Straight from our first look, we went into couple portraits. We actually had two or three different times that we were focusing on us as a couple, with group shots in between. But for the sake of fluid posting, I’m going to show you some of our favorite couple shots even if they are out of sequence.
All photos are courtesy of onelove photography
I don’t think I can get enough of this tree.
My wedding day was not the happiest day of my life.
I’ve talked before about the pressure to have the right feelings. A bride is supposed to be blissfully happy on her wedding day, and declare it the best day of her life. The wedding dress is supposed to be the best thing she’s ever worn, and she’s supposed to look the most beautiful she’s ever looked. Everything comes with a superlative attached to it, according to the WIC.
Some people may feel “the most” or “the best” all day long, but I was not one of those people. Sure, my wedding day was filled with moments of joy—sometimes even transcendent joy—but it was filled with a lot of other feelings, too, some of which were unhappy feelings. I felt a lot of anxiety. Looking back, it was unfounded anxiety, but that doesn’t change the fact that I felt it. And I feel a little bad about feeling that way, which is ridiculous. I’m a human being, not a robot. I can’t control my emotions on cue, especially on a day that’s supposed to be emotional.
Oh hive, last Saturday was so much fun. While talking about our November timeline Mr. Toadstool took out his cell phone’s calendar and started counting the times he’ll be able to come before the wedding, and I started counting the weeks till the big day—six.
Six weeks! That’s a hand and an extra finger! I started numbering the things I still have left to do, minor things, big things, important things, all kinds of things. Next thing I know Mr. Toadstool started hugging me while I sobbed, a desperate, I-can-barely-breathe kind of sob.
Image via The Gloss
We spent days three and four in that same anchored spot in Back Creek. It was such a nice location, we didn’t really have favorable winds to head off to another location, and we also decided that we might as well stick around in order to check out the annual US Sailboat Show, which was starting on day four of our honeymoon.
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Osprey at anchor near Eastport
On the morning of day three, we walked across the bridge into Annapolis proper. The weather had cleared up for us that morning, so we took a nice little walking tour.
On to the sparkly stuff!
Now, as you may have read in my pre-proposal post, Mr. Manatee initially proposed lacking two very important things by American standards:
Anyway, after that first initial oops, my knight in shining armor circled around for a second charge prepared! He liked to tease me all throughout the year that followed by ducking into my childhood home to “help move furniture” or “just to check in.” He practically drove me crazy with curiosity several times. Of course, my parents adore him as much as I do, and he needn’t have been worried about their blessing. When he finally did ask, I called my mother practically beside myself with happiness. She is completely amazing, because she made sure to remember every detail of his nervous request and relayed it to me later that night!
Ashli is selling a set of off-white linen napkins. Make her an offer on the set of 64 napkins.
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:
OK, in retrospect, what seemed like “our little secret” in the last month before the wedding was in fact quite a big secret. Also, while this is the first time I will be revealing it to the hive, I will say I suck at secrets in real life and am a horrendous liar, so it didn’t stay a complete secret very long at all.
The Monday before our joint bachelorette, I woke up Mr. B rather abruptly to shove a surprise in his face. I was so overjoyed, I could barely contain my excitement. Being completely asleep, it was difficult for him to immediately share in my excitement. Of course if you had this shoved in your face at 5:30 AM in the dark, you would probably be confused, too.
“Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.” – Gwyneth Paltrow
Ann Sheridan, circa 1938 / Photographer unknown / Image via Insite
I already revealed to you that I have hired a stylist to do my hair and makeup on our wedding day. Now that my hair and makeup trial is approaching, I’ve been searching high and low for inspiration for my wedding-day look. My dress is vintage inspired, so I’d like to complement it with a look that channels the 1920s Hollywood glamor. My ears will be bejeweled with these Art Deco earrings I scored from Perfect Details:
Drop earrings with flange, from Perfect Details
The vintage Hollywood look is becoming really trendy again, so there are plenty of resources out there for inspiration. My favorite look at the moment is red lipstick, subtle metallic eyeshadow, blush cheeks, and lonnnnng come-hither eyelashes:
Although I always thought taking dance lessons before the wedding would be fun, I quickly brushed it off assuming Mr. Buck would have no interest. He surprised me when he brought up the idea approximately two months before the wedding. His biggest concern was the high school sway—which we have perfected up until this point in our life. He, of course, naturally assumed he would be burdened by two left feet. I did some research and decided to use Barbara’s Dancing Tonight in Davis, California. I found her prices to be reasonable and she was willing to customize different packages for exactly the type of instruction you want.
As it turns out, even though I had been a cheerleader for years growing up and performed in many theatrical plays, apparently I had somehow lost that talent. While I wasn’t a terrible dancer, I was, in fact, a slow learner. Mr. Buck on the other hand was incredibly coordinated and a very quick learner. We decided to keep our dance lessons a secret so that we could surprise everyone at the wedding—mainly his family who would never in a million years think he would do dance lessons. He is a baseball player, hunter…manly man. And apparently a pretty sweet foxtrottin’ machine as well.
I wrote a while back about my concerns of trying to dance to a song that is really neither slow nor fast. I am glad we decided to take lessons because we were able to learn the foxtrot, which is perfect for “Better Together” by Jack Johnson.
