Weddingbee Blog

Since I am the one who is far away from my bridesmaids, I wanted a quick and easy way to let them know things that are going on. I talk to all of my girls regularly, but I make it a point to not really talk about wedding stuff when we are on the phone. I want our conversations to be about catching up and not all about the details of my upcoming nuptials, especially because out of all of my bridesmaids, only my sister-in-law (obviously) is married, so I know it’s something they don’t want to hear about all the time. After scouring online for ideas, I found many other brides in the same position who developed newsletters. Aha! Perfect!

I was an editor of my college and high school papers, so I know a thing or two about laying out a design. I borrowed a name that I saw on many of the newsletters (and it’s impossible to credit it to someone because I have absolutely no idea who started it), found some patterns and clip art that matched my colors, and voila:

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I have actually done quite a few DIYs, but most of them I want to wait to show until it gets a little closer to the wedding or when they are finished. (For example, the invitations and programs are designed but not printed out yet.) I did manage to finish a small DIY this morning and wanted to share it. It honestly isn’t anything much, but I thought it was cute.

I bought a plain wooden sign from Dollar Tree like this:

Image via Dollar Tree

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On top of juggling school, work, and wedding planning, I have added yet another item to my already overflowing list of things to do: lose weight. I am currently 223 pounds. I’m a size 16 (which is down from 245 and a size 18). There, I said it—I’m not ashamed to admit my weight to all of you guys (well, just a little). I have yet to order my dress in hopes of losing weight. However, I have a problem that keeps me from losing it easily. I am a COE. This stands for a compulsive over-eater. More simply put, I am addicted to food and cannot always control what I put into my body. I would binge eat, up to 3,000 calories in a sitting. Then I would feel guilty about eating that way and would consciously be very careful about what I ate, hardly eating anything at all until I would lapse and do it again. This is what caused me to go from being 170 (a size 12) my freshman year of college, to being the size I am now. I gained almost 80 pounds in six years. The cycle was devastating to me. But good news: I have not binged in a year. Which is why I have managed to lose 20 pounds. But I have so much more to go: my ideal weight is 160.

So what am I doing to lose this weight? Well, several things.

The first:

Image via Demonoid.me

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I thought flower girls’ dresses were going to be much, much easier than bridesmaids’ dresses. After all, it’s just two little girls, right? Wrong.

The first little girl is my stepsister J. I was 21 and J was four when my parents got married. My stepdad and his first wife got divorced when J was one, so her first memories are really of my mom and her dad together and of us being her older siblings. She told me the first time Mr. D and I got engaged that she was going to be a flower girl and that she wanted a poufy dress and a tiara. And if I didn’t provide these things, she wasn’t going to do it. She is very, very precocious. Now that she is almost nine, she said she will still be a flower girl, even if she doesn’t get all of the other stuff.

Little Miss J: My littlest sibling, and by far one of the biggest handfuls (Personal photo)

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I’m one of those brides who could honestly care less about the dresses that my bridesmaids wear. In fact, I told them that we could pick a designer and color and length, and they could choose from there. Whatever made them feel beautiful. My bridesmaids are all different sizes and shapes. MOH A is a size four and is 5′3″. BM S is a size sixteen and is 5′6″. BM E is 5′2″ and is a size eight. No two girls are alike in any way. Thus the reasoning behind getting different dresses. MOH A and I talked about the reason we had to pick one designer and color. Navy is one of those weird colors that all designers seem to do in varying shades. Some navy blues are so dark they are black, and others are light and look almost like a dark royal blue. Not that I minded the shades, but for some kind of cohesiveness MOH A urged me to go with one designer, thus one shade of blue.

Now MOH A pretty much took charge on the dress front, which is fine with me. About half of my bridesmaids live in Des Moines, where MOH A lives, so if she wanted to book the appointments to find the dresses, I was game. I was happy to delegate (which is completely surprising because I am usually one of those people who likes to control every little detail). So MOH A made an appointment at a swanky bridal salon in Des Moines because there was one dress that I really loved the idea of and wanted the girls to try on.

