- Blog
- Bios
- Boards
- Classifieds
- DIY
- Gallery
- Vendor Reviews
- Shop Weddingbee
Weddingbee Blog
I’m so happy the culmination of a year of planning and a lifetime of hopes and dreams is finally here! In a couple of hours, we will officially announce to the world that we have chosen to spend the rest of our lives together. I get goose bumps just thinking about it!
To the hive: Thank you for all the love throughout this crazy thing called planning a wedding and for allowing me to share this journey with you. I feel very fortunate to be a part of this incredibly supportive community. I can’t wait to come back and tell you all about the wedding!
I have a couple of posts scheduled for the next few weeks so that you guys don’t forget about me. We will be leaving for the airport straight from the reception for our three-week honeymoon in Europe, for which I’m ridiculously excited, but I promise to come back…with pictures!
To Mr. Boa: This is it! In a few hours we will take the first steps into our greatest adventure yet, the start of our lives as husband and wife. This is only the beginning. I’m looking forward to spending every single day until forever by your side, being grateful every day that life put you in my path. 
Let’s DO this!
PS: My excitement is evident in my obvious overuse of exclamation marks!!!!!
A long time ago, I asked Mami Boa if I could use her wedding glasses if they were still around. She answered in the affirmative, super excited that we will be including a memento for her wedding into our big day. I finally saw the glasses this weekend and I’m totally in love.
Straight out of the box where they have been stored for almost 25 years
With a little TLC, some cleaning and a little shine on the silver part, they will look as good as new. We had a little scare with one of them when the cup came apart form the stem, but it wasn’t anything a little glue couldn’t handle.
Read more…
This weekend I caught wedding-crafting fever. With the help of my awesome MOH, I finished the table numbers and the seating chart in record time.
I wanted to utilize our engagement pictures as our table numbers but had no idea on how to edit them in. Lil Boa worked some Photoshop magic to attach the table numbers to each of the pictures and created JPEG images of the seating lists. We printed the table numbers, the I Spy sheet, and the seating lists as photos at Walgreens.
The table number workstation
I used a simple plastic frame to display the the number and the I Spy.
Featured on Weddingbee
Unique Wedding Favors
“Add a memorable touch to your wedding with unique favors that match your theme.”
Two weeks ago we met with our photographers Keli and Che, from Keli Art Photography, to finally take our engagement pictures. We had decided a long time ago that we would take our e-pics at our college campus at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, where we met and have spent huge part of our relationship. We wanted to somehow incorporate our alma mater into the wedding, and choosing it as our e-pic site happened to be the perfect opportunity. It doesn’t hurt that the college campus has beautiful historic buildings and gorgeous lawns. We even got the school to lend us our mascot, Tarzan the English bulldog!
Without further ado, prepare yourselves for a Boa Picture Overload…
For 85% of the year I’ve been engaged, Mami Boa and Lil Boa have been looking for dresses. I had given them free rein to pick whatever dress they wanted as long as they chose it in one of our wedding colors. A few weeks ago they conference called me to say that they were tired of shopping for dresses and not finding anything they liked. They had decided to call Jose Braulio and ask him to custom design a pair of dresses for the two of them.
Most probably I will not be able to see their dresses or the design until the day before the wedding, and that’s fine with me. I trust both these women’s fashion sense and really want them to feel comfortable and beautiful on my wedding day. There was no need for cohesiveness between the dresses since I love the mismatched look, so I felt comfortable letting Jose Braulio design whatever he thought would suit them best.
All I know of Lil Boa’s dress is that it will be gray, knee length, and with lace detailing on top.
Fabric for Lil Boa’s Dress
Mami Boa gave the designer free rein with her dress, and he chose to make a one-shoulder, slightly above-the-knee dress in all over purple lace.
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
Way back in 2010 when I discovered all the greatness that is Weddingbee, one of the first blog posts I had the opportunity to read was Mrs. Meerkat’s shortest post ever, which showed off her incredible I SPY cards. I knew in that moment I just had to have them at my wedding (a whole year and half before being engaged). I had never seen them before at any event and thought it would be a great way to get our guests to mingle and have a little bit of fun (and take great pictures I can steal off Facebook).
Right off the bat, I was confronted with a bit of a situation—all of the “I Spy” inspiration I found was in English, a language understood by less than 50% of my guests. I had to come up with a cute line or two to explain what an “I Spy” card was (there was no pretty way to translate the I SPY poem, so I came up with a variation) and translate a dozen or so “photo ops” to Spanish.
Obviously the design part of these I SPY cards was another job for my super duper paper-product slave/Lil Boa/MOH. I sent her the translations along with the following inspiration pictures.
When I decided to go the custom-design route with my wedding dress I knew I was taking a risk. I had worked with the designer Jose Braulio before and knew his creative process included doing the work a couple of weeks out from the event. This means I won’t be able to see Isabel (my wedding dress) until a few days before the wedding.
Lil Boa/ MOH gifted me with a weekend getaway at the swanky Wyndham Rio Mar Resort & Casino with just a couple of my closest girlfriends. Unfortunately, my friends canceled in the weeks leading up to the event, leaving me and Lil Boa alone for the weekend. Somehow what began as my second bachelorette weekend ended up acting as my last family as a single girl. Instead of leaving for the hotel by ourselves, we invited Mami and Papi Boa along for some well deserved rest and relaxation.
