You know what they say—there’s a story behind every picture. As I near the end (not today) of my Weddingbee recaps, I’d like to share some of my favorite pictures of the night and let you in on some Dumpling silliness along the way. It was so hard going through all 3000 photos from The Cohens, but here we go.
All photos by The Cohens.
This is me, sitting in my bedroom right before putting on my dress, writing the final check of the day. That’s Weddingbee on my laptop in the background. Love my WB girls.
I was pregnant when I got married, and my boobs grew like two sizes. Score. They looked awesome and I wanted to squeeze them all night. Kidding…
When you think of vow renewal, you’re probably like me and think of boring, old people kissing in public. Gross. I think Avery (Ramona’s daughter on Real Housewives of NYC…do you watch that? I’m obsessed.) said it right when she said, “there’s a dress… there’s a cake… this is ridiculous.”
I know that makes me sound like a hater, but maybe I haven’t been to any good vow renewals. Well, until now. Remember that YouTube wedding entrance with the Chris Brown song? And then The Office recreated it for Jim & Pam’s wedding? Well, one night my friend Kristin, Director of Operations for Chippendales Las Vegas, decided that if she and her husband were going to do one of those vow renewals, that they better do something out of the ordinary. After a few brainstorming sessions (and quiet possibly a few drinks!) this is what she came up with.
This is how you do your vow renewal, Vegas Style. Check out these crazies:
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Remember this picture?
A long time ago, way back in May of last year, I posted a picture of myself in a little red bikini on Waikiki Beach. At first glance, it may have appeared that I was super bloated from too much room service and fruity drinks, but upon closer inspection, hopefully you noticed my belly was growing a teeny tiny Baby Dumpling.
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We named the Southern dishes on our dinner buffet after family members on my side, but we also wanted to think of a way to honor Mr. Dumpling’s family as well. We knew that we wanted a cookie buffet as our wedding favors for a few reasons. First, we could send our guests—-most of whom were from out-of-town—back to their hotel with a midnight snack. Secondly, we knew that if we had a variety of cookie choices that it would be a great place to incorporate his side of the family.
Mr. Dumpling emailed a few of the most important women in his life—Aunts, SIL, Mom, Grandma, and close friend—and asked them to participate by bringing their favorite cookie or treat to the rehearsal dinner (so I would have time to “make” the buffet). They all emailed back ahead of time to let me know what they were planning to bring so I could make the labels for our cookie buffet. This was actually a very easy project, and I’m happy to report that it didn’t enter into my “DIY screw up” file.
Here is the cookie buffet:
Here’s how to make your own cookie buffet—this would also be good for candy buffets.
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I realize that while I was planning I omitted some of the details on the special projects I was working on, but I have an excuse (don’t I always?). Some of my friends and family read this blog and I wanted some of the wedding to be a surprise. We’ve spoken before about how un-crafty I am and how my bee status should have been revoked a long time ago—you remember the invitations, the place cards and the hot glue-gun mess that I tried to pass off as pomander, right? Sadly, those weren’t the only DIY projects I had up my (very wrinkled) sleeve.
Our wedding didn’t really have a theme other than Neapolitan ice cream, so I really tried to incorporate some of each of our heritages into our big day. We used custom fortune cookies as our STDs, so I thought it would be nice to serve Southern food at our reception. But it didn’t stop there—we thought it would be a hoot to name the dishes after family members. Sounds stupid, right? I know. It totally does. Somehow we pulled it off, and people were so touched to be included like that.
All of these were made with Microsoft Word, a black & white laser jet printer and a stack of A7 Paper Source luxe cream flat cards. Don’t be jealous of my skillz.
My mom lives right in the middle of football heaven (or hell, if you’re like me and loathe sports), so we thought it would be funny to name one of our main dishes after her.
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It’s taken me a LONG time to write about this because it’s something that made me really upset. I wasn’t even sure I was going to tell you about it, but now I have to look back and laugh at how incredibly stupid this was.
What I’m about to say is going to shock you.
