Weddingbee Blog

Soon, our church wedding coordinators came into the bride’s room and told us that it was time for the bridesmaids to line up for the processional. I was ushered into the hallway and out of view behind the church sanctuary. Everything at this moment felt like someone pushed “fast forward”. Things were moving so quickly and before I knew it,—and luckily, before I had much time to get nervous—the wedding party had gotten into order and was ready to process down the aisle.

The strains of “Canon in D” began to filter out into the sanctuary, and I knew that it was time. My bridesmaids walked in one by one to the groomsmen lined up at the front of the church.
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When we arrived at the church, my bridesmaids and I were quickly sequestered into our church bridal room. I gave my wedding bands and my card for Mr. FF to my MOH B to deliver to my hubby-to-be. Mr. FF and I had decided before the wedding to nix the presents and just swap cards right before the ceremony.

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The morning of our wedding, I woke up at 5:00 AM. True story. No matter that I had just fallen asleep around 1:00 AM after my late-night convo with Mr. French Fries, my eyes popped open and I looked at the clock. ‘OMG, MUST GET MORE SLEEP,’ was the first thought that ran through my head. But, as everyone knows, forcing yourself and stressing about getting more sleep is the fastest way to achieve… staying awake.
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After our rehearsal, Mr. French Fries and I were ready to eat. We had opted to have our rehearsal dinner at the same restaurant that Mr. FF had taken me to for our second date, partly because it was sentimental, partly because it was affordable, and mostly because it has amazing food!

We had selected a buffet of pizza, pasta, salad and garlic bread for our guests. Mr. FF and I are obsessed with Italian food, so it was a natural choice for us. The restaurant had a party room for private parties, and they didn’t charge us to use the room. Score! Our wedding party assembled and we set to work handing out bridal party gifts. What did we select? I’m glad you asked! Almost all of our bridal party gifts were purchased off of Etsy. (Seriously…what would I do without Etsy?)

The guys got personalized pilsner glasses with mustaches and their names etched into them from Etsy seller JackGlass. They were a hit, and the quality was top-notch. As you can see, our usher C really enjoyed them…

Photo by Bridesmaid N

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We arrived at our rehearsal to find that we were the only ones that had showed up! I quickly found out that traffic to our church was terrible, and that everyone was at least en route and doing their best to get there. I told our priest that we should have everyone assembled in about 10 minutes, but I could tell that he was antsy to get things started. I managed to cool his jets for about 5 minutes, at which point he decided we were going to start without the missing wedding party members. Um… okay. Not that they need to know where to go or anything…

Eventually 99% of our bridal party had arrived, and I began to arrange the guys in the order they should stand in:

Where’s Waldo?

Seriously, it was kind of like herding cats, which is why I’m a blur in this picture.

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Where we last left off, Mr. FF and I had dropped everything off at our venue, and were driving back to our casa. I couldn’t help but overhear the forecast for the next day, our wedding day, on the radio.

“…and for tomorrow, there’s a 30% chance of heavy rain and high wind. Some of these storms may be severe and could include localized flooding and hail. High around 90 degrees.”

My stomach dropped into my toes. I had been checking the weather forecast the entire week like it was my job, and every day I would hear something different. One day the forecast would be 80 degrees and sunny (aka perfect) and the next it would be 94 degrees and an 80% chance of rain. So, basically, they had no effing clue what it was going to do outside.

Source

Because I’m somewhat of a superstitious person, when I was at Target previously that week, I decided not to buy a cute umbrella and Wellies, because I didn’t want to jinx it.
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It’s time for French Fry wedding recaps!!! Before we can get to the wedding day, though, we have to take a look back. My plan was to have everything done ahead 1 week prior to the wedding, so that when the week of the wedding rolled around, I could relax and mentally prepare for everything that was to come. Thus, the week before the week of the wedding, my day planner looked like this:

(I apologize for the crappy iPhone pic)

Yeah, I’m a crazy list-maker.
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When I last left off, I noted that the sunset picture I took one evening walking back to our room would be the last gorgeous sunset we would see on our honeymoon. This was about 4 or 5 days in, and we stayed there a total of 9 days.

So what happened the rest of our trip? Well, just a little thing named “Alex”. Tropical Storm Alex, to be exact. Yup, that’s right — we got hit with a tropical storm on our honeymoon! That meant that our gorgeous views every day went from this:

to this:
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Like many other bees, I’m doing my honeymoon recaps before I do our wedding recaps. So, let’s get to it! To start off, Mr. FF and I had kicked around a lot of ideas pre-wedding about where to go on our honeymoon. We thought that we had settled on a California road trip style honeymoon, driving from San Fran down to Orange County, but soon realized that we would most likely be pretty tired after the wedding and didn’t want to spend our honeymoon in the car. (Side note: this was a great decision on our part, since we were dead to the world for pretty much 2-3 days after our wedding.)

So, what did we decide? The good-old honeymooner stand-by: Mexico! The idea of an all-inclusive vacation was very appealing to us, so we weighed our options decided on Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. Helping us make that decision was the very helpful Katie Frederick, whom I had found while reading Utterly Engaged magazine. (And no, she’s not paying me for the plug!) Once we had narrowed down a *final* location, Katie took our budget and our ideal length of stay and worked her travel agent magic and gave us three or four options to choose from. We finally chose the Royal in Playa Del Carmen, and in a Royal Beachfront Room.
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When we last left off, I had shared with you the first installment of our e-pics. They were the more “formal” set, taken at the lighthouse where Mr. FF proposed.

