OK, just so you guys know, my birthday was a few months back. But, not unlike our favorite Miss Sword, I, too, received a wirthday gift! I had been lusting after this particular pair of somethings for what felt like FOREVER, and my dear, sweet Mr. A somehow picked up on it. Needless to say, when I opened up my present from him on my birthday, I was elated with what was inside!!! Need me to give you a hint?
ZOMG!
Still don’t have a guess? OK, I’ll cave!
Before Hurricane Sandy brought her wrath to the East Coast, my family celebrated this weekend the wedding of my little brother and my now sister-in-law! I am using the time while we still have power to blog, as Mr. Ly is using this time to battle a bear in Skyrim. I hope everyone who is in the path of Sandy is safe and sound, and mostly dry. I am particularly freaked out by the severity of the storm, but as long as I have power, I am going to use my time wisely and I need something to keep my mind busy! Recapping our last unmarried wedding as guests is the perfect distraction.
As Miss Gray Wolf recently blogged about, when you attend a wedding close to your own, you notice things that you might not take notice of otherwise. The details that, as brides, we spend hours obsessing over go unnoticed by many a wedding guest—unless you are planning your own wedding! My sister-in-law and I are very different types of brides (for one, I don’t think she’s ever been on the ’Bee) and had very different visions for our weddings from the start. I have tried not to compare our weddings, but as you can imagine, when you have two family members getting married just three months apart, it’s hard not to. My brother’s wedding was more of your rustic/barnyard feel with lots of Mason jars and wooden touches. The venue was spectacular and my sister-in-law did a really excellent job putting her vision together!
(all photos personal)
A good shot of the venue, Pomme, set up for the ceremony, which was later transformed info the reception space
Kelsey, today I give myself to you in marriage.
From this day forward
I promise to stand beside you and love you completely
Through the good times and the bad,
In sickness and in health,
In times of plenty and in times of want,
When our love is simple,
And when it is an effort.
I will laugh with you in times of joy
And comfort you in times of sorrow.
I will respect, trust, support, and care for you.
I will be faithful to you and honest with you.
I will cherish you and hold you in highest regard.
Whatever may come I will be there beside you
All the days of my life.
With these vows, I take you to be my wife.
*
It was finally time to bust a move! The DJ cranked the music and everyone piled onto the dance floor. I will let the pictures speak for themselves!
MOB and her daddy cuttin’ a rug!
Why is it that becoming a mail-obsessed person is so common when planning a wedding? I know I’m not alone.
Most of our invites are going to be handed out by us personally; some people were actually surprised when I mentioned mailing some. We’re mailing invites to different parts of Mexico, USA, Canada, one to Scotland, and maybe one Nicaragua (maybe we’ll email that one). USA and Canada are not a big deal because we’ll just cross the border and mail them from Arizona—piece of cake. The problem is the ones going within Mexico.
See, as bad as it sounds, I don’t trust the Mexican postal service—they’ve lost and mistreated too many packages for me to believe in them. Even Mr. Toadstool’s cousin, who got married a few years ago, told us to email them their invite because, when she got married, almost half her invites were lost in transit.
Another reason to distrust them? In March I sent my BMs their “Would you be my bridesmaid?” packages:
I just added the address labels on top and taped the lid.
It feels a bit strange writing about our first anniversary, because in August we celebrated two years on paper. Part of me feels “sooo married” and the other part still feels like a newlywed.
We are not quite as adventurous as Mrs. Socks. We only visited five countries this year, three of which were new to me, but we still face intermittent long distance with Mr. FC’s work travel and military service. In fact…Mr. FC is traveling for work today, so he’s not even here to celebrate our first anniversary!! But somehow, long distance does seem easier now that we are married.
When Mr. Wallaby and I began wedding planning and our families asked us where we wanted to register for gifts, we were unsure about how to proceed. Our first idea was to ask our guests to gifts us trees and plants for our garden—that would help offset some of the emissions from our out-of-town guests traveling to Houston for the wedding, it would help us grow our garden, and it would keep our home clutter free. However, Mr. W’s yard is pretty small, so I’m not sure we’d have enough free space to plant ~150 new trees and shrubs. We also thought about asking our guests to have trees planted in the Amazon rainforest preserve, again to off-set the carbon emissions from wedding travel, as well as to help preserve the incredible biodiversity in that region. But, many of our relatives and family friends still want to give us something to start our new home together. And although Mr. W and I are adamant about minimizing waste and clutter, we are pretty short on kitchenware and serving dishes for entertaining. We don’t have enough place settings to serve dinner for his whole family. We also don’t own a single wine glass—we keep it classy and drink our wine out of coffee mugs 
So, we somewhat hesitantly agreed to register for a few things from “green living” companies. Our new standard was to find products that are made from renewable or recycled materials, and if possible, manufactured in the U.S.
From some pretty exhaustive research into green living stores that offer plenty of options for kitchenware and entertaining, I decided on two online stores: VivaTerra and AreNaturals. Mr. W and I browsed through the products listed on their websites and created online registries. We are still a little bit shy about the registry process, and we would be perfectly happy if everyone came to our wedding empty-handed—we are just excited to be surrounded by the people we love on our wedding day!
