasted longer and that we’d had more time to visit and dance with each and every guest. After dissecting the night the way that only newlyweds can, we came up with only two regrets: not eating more of our wedding cake and not getting more time with each guest. I have a feeling that no matter how much time we had with each person in attendance we’d still want more. The night was a whirlwind and I can’t wait to get the professional pics back so that I can start recapping.
Before the recaps begin, I’ll be stopping in with some South African honeymoon highlights and some other last-minute items that never got to be blogged. Until then, here are a few teaser pics to enjoy that were taken by my talented cousin, Jonathan.
I absolutely adore our engagement pictures. One of my favorite things about them was the price. The very best Price. FREE! as in $0.00. Perfect. If you recall, my mother was visiting us when Mr. Aardvark proposed. She is a very talented armature photographer and was able to work wonders with my dinky little point and shoot! The day after we got engaged the three of us trekked out to a park near our house and got some really great shots. We were both still giddy and glowing over the new engagement and I really think it comes through in the pictures.
So without anymore unnecessary yapping, here are a couple of my favorites:
I like to call this one the “Album Cover” I am pretty sure neither of us were ready for the picture but it looks kinda cool. Right?
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.”
Catch up on the entire After “I Do” series here! And if you have a burning question you’d like to see discussed, submit it here!
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How do you balance your relationship, job, family while making time to do things you love? Any tips for overstressed hive members?
The quest for me time—important to an only child like me!—is an interesting struggle. It’s a melding of personal time and dorky self-amusement that only children are pretty good at. My husband and I work together, we run a website together on the side, and we socialize a fair bit together in a combination of networking and plain-ol’ social drinkups and dinners. And we’re part of the same two families now, lest we forget, and we have to share a bed, a household, and a budget.
Here’s how I do it alone (ha), at least:
I let myself get lost in my job for several points on any given day. For example, I write and edit for a living, so I like to find the funniest self-amusing thing I wrote or edited that day. It being self-LOL, I don’t expect anyone else to find it funny, and I don’t really share these things with anyone. It’s prime Me Time, in my head. Just get into the zone doing whatever you do, and you’ll find yourself having a lot of fun, on your very own, along the way.
I send personal emails. I’m not really an all-day IM sort of girl, so taking a minute to send a message and then spending a minute to read a fun response hours later can really make my day. Those moments are just for me and the friend I’m emailing. And it always feels special somehow.
Drink alone (not like that). Sitting alone at home or in another room with the dog and a glass of wine—or whatever you want to drink, even if it’s water—is amazing soul tonic. I love to chat/gossip/commisserate/bicker with him, but I don’t feel the need to spend all evening jabbering when we’re at home together.
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Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
I am so flippin’ excited that we’re going to have a photo booth at our wedding! And yeah, I know it’s one of those things that’s been done everywhere at this point, but I honestly don’t care about that in the slightest. The idea of giving our guests a fun, non-dancing activity during our reception is totally worth it to me. (Not that we don’t want people to dance, of course. We just want them to have options.) Our photo-booth package includes a box of props, which is great because it means we don’t have to raid the Halloween stores on November first to find our own (although that did sound kinda fun). But we still wanted to find a way to personalize things just a bit.
I’d seen pictures of those awesome chalkboard speech bubbles, and I thought that might be our answer. But when I talked to Mr. FW about it he seemed concerned. It’s not that he thought it was a bad idea, no no. He just thought it would make me freak out to be near chalkboards on our wedding day. See…I have a bit of a chalk phobia. For realz, just typing out the word “chalk” makes me shiver. I can’t stand anything about it—the way it feels in your hand, the way it sounds when you’re writing with it, the dust it creates when you erase it. Ugh…seriously, it’s a problem.
So Mr. FW went searching for alternatives, and he discovered the ingeniousness of white-board contact paper. Yep, it’s contact paper that you can write on with dry-erase markers. You can probably purchase it a lot of places, but we’re online people so we bought ours on Amazon.
{GoWrite dry erase rolls on Amazon, $8.99}
I am already debating whether or not to sell my wedding dress. I know a lot of bees before me have contemplated selling their wedding dresses (such as Mrs. Fro Yo and Mrs. Cowboy Boot). I don’t intend on wearing it again, and I am personally a huge fan of the eBay recycling system when I no longer have an interest in clothes. So why not my dress? Let’s weigh up the pros and cons for selling the dress:
Pros:
Hive, I’ve been a busy bee painting away to get our cake topper done. After all the details have dried and been sewn together or glued on, I’m ready to call this DIY project “done.”
After I drew a rough sketch on the dolls and consulted Mr. Funnel Cake on whether closed or open eyes were better, it was time to paint the first layers of our outfits. This part took awhile while I let layers dry and then painted new details and colours on top.
Get ready, y’all! It’s the first ever Texas Hill Country Bee Meet-Up!
Picture via Gruene River Grill
Catch up on the entire After “I Do” series here! And if you have a burning question you’d like to see discussed, submit it here!
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How do you keep the spark alive in your marriage, or keep things fun?
Seriously? Sex. I went off hormonal birth control and my sex drive came back!
Also, we have date night once a month where we get dressed up and pretend like we are still trying to impress each other and have dinner and drinks.
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Everyone was ready. Everyone had posed for pictures. There was nothing left on the to-do list. Guests began to fill the seats out in the garden, waiting for the ceremony to begin, waiting for us to get married.
This won’t be a terribly long post, hive. We had our meeting with the second florist. I was late, again!!! At least I wasn’t 45 minutes late this time; I was only 30 minutes late.
But I have an even better reason this time. I did have to stop and pick up Grandmother Kettle again. But first, I picked up Momma Kettle from her job downtown. Originally, we were going to meet at the florist’s, but since I was in the neighborhood I picked her up so she could leave the car with Daddy Kettle and make his trip home from work easier.
So why was I in the neighborhood? Well, I was having lunch right across the street from my mother’s building, with Miss Sunhat!! We met for lunch and were both quite glad to have someone to talk to about wedding stuff who never got that glazed over, I’m-not-getting-married-so-I-really-don’t-care look in the eyes.
We shared stories of Mr. Kettle and Mr. Ball Cap both trying to avoid searching out their tuxes for the wedding. It’s always interesting to find random things in common. But this post is supposed to be about meeting florists, not how awesome Miss Sunhat is, so I’m moving on.
Our second florist meeting was with Homewood Florist. The shop was lovely. I wish I had taken a picture of the outside when we walked up.
Image via Homewood Florist
EAB767 is selling a DIY photo-booth wall. She’s asking $150 for pick-up only in Northern California.
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:
As I mentioned in earlier posts, Mr. Aardvark and I live together. However, we do not live alone. We have a constant chaperon/dependent/fur baby. Ladies and gentlemen of the internet, meet Kitty or Fuzzy Aardvark:
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| Personal Photo |
I apologize for the poor quality photo, but that look of contempt on her face is due to the camera’s presence. She is not very photogenic, but that is beside the point. The point is that she lives in our house. How that came to be is a story unto itself. A story I will now tell.
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