A quick yet funny side story before I move on. The night before the wedding, we were at the hotel and we were both very nervous about our impending dance. We felt as though we needed to practice a few more times until we felt more confident. I secretly asked the hotel if we could borrow one of their meeting rooms to practice in. (Hi, I’m the bride, please don’t say no. Insert cheesy yet impressive smile here.) They agreed, but asked that we make sure the furniture was moved back into place should we move it. Well, they gave us the smallest meeting room ever, so we did have to move the furniture around.
More important to this story, though, is that our friends and family had no idea where we were. They kept calling and texting us, but the problem was the only way we had to practice with music was with our iPhone. Which means every time they called us, we had to stop and then start again. Apparently, they all started cracking jokes about where the heck we were.
Ball Cap and I are both of Polish heritage, and we wanted to incorporate a few traditions into our wedding day. We had already served our guests some Polish dishes with dinner, but there were three things I clearly remember from Polish weddings I attended as a kid that we wanted to include during the night.
The first was the removal of the bride’s veil and an apron tied around her waist. Traditionally, this takes place on the first day of the Polish couple’s two-day wedding celebration, and it symbolizes the bride giving up her innocence and accepting her duties as a wife, mother, and hostess. The removal is done by a married woman, or in my experience, my mother.
I took my place on a chair in the middle of the dance floor. I completely forgot that I should have been sitting on Ball Cap’s lap for this part!
Before we delve into the gooey-ness that is the first dance, allow me to give you the back story.
One month before our wedding, I decided we HAD to take dance lessons.
Neither of us knew how to dance. My previous experience with dancing consisted of tap/ballet classes as a pre-schooler, baton twirling (which I shouldn’t count as dance because really it’s just marching in place while my hands did the work), and bailing out of high school dance team tryouts after I realized the choreography was way too advanced. Marching band was as far as my feet took me. Mr. PaC’s dance skills extend only to those of the strobe light and glow stick variety.
This weekend, before the pleasant rain shower known as Sandy drizzled by, we started working on presents for our parents.
Just to make sure nobody peeks…
Following in the footsteps of many a bee before me, I decided to grab some gorgeous picture frames and fill them with placeholder pictures, to be replaced as soon as the wedding photos come in.
Rather than taking new pictures or drawing stick figures, I just cropped some of our engagement photos and added in the words:
In the last post, I made 3D block numbers to use as table numbers. Though they were awesome and free (!), they weren’t exactly presentable with the large quantity of Scotch tape holding them together, and they were also incredibly flimsy. Thus, I needed to papier mache and decorate the numbers.
As a reminder, how the numbers looked after the end of the last post:
1.) First, to make them more sturdy, I papier mached the numbers with newspaper to give them strength. I made a papier mache paste by using the recipe:
The salt is there to prevent the papier mache from molding, while the Elmer’s glue gives it a bit more strength. The overall batter ends up being very similar to pancake batter and will last in the fridge for a couple of days. You just have to stir it back together before using.
Hive, I pride myself on being a pretty reasonable person. I feel like my wedding plans have been coming along, with very little crazy on my part (except for that time that I almost talked myself into making my own wedding cake—that was a lot of crazy). I found vendors, venues, a dress—McGlovin and I have put together a nice little wedding with very little drama or fanfare. So it makes me absolutely insane that I might be having my bridal meltdown…over a cake stand. WTF is this, hive?
Right, so. Around the hundred-day mark I emailed all of our vendors, just to check in to see what they still needed from us, and start to finalize all of the details. I emailed our cake baker to confirm flavors, decoration ideas, etc. And, since we’re doing a cake-and-pie situation, I wanted to confirm the size of the cake stand so the venue would have the right size table to accommodate everything. I was taken completely off guard, then, when he emailed back and apologized for any confusion but, unless we pay a (not-small) fee to rent a cake stand, he delivers the cake on a cardboard round.
WHAT?
This surprise is not the baker’s fault at all—he’s totally right, we never actually discussed a cake stand, he never insinuated anything otherwise, and, from talking about this to everyone I know, it’s completely common practice. It’s just—I guess that I’m just constantly surprised at the ridiculous, minute things that someone is required to think about just to have a wedding. You have a dress, but you also need a longline bra and a crinoline. You reserve a church, but you need to hire musicians. You have invitations, but for some reason your mom objects to the stamps. I thought the cake would be, like, we bought the cake, done. But no…no, no, silly Gloves.
This entire rant feels ridiculous, because it is—no one cares what my cake is on top of, not even me! It’s just like, every time I think something about this wedding is settled, it turns out there are four more surprise steps that need to be addressed. Hhhhhh…so, OK, now that I’ve vented that, let’s look at options. For some reason, I’ve always pictured my cake sitting on top of a silver plateau, like this:
Photo via Southern Events Party Rentals
I could rent that, or look at some DIY options, like Mrs. Bunting’s (gorgeous, by the way!):
After arriving at the venue and a rain plan was set, it was time to rehearse. As you may recall, we did not have a rehearsal the day before but rather the afternoon of our wedding. This worked out perfectly. We got ourselves arranged on the stone patio.
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| Not sure what I am doing here—some sort of robot dance, it appears. |