The caterer FORGOT to bring our wedding cake. Like, literally forgot all about it.
I had plans to have a cake and pastry buffet so everyone could enjoy a little bit of everything. I was already about $5K over my budget by the time cake ideas rolled around, so I decided on a cake buffet in an attempt to save money. Remember Mrs. Avocado’s cake buffet? That’s what I was going for. Something like this:
You MUST press play and listen to this while you read my post today. I promise it will make it so much more fun!
OMG it’s been too long. How has everyone been? I’ve been busy being a mom. It’s a lot of work but I really want to get back into blogging. We last left off right before the reception, where we were striking a pose. Now it was time for our grand entrance as Mr. & Mrs. Dumpling! Did I tell you that I tried to have a Beatles-themed wedding? Well, Mr. Dumpling wouldn’t let me get that yellow submarine cake, but he did give me free rein over all of the music selections. HAHA sucka.
We said our vows, kissed, and walked back down the aisle in our last installment. It was then time for us to act all married and kissy-kissy face. I wont lie, I think my hubby is super hot and I still make googly-eyes at him when we hang out. How lame is it that one of my all-time favorite sounds is the garage door opening at our house letting me know that he’s home? I love him so much that I don’t even mind his snoring, which is sayin’ a lot, ’cause if I’m sharing a hotel room with someone who is sawing logs all night I want to hit them with their pillow until they shut up. I have no desire to do that to him. I love him.
Once we got to our reception venue, The Cohens took the bridal party out to the golf course for some fancy pictures. The ones from the church are boring traditional, so I’ll just skip right on over those if that’s okay with everyone.
In the last installment, you saw us walk down the aisle. Now it’s time to do the actual ceremony and getting married part. It’s really self explanatory at this point, and since we had a traditional Catholic ceremony without all the interesting personal touches that most of the other bees had in their weddings (kinda jealous…), I’ll let the photos do most of the talking.
After we got down the aisle and sat down, we settled in for the long ceremony. We didn’t have a “full” Mass, which would have included communion, for different reasons. Most importantly, Mr. Dumpling is Catholic and I am not. I might have forgotten to mention a while back that I have been in the process of converting to Catholicism. It’s quite a long process actually, and I’ve been in the process since March 2008. I asked why I couldn’t just “sign up” to be a Catholic—you know, like why wouldn’t they want more members or whatever? They told me it was about quality, not quantity. Okay then. 
Anyhoo, I’m not finished going through the process yet, so they considered us a “mixed religion” couple and we couldn’t have communion. (Side note: non-Catholics can’t take communion during Mass. Don’t kill me—I’m just reporting what I learned.) So instead of a priest performing our ceremony, we got a Deacon (who also can’t say Mass). This turned out to work in our favor in the end though, because the Deacon and his wife (yeah, Deacons can have wives) did our marriage counseling/prep courses and we got to be pretty close with them. They have been married for something like 52 years, so they were really great to work with.
Ramble ramble…
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It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Sorry. I’ve been growing a human. Lots of gross things are happening and it’s kind of a mystery that I still have a husband and friends that want to be around me. I’m looking at these pictures and thinking about how tiny I used to be! I mean, these pictures were like 40 pounds ago! Skip to the end if you want to see an updated pregnancy shot to see what I mean. I’m OVER it. Baby Dumpling is already 7 pounds and I still technically have 4 weeks to go. It’s also 112 degrees in Vegas… happy thoughts happy thoughts happy thoughts…
I feel better.
We left off last time when I was getting in this cool vintage car my dad rented to transport me to the church. After my sister and I piled in, we headed down the road in our big caddy. It’s hot, right??
Notice anything different or off about this picture? No? How about this one?
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For starters, I should tell you that our “first look” wasn’t exactly the type of “first look” you typically see here on Weddingbee. We had our rehearsal dinner at our house the night before the big day (I will blog about it later… I’m still waiting on pictures from guests!), and the plan was for Mr. Dumpling to stay at a hotel with his family or friends. We live together, and we were just trying to be a little bit traditional. Ha! That kind of… well… never played out right. After all 50 guests left, Mr. Dumpling went out for drinks with his friends, but instead of going to a hotel, he just came home instead. Go ahead and laugh at us, ’cause yeah—we’re dorks like that.
