Note: this post is long and picture-heavy. 
Answer: WHO CARES?! It’s your honeymoon!
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Hehe—it’s Mr. Palm Tree cheering you on!*
In all seriousness though, hive, Couples Negril has a BOATLOAD (again, pun not intended, but made me giggle when I saw it typed) of activities on a daily basis.
Normally when we go out of town and aren’t able to bring Lil Wingman with us, we find a friend or family member for him to stay with to make sure he stays out of trouble. This is proving to be an issue on the day of the wedding, since all of our closest friends and family will be celebrating with us and unavailable to puppy-sit.
Mama and Papa Plane will be hosting Lil Wingman while we are on our honeymoon, but we definitely needed a plan for him on the night before as well as the day and night of the wedding.
I started researching boarding facilities near the wedding venue and the hotel, as I figured it would be easiest for drop-off and pick-up if he was nice and close. I did some research and narrowed down my options based on the following criteria.
(Warning: gratuitous doggie photos ahead—all personal)
Sunday pick-up available: Because Mama and Papa Plane will be home Sunday night, there is no reason to pay for an extra night of boarding if Lil Wingman can be picked up the day after the wedding. This also works because we will be able to see him on Sunday and say goodbye before we leave for the honeymoon.
“I don’t always ride in the car, but when I do, I require a chauffeur.”
Ample play time: Lil Wingman loves to play with other dogs. We take him to the dog park all the time and he gets along really well with most canines. In the case of finding a boarding facility, I wanted to ensure that he wasn’t going to be sitting in a kennel all day without being able to interact with the other “guests.” A caveat to this is that the facility must also require every dog that is allowed play time to pass a behavioral assessment—I know my dog plays well with others, but I want to make sure the new friends he’s making play nice, too.
Since Mr. Jet and I wil be doing a first look, we needed a single mode of transportation that will round up our crew, including fur baby Bruce!
Ideally, we wanted a four-to-five-hour rental that would pick up all of the bridal party and our photographer (Uncle J), bring us to a few local places we wanted to take pictures at before the ceremony, and have a final drop-off at our ceremony/reception location before our 5:00 PM ceremony start. I immediately crossed out the limo idea, as I am about as graceful as a St. Bernard on a slip and slide—never mind when tied up into a wedding gown. Something I can step up into was preferable, if not mandatory.
I looked into trolley rentals in our area. I figured they weren’t quite as popular as the limo and maybe not as expensive. WOW, was I ever wrong! The trolley rentals I found were almost 50% MORE expensive than the limos and most required a six-to-eight-hour rental minimum. It was way outside the (completely arbitrary) $500 budget I seem to have set for everything, but I was determined to find something more affordable.
In our small-ish city, we have a few city trolleys which operate in the summer months doing tours of museums and “famous” locations around town. I inquired with the city to see if they rented it for private events. They don’t.
Never fear, a similar small-ish city is only 20 minutes away. I shot off an email to their parks and rec department…
TOTALLY hoped that she’d respond!! / Image via NBC
GOOD NEWS! This small-ish city rented out their trolley for a song! Only $100 an hour with a four-hour minimum rental. My penny-pinching inner self was shouting from the rooftops! I booked a meeting with Tammy and the trolley at the city bus depot to check out the trolley to make sure it wasn’t a hot city mess.
(All photos are personal)
So, I love wine. I blame the French. I did a summer in Lyon after my first year of law school to study the law of the European Union, and while I remember very little about the actual course, I got quite an education…in wine. For those of you that don’t know, Lyon is in the Beaujolais region of France, a huge wine region. Wine was literally cheaper than water and tasted amazing!
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Miss Waterfall sampling wine at a vineyard in Pays Lyon, Beaujolais region, circa 2006 / Personal photo
Cut to now, and Mr. Waterfall and I share a mutual love of wine. We definitely enjoy a nice glass of red (or white, or rosé) with dinner most nights.
We settled on DIY submerged centerpieces a while ago, and trying to find cheap vases in the width and style that we were looking for proved beyond difficult. Then, I came across Mrs. Pain au Chocolat’s posts about cutting wine bottles and a light went off in my head. Brilliant! It would be cheap because we were already drinking plenty of wine, AND we would be recycling!
Anyway…we happily started collecting bottles and I finally got around to buying a glass cutter. This is not the exact one, but close enough.
The guestbook is one of those bits of wedding decor that actually has an honest-to-goodness purpose—it even gets its own table, putting it right up there with the cake in level of importance.
Darice Guest Book Set / Image via Amazon
And, yet, after the wedding the guestbook generally gets shoved into a box or onto a shelf, seldom to be looked at again.
Hardly seems fair, right?
Which is why I always thought, even when I wasn’t considering another marriage as a possibility, that having guests sign a photo mat that could then be hung in the home with a picture from the day made much more sense in the grand scheme of things.
knadams0723 shares a photo from her Florida destination wedding!
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Our photographer, Crystal, and her second shooter, Anna, showed up around 9:30 AM to begin taking detail and getting ready shots of all of us. I’m going to be a big tease and hold out on most of the detail shots but I will show this one of my dress with the sunlight streaming through it. GORGEOUS.
I was really happy with how my hair and makeup turned out. Laura does amazing work and I looked just how I had envisioned myself as a bride! As for the extensions? I would buy them again in a heartbeat. Laura didn’t clip them in as tightly as she had for the trial and I wore them for over 12 hours without a problem. Most people had no idea I was wearing extensions until I told them! (And sidebar: I wore them again at Sister Big Eye’s wedding this past weekend—photos to come later this summer!)
Hello, friends. Let’s talk hair, shall we?
I’m pretty low maintenance when it comes to my hair—wash, air dry, straighten if I have time. Even if my hair is nice and straight, I often pull it back in a ponytail anyway. Part of this is because I’m typically engrossed in other things and don’t give much thought to my hair, and the other part is because I have pretty sensitive skin and so having my hair touch my shoulders, back, or face can drive me crazy.
Grainy photo from a Google+ hangout when Sparky was out of town. I had to take a picture because that was probably my best hair day EVER.
Finally my mom arrived and I put on my dress. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really a “cute picture of your mom zipping up your dress” moment. It was more like “oh please let this dress zip…” which it did, and it fit perfectly. Once I got it over my rib cage.
*** Once again, all photos by Niki Marie Photography ***
My mom was able to help me adjust my dress, though, which I’m thankful for. She also helped me put on my grandmother’s antique necklace. Both of my cousins’ wives wore it in their weddings, which makes me the third grandchild to get married in three years and feature this amazing piece of jewelry.
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