View of the hotel pool from my favorite beach chair
We arrived at the hotel on Friday around 5 PM, and while everybody went to walk around the hotel and look around, I slipped into PJs, got my Kobo, and went to bed at 7 PM. (It had been a particularly fierce school week.) I woke up on Saturday morning feeling refreshed and looking forward to lounging out by the fabulous pool all day while wearing SPF 80. (I don’t tan, I just get as red as a lobster, a look I do not want to have for the wedding.)
When we decided to have a morning wedding, thoughts of a drunken all-night bash where guests boogie ’til 4 AM went immediately out the window. Broad daylight, only hours after waking up and the lack of alcohol do not lend to a party-like atmosphere. That worked out perfectly for us since we envisioned our wedding day as a time to join our families in sharing and celebration, but not in song and dance. Some brides might be looking to give their guests the party of the decade, but a more laid-back vibe suits us perfectly.
After debating whether to have music at the reception, we ultimately decided it would be nice to have some background music during breakfast and maybe some dance music afterward, without having to worry about someone manning the iPod. We met with our DJ this week and he asked for a list of must-have songs for the reception.
Mr. Boa and I came up with this:
Special Songs
Read more…
As I told you guys in my hair chronicles, I’ve been growing my hair for the wedding for a while now in hopes of achieve a wedding look similar to those below.
Photo by: Alea Lovely on Wedding Chicks via Lover.ly
One of the cons of having only one bridal attendant is missing out on all the typical bachelorette fun I could have had with my bridesmaids. On the other hand, a lot of my closest college friends are men of the homosexual orientation. A “typical” girls-only bachelorette party would have excluded them from the festivities, which I found totally unfair.
For this reason, I decided to go a slightly unconventional route. Since I really wanted the opportunity to party with all my college friends one last time before the craziness of finals/wedding/honeymoon/moving/jobs/real life set in, I invited all of them, gay/straight/guy/girl, to meet me at our local gay bar for karaoke on open-bar night. You could say I threw myself a kind-of-sort-of bachelorette party
Saying we had a blast that night is an understatement! A drag queen brought me onstage to serenade me, and the owner of the bar came over to personally to give her congratulations on the upcoming nuptials and gifted our party a round of shots. Over 30 of my friends showed up, and some of them even brought me some penis paraphernalia, my favorite being the light-up penis veil (sorry, pictures are not suitable for the interwebs) so I could feel like I lived the true bachelorette experience. After a little coaxing on my part, even Mr. Boa decided to pop by for a bit. I invited him from the start, but he decided to leave me have my fun before joining me before the party ended.
Here we are being serenaded by yet another person.
I’m not a delicate young lady by any means, and the normal wedding shades of white, cream, and taupe would not do it for me. I want to wear purple colored nails on my wedding day, in a shade that will really pop in pictures and match our overall color scheme. Seeing pictures like this confirmed my NEED for purple nails.
Photo by: Samantha Maber on Inspired by This via Lover.ly
As you can see below, while trying to find the perfect shade to wear on wedding day, I went on a nail-polish-buying binge.
This is my attempt to tackle the great name-change debate from a slightly different perspective, namely Hispanic culture. While in the US, a wife changing her last name to her husband’s is expected/traditional, in Hispanic countries it is somewhat uncommon, unless the wife is marrying a gringo (which in Puerto Rico is not a pejorative term—it simply means a US citizen from the US mainland).
In Hispanic countries, most people have two last names, the first last name being your father’s last name and the second last name being your mother’s first last name.
Example:
What happens when you get married? In Puerto Rico most frequently nothing happens—both parties remain with their same last names after marriage. In other Hispanic countries the husband’s last names remain the same, but it is common for the wife to change her name as follows: Her first last name remains the same (her father’s first last name) but her second last name changes to her husband’s first last name. Sometimes a “de” will be added between these two last names to indicate that her second last name was acquired through marriage.
A week after having mixed feelings about my makeup trial at Sephora, I tried my prowess at makeup application as a practice for wedding day.
45 minutes later this is what I came up with (please ignore my scraggly hair)…
| Visit our sister sites | eHarmony Online Dating |
eHarmony Advice Dating Advice |
Project Wedding Wedding Songs |
JustMommies Pregnancy Calendar |
Miss Boa Constrictor, Isabela, Puerto Rico Age and Occupation: 22, Undergraduate Student Fiance's Age and Occupation: 23, Soon-to-be Civil Engineer Engagement Date: May 19, 2011 Wedding Date: May 2012 Venue: El Faro Convention Center About Me: I’m a Caribbean gal, born and bred on the beautiful island of Puerto Rico, finishing her last year as an undergrad. I describe myself as a “closet nerd” as I secretly enjoy reading research papers, playing video games, and geeking out on Lord of the Rings movie marathons. I will marry my college sweetheart, a soon-to-be civil engineer, who loves Legos and old-school Puerto Rican cooking. This is sure to be a fast-paced year with our wedding, honeymoon, college graduation, new jobs, and a cross-country move all within less than 30 days of each other!
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 | 30 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