For our 2nd location (and an outfit change!) we grabbed our puppies and headed to a local park. These, by far, are my favorites. They’re casual, relaxed, and just very “us”. We liked these so much, we decided to frame two different shots and give them to our parents at our rehearsal dinner! First, we played around a bit with our wedding’s candy theme, and had a lot of fun with it! Then, we got some glamour shots with our puppies (in some gorgeous evening light).

As always, we worked with the wonderful Molly of MThree Studio, and all of these images are hers. Up first: the candy shots!

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Hola, hive! I’m currently waiting to get our pro-pics back, but I figured that while I’m waiting I might as well fill you in on some of the things that happened before our wedding day (things that I didn’t quite have time to blog about before our big day).

One of those things (that’s actually quite major) is the e-pics session we had with our fabulous photographer, Molly of MThree Studio. One of the reasons I didn’t get to blog about this previously is because we didn’t have our session until the end of April, less than 2 months before our wedding day! It was totally our choice, but it didn’t leave a ton of wiggle room for me to blog about it. So, without further ado… our e-pics!

We split our time between two separate locations - one was the lighthouse where Mr. FF proposed, where we did our more “dressy” pictures, and the other was a county park (where we went more casual and brought our pooches in on the fun!). Today’s set will be the lighthouse pictures, and the next set will be the park and pooches pics. (Enough alliteration for you?)

Sitting on the rocks, at the beginning of our shoot. I was *slightly* nervous, as evidenced by my hands.
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Well, hive…we did it! We’re married! I feel like I have so much to say and I can’t quite find the right words to say it — how do you write about something so monumental and wonderful? The day was amazing and beautiful and full of emotion. We did everything that we could have done to plan the best wedding possible (and everything that we planned turned out fabulously!) but the weather, on the other hand, decided not to cooperate.

We had some serious storms the day of our wedding, complete with high winds, heavy rain, and downed trees. Luckily our fabulous photographer captured amazing shots that we never would have gotten if we had a bright, sunny day. And, they say that rain on your wedding day is good luck. So, it looks like we have a lot of luck coming our way!

Once I get my pro pics back, I’ll begin blogging this whole shindig in earnest. To tide you over, here’s an amazing teaser pic from our photographer’s blog (right before the heavy rain that I mentioned):
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Right now, I’m laying under a fluffy down comforter in the quiet stillness of my hotel room. It is the night before my wedding. (!!!) Tonight was our rehearsal, which… I’m not going to lie — was sort of like trying to herd cats. 9 groomsmen, 6 bridesmaids, 2 flower girls 1 ring bearer (and a partridge in a pear tree) will have that effect. But, we rehearsed… and then we ate and drank and had a ball at our rehearsal dinner, and now, as they say… it’s go time.

I’m so ready for tomorrow. I know it might sound trite, but I’ve never been as sure about something as I am about marrying Mr. FF. Ever since the 2nd week when we were dating and we talked about our “hypothetical wedding” and who would be there and how it would be… we’ve known that we would be together; that it would come to this point.

To Mr. FF: It’s here! It’s happening! It’s finally our turn, and I’m so ready to be your wife and to look all of life’s challenges (and excitement!) square in the face, together. I love you more than words can say. You and me, babe.
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In our search for a wedding cake vendor, we took a pretty circuitous route: we thought we were going with Company A, then realized that they were too expensive. Then, we thought we were going with Company B, but they never emailed us back (still, to date, some of the worst customer service I’ve received). Then finally at our venue’s food tasting, we landed upon Company C, who we quickly booked upon tasting the cake and getting a rough per-person estimate.

Actually, “Company C” is more like “Woman C Who Does This Out Of Her Home” or “WCWDTOOHH”, if you’re into acronyms. We met with her back in the early spring and quickly decided on a two tier cake. The bottom tier will have chocolate cake with peanut butter cup frosting/filling, and the top tier will have chocolate cake with mint chocolate chip frosting/filling. Delicious. We left the appointment with strict instructions: call 2-3 weeks before the wedding to set up a date to drop off our final payment, and any cake accoutrements that we might have (flowers, topper, etc). Easy peasy.

So, I called this past week to set up our final payment date and talked WCWDTOOHH. She quickly went over our order: the tiers, the flavors, and how we wanted it decorated (in her words, “frosted smooth, with big borders”). Um, sure. I’m not exactly sure what “big borders” means, but I think she’s talking about the frosting in the little crack between the top tier and the bottom tier. Maybe. Sure, let’s go with that.

Then she asked me if I had a topper —
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That was my first thought this morning.

I know I haven’t been around a lot lately, and that’s because the entire month of May was a whirlwind of pre-wedding events and getting stuff done. That left little time for blogging and commenting and things of that nature. But as of today, I can finally say: I’m getting married this month! THIS MONTH!

You see, when you’ve been engaged just shy of two years, there becomes a dividing line in your brain. There’s Before (Insert Wedding Month Here) and there’s After (Insert Wedding Month Here). So, for me it was “Before June 2010″ and “After June 2010″. I spent so much time thinking that our wedding was so far away, that when people told me “It’ll be here before you know it!” I just smiled and thought “yeah, right… we still have tons of time!” Plans for the second half of 2010 were put on hiatus — we had a wedding to focus on! How could we possibly think of what was after June 2010? So when you finally enter your wedding month… well, it’s kind of like a smack upside the head. A loving smack, but a smack nonetheless. It’s official: the “before” portion of the program is quickly coming to a close.

You quickly realize that in mere weeks… days, even! you will be a married woman.
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