The Convertible Wrap Dress from Dessy. The top can change into anything the wearer wants! / Image via Dessy

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Mr. D and I do not have a very big budget. We are paying for the wedding ourselves, which has meant that we have had to be very creative with our choices. Much like the ceremony site, we were having problems finding a venue budget that fit our personalities and our budget. It was obvious something was going to have to give. We simply could not afford to pay $1,000–$2,000 for the rental price, plus another $3,000 for food and another $1,200 for drinks. Plus the odds and ends of decor and linens. I understand the reception is typically about half of your budget, but this would push us close to 75% of the budget, and we still had a lot of other things to pay for that were equally important, like my dress and the photographer. And for those of you not familiar with Iowa, an outdoor wedding and reception is not something you gamble with in March. It can be sunny, raining, or snowing, or possibly all three. So what were we to do? We started looking long and hard.

We were hoping for something like this place:

I loved the wooden floors and the windows, but the price was just too high for our budget, so we had to pass. / Image via The Avacentre

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Obviously the first thing on Mr. D’s and my to-do list was to start booking the big vendors. The most important thing was first: where we were going to get married. So we started to discuss the possible places to get married.

We could get married in my hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. The thing here was the fact that I had not lived in the area for almost seven years, and I no longer had ties with my home church. I was raised Catholic but left the church went I went to college. As a girl, I had always dreamed of getting married at this church:

St. Ambrose Cathedral in Des Moines, Iowa. Such a beautiful church—just not my church. / Image via Wikipedia

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Mr. D and I have been doing the long-distance relationship for almost two years now. Let me preface this by saying I was not expecting a proposal while we were still living apart. (Well, maybe a part of me hoped.) I had come home for my 24th birthday in August 2010 because we were planning a fabulous weekend in Des Moines to celebrate with my friends. We were not going to drive down to Des Moines until the day after my birthday, which was a Saturday, so I spent my actual birthday on Friday holed up in the apartment with our two cats since Mr. D had to work most of the day. (This is while he still had a job where he had to work hours in an office.) While the cats were amusing, it wasn’t how I imagined spending my special birthday.

Personal photo

This is Smudge and Kelly Clarkson: My troublesome duo. Mr. D and I adopted these frisky sisters in June 2007 (and seriously, they are from the same litter). They are lounging here on Mr. D’s ugly man-chair that they fortunately clawed up before we fixed them, and I was able to throw it out.

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I know that I am spending a lot of time on Mr. D’s and my relationship, but I think it’s important to know where we came from to see and understand what our story is now. I know I left with a bit of a cliffhanger and probably had some of you worried as to what happened to Mr. D or me that would be considered tragic. Well, nothing physically happened, but what did happen has completely altered our lives.

We had gone up to Mr. D’s grandmother’s home in northeast Iowa to get away for a weekend and discuss our options when it came to our relationship. I had been offered a nanny position near my parents’ home, which was two hours away from Mr. D. Mr. D was still admitting that he was not sure when he wanted to get married, or honestly if he did at all. He said he loved me more than any other person in his life, but he had recently seen his parents’ marriage dissolve and their messy divorce and didn’t want to take the chance of that happening to us. I told him that not getting married was a deal-breaker for me. I loved him, and I would wait IF I knew that it would be coming, but I wasn’t going to stick around in the hopes of it. So I decided to take the job and let him have room to decide once and for all.

On our drive home, we got a call from his father who told us to immediately pull over. Mr. D put the phone on speaker and with what Dad D said, our world crumbled. Mr. D’s younger sister had been arrested that morning. She was being held on suspicion and there was evidence that she had in some way been involved in a crime.
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Well, I guess I wouldn’t go as far as to call it bliss. Mr. D and I have had a lot of ups and downs. Back in college we spent a lot of time together. Mr. D was a junior and was two years older than me. We often spent time talking about football and watching games. Mr. D said jokingly that he even knew the exact moment he knew he loved me. It was when we were watching a Packers game and I got upset at a bad call from a referee. He said he was impressed that I even caught that it was bad call without someone who was really into football saying something. Of course, he quickly followed that up and said he loved more about me than just my deep love of football. He said he loved the way I snort when I laugh, the way that I dryly say certain things, and that I am super sarcastic. And after planning for a college experience without relationships, I was in love and suddenly in a pretty deep relationship with someone I definitely did not think was the kind of person I would fall for.