In case you’re curious, here are some of the items Mr. W and I picked out. We registered for a set of ceramic dinnerware:
Le Marais Dinnerware from VivaTerra
We also registered for a set of hand-blown glasses made from 100% recycled glass:
OK, hive—let’s chat about transportation. This is a subject that, during my short time interning at a wedding venue, I saw overlooked COUNTLESS times! People would be at the rehearsal the night before trying to figure out who would take the fall and be the DD for those who drank throughout the night.
Now, while we won’t have that issue (still planning on no alcohol at the wedding, as of now), we definitely will need some from of transportation for the big day. Actually…we may need MULTIPLE forms of transportation.
Here’s why: the girls and I will be staying at a hotel the night before the wedding, and we’ll be getting ready there for the day. The guys are going to be staying (as far as I know) at our apartment and then getting ready when they’re actually at the venue. Let’s face it, I can totally see these boys getting dirty in the ten minute car ride from our apartment over to the venue. So we’ll definitely need either a giant bus for the girls and two cars for the guys, or three cars for the girls and two for the guys. That’s a lot of carpooling!
But throughout this thinking process, one thing came to mind—no limo. Now, if this is your favorite thing—go for it! By all means! But when we take photos with our car, I wanted it to be something different and unique.
…And then I saw the always lovely Mrs. Fox talk about her transportation. A BUS! How cool is that!?
Image via Mrs. Fox / Photo by Exclamation Imagery
daphne is selling a set of rhinestone picture frame table numbers. She is asking $40 for the set.
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:
I can’t tell if I’m more sensitive to blue or if I’m just going insane, but I’m finding that picking the correct shade of blue for my bridesmaid dresses to be one of the most difficult things in this wedding so far. Anything that needs to be blue is almost impossible to find in the right shade.
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| Photo by: Beautiful Day photography on Inspired By This via Lover.ly |
When looking for a shade of pink, I just pick something soft and pastel, and call it a day. With the peach, it was a little more difficult to pick something that was more pinkish than orange, but it was at least doable.
The last time you saw the corsages, they looked like this:
I finally got around to finishing them!
Originally, I wanted to find stretchy beaded bracelets, have each woman wear three or four of them, and attach the flowers to the stacks to create the illusion of single bracelets with multiple loops.
Only I couldn’t find stretchy beaded bracelets ANYWHERE. Maybe I didn’t look too hard, or maybe I didn’t look long enough, but I couldn’t find them! No matter—I decided to make them myself.
I have a ton of floral wire for a project you haven’t seen yet, so I set off to my good friend Michaels and snagged some jewelry-making supplies.
Without further delay, I’m going to dive right into a mega-post of our wedding ceremony—the full text and then some!
On behalf of Nicolette and Brian and their families, I want to welcome you to their wedding celebration. My name is David Braneky and I am an officiant with Journeys of the Heart, a non-denominational ministry that performs customized spiritual and secular ceremonies. Our couples approach their special occasion with comfort and joy, know they have a ceremony fit to their specific desires, and the backing of an organization to fulfill their needs.
During our ceremony you will be asked to affirm the couple in the vows they are about to take. If you can respond at that moment with a “we will” that would be wonderful.
Let me take you back again, to the moment when all the girls were finally dressed.
There I was, stuck upstairs and all dressed up, waiting for my groom to arrive. I really didn’t want to venture downstairs, just in case Mr. Dragon happened to show up and walk by a window right as I walked by, thus ruining nearly a year’s worth of effort to keep my dress hidden from him until my walk down the aisle.
Unfortunately, being trapped upstairs was making me feel incredibly claustrophobic. I couldn’t see what was going on beyond my five foot patch of space, couldn’t talk to anyone unless they happened to be upstairs, too, and couldn’t really sit down anywhere. There were a lot of us up there, a lot of luggage and clothing, and not a lot of space.
I tried looking out the bathroom window, but that just made me nervous that somebody would spy me from the garden below. I desperately called for water to soothe my suddenly dry throat, and chugged half of the bottle MOH Michelle handed me without a break for air. Finally, I told BM/sister Kay how I was feeling, and she whisked me downstairs, sequestering me in my mom’s TV room once she knew Mr. Dragon wasn’t going to see me.
*
I felt better, being able to sit down on a comfy couch, but now I really had no idea what time it was, or where Mr. Dragon could be. I didn’t even know if we had guests in the yard yet! We passed some time by taking pictures.
Today is our one-month anniversary. In some ways, I can’t believe it’s already been a month. In others, I can’t believe it’s only been a month.
One thing I know for sure is that I don’t feel different.
I can honestly say that our relationship isn’t any different now that we’re married. We’re the same people we were before September 29th, just with bands of metal on our left ring fingers and a marriage certificate in our fireproof safe. It’s changed my health insurance and even my name (well, not legally quite yet), but not who I am.
I wish I felt different. Marriage is supposed to be a transformative experience, something that changes everything about you. That just hasn’t been my experience. From day one of our relationship, Mr. T and I have been very committed to one another. I have never once felt that we would break up and neither of us has ever threatened to walk away. Maybe this level of security in our relationship is why marriage hasn’t changed anything. Maybe our marriage is too new for things to feel different just yet. Maybe things never will feel different. As long as we’re as happy as we are today, I’m OK with that.
How long did it take before you felt married?
dinamarie07 shares a photo of her gorgeous wedding cake by Mad Hatter cakes of Atlanta.
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