So we woke up together the morning of our wedding and looked at each other and said, “OMG we are totally getting married today.” It felt like any other day, honestly.
I went to one bathroom to get my makeup and hair done, and he went to another bathroom and did whatever it is he does in the mornings to look gorgeous. We actually saw each other the whole time because I had a *tiny* meltdown over something on my dress, and he needed to calm me down. I remember sitting in my closet doing that inhale-exhale-cry thing (you know the kind… Elle Woods, Legally Blonde, in the restaurant…) and he came in there and said, “Follow me, let’s go.” We went to one of our guest rooms and he basically told me to calm down because we were getting married, and nobody would notice the big spot on my dress. Sweet little liar, isn’t he? It worked though, and then the spot came off the dress. Life was good!
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Where did we leave off? Oh yes…
I was getting my makeup done.
So, my makeup is on, and I mentioned that my Dad had a surprise for me (okay, us…). My dad is a vintage car collector, and he has about 10 vintage cars, some tractors, and a few vintage fire trucks that are completely restored. He’s sort of a work-a-holic, so getting a junky car and then having it restored (by someone else) is like a vacation for him. After they’re all restored and shiny again, he either puts them in his little car museum, or he pimps them out with SIRIUS radio and drives cross-country. He actually drove one of the new ones all the way from Georgia to Vegas, but he wanted to get his baby girl something special.
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So, The Cohens sent me almost 500 pictures of just me getting my makeup done, putting on my dress and our “first look”. It was so hard going through them all because they were all SO FLIPPING FANTASTIC. Each and every picture was awesome. Kenny and Josh basically locked themselves into their photo lab and had this first set of pictures to us 4 days after our wedding. I mean, if that’s not the sign of an amazing photography team, I don’t know what is.
Our wedding was everything I wanted it to be, and so much more. Everything from the decorations to the food to the flowers… seeing family and friends… getting to marry my absolute best friend… I can’t even describe it, but I’ll try….
The day started off with getting our hair done by Danielle of Sola Salon and Spa. She worked her magic on my stick-straight-hair and made it stay in curls all day. Thanks, Danielle! We don’t have any pictures of that because I have a strict “no pictures before I’ve had food and/or makeup” policy. So, our hair was done and we started eating yummy cupcakes from The Cupcakery, brought over by my DOC, Liane. More on her later.
“We got married. No, seriously…we did. Like, that was OUR wedding last Friday.”
That’s how our morning conversations have started over the last 3 days. We look at each other and get the goofy faces going, and then start laughing. Is that weird? Haha!
It was perfect. I’m not joking. There were no (major) snafus and I DID NOT CRY. I have to say that in all caps because for the year leading up to the wedding, any time I would hear a country song about a wedding or a daddy or anything like that, I would start tearing up. I still do. I watched Mrs. Cupcake’s ceremony video in her blog post and got all weepy and sentimental. But my own wedding? Nope. Not a single tear. SUCCESS!
Here are some teaser shots by the amazing Cohens. I am literally drooling over these shots and can’t wait to see more.
Mrs. Dumpling, Las Vegas Age and Occupation: 27, Finance Fiance's Age and Occupation: 34, Real Estate Engagement Date: March, 2008 Wedding Date: March, 2009 Blogging Since: August 26, 2008 Venue: Catholic church ceremony & golf course reception About Me: I grew up in the Deep South, and while most people say I have a thick southern accent, I tend to think it only comes out when I need to use it. Living in Las Vegas has definitely been an adventure and Mr. Dumpling and I are loving every minute of it! We are planning a traditional Catholic wedding ceremony and a reception with lots of DIY! We might even get Elvis to show up! I'm a HUGE Beatles fan, love The Office and can't wait to become a Mrs.!