Mr. D and me having a deep conversation in his room with some friends in 2005

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Our story began back in the fall of 2004. I was a freshman in college, eager to move out from under my parents’ watchful eyes and to begin to grow as a person. I had just broken up with my boyfriend, citing reasons of independence and wanting to be at college unattached. I know that it sounds like a party-girl reason to break up with someone before going to college, but I had moved three hours away from home, and I didn’t want to be “that girl” in the dorm who was on the phone every night with a boyfriend whom she saw every couple of weekends when she drove home and missed out on the many activities around campus for it. Some people think or know they are going to marry their high school sweetheart; I knew I wasn’t. So I ended it and decided against relationships for at least my first year at school.

I spent the first couple of days on campus trying to get used to the tiny dorm room, the fact that I was suddenly living with my high school best friend, and of course—classes and cafeteria food. Finally one night my roommate and other friends from high school had enough and dragged me out of the room and onto campus. We left the all-girls dorm where most of the freshman stayed and headed toward the dorm next door that had a wing of all-male and a wing of co-ed living.

As we were heading into the all-male dorm, I bumped into a guy wearing the typical college-guy outfit: a football T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts with sandals. He apologized and shot this smile at me that dazzled and walked away with his buddies. I shook off the smile and told myself that crushes were not needed at this time and there were more important things to do. So I followed my friends up to their new friend J’s room. We were hanging out and chatting and possibly enjoying some adult beverages, when lo and behold football boy popped his head in to invite J to a party in his room. J immediately said that we would all be over in a few minutes. When the mysterious guy left, J explained that the guy and his roommate were called the Vodka Kings (I know, stereotypical partying football players, but there is more to him—I promise!) and they threw the best parties. So we headed over. Before I knew it, football boy had introduced himself as Mr. D and we started talking.
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Once we were engaged, we really didn’t talk too much about the wedding itself for probably about six months. Which, to be honest, is very impressive of me, considering I had been waiting almost six years for the wedding date to actually be set. It was probably because we were still living apart and I was so happy when I got to go home and visit him that I didn’t want to weigh the conversation down with wedding talk. It wasn’t until February 2011 while we were on vacation in Kentucky that we really started to talk about our vision for the wedding.

Mr. D and me in Kentucky in February 2011. This was during Mr. D’s shaggy-hair days while he was in between jobs.

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Hello, hive! Hello, hello, hello!!! I cannot even begin to explain just how excited I am to be Miss Doily. Mostly this is because I am in shock, and it’s not even 100% hit me that I am a bee. I wanted to be a bee so I can share my wedding journey with others who are in a similar place and hopefully give them ideas and inspiration! I am one of the first of my friends and family to get married, so I am venturing into unknown territory, and guess what? I’m dragging all of you along with me! I hope you have your seat belts buckled—it’s going to be a pretty crazy ride!!

When I applied to be a bee, I had already resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t hear for weeks and that I probably would not get chosen the first time out of the gate. Much to my surprise, and the chagrin of Mr. D’s eardrums, I found out only five days after I applied that I would be the newest blogger bee. I went to check my text messages and noticed that I had some emails. At the top of the pile was one with “Weddingbee Application” in the subject line. I opened it, expecting a kind rejection from Pengy. After all, it had only been five days! But it was there, congratulating me. I squealed at the top of my lungs, running into the living room, sending my cats scattering in terror. Mr. D looked alarmed as well. I could barely get the words out, but he managed to get the gist of: “OHMYGOSHITHINKTHEYMADEMEABEE!” After I calmed down, I made him read the email to me out loud so I wasn’t mistaken. He read it and assured me that I wasn’t, and now here I am!

Introducting Mr. D and Miss Doily! (Personal Photo)

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EOM