Weddingbee Blog

It was five minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to begin. After getting ready and going downstairs, a friend told me, “Half the people aren’t here yet. The backyard is practically empty.”

My first thoughts were, “$(@!&!beeeeep@!!!#$&$%beeeeep*&@()$#!” Luckily the photographer and my soul sister, Tam T. Nguyen, is a pool of serenity. In the calmest, kindest voice, Tam turned to me and said, “Mrs. Glasses, you look beautiful. It’ll be okay. Why don’t we take some bridal portraits?”

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I needed a PWC big time. I was one of those girls that diligently grew out her hair for the wedding, so my hair was way too long and was falling out in the shower from being too heavy. I chose to donate to Pantene’s Beautiful Lengths program because their free wigs go to cancer patients.

To donate, I needed to tie my hair back with an elastic band and bring in a Ziploc bag to put the hair in once it was cut. I was really worried about cutting my hair short because I have a lot of thick, frizzy, out of control wavy hair. When I cut my hair short it tends to poof out at the bottom and I turn into a triangle head.

(source)

For Beautiful Lengths, I needed to cut off 8 inches. I made sure my hair was freshly washed, fully dry, and free of product and got the big chop.

Before:

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Maybe Tokyo isn’t my hometown, but it sure feels like it. Remember when I lived there? That was pretty weird. I’m actually homesick for Tokyo—the lights, the quirkiness, the energy. Japan has four seasons, and in the winter in Tokyo it gets so cold it snows just a bit. Tokyo is most beautiful during the cherry blossom season in late March through early April, or when the leaves change color during fall (known as “koyo“). Avoid summer as it is unbearably hot and humid, and September is the rainy season and prone to typhoons.

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After the backyard was set, it was time to get ready. Right around the time people started coming over, I realized I’d need to stick to my golden rule when I taught toddlers: Have a plan. Be ready to trash the plan. I couldn’t control people, so I just let everyone do their thing. With everyone working on their assigned tasks, I had to hope that everything else would fall into place—and my family and friends came through big time!

A hairstylist and MUA definitely weren’t in the budget so my friends brought all their makeup and curling irons to help me out. (Also: we didn’t have a pro photographer for a lot of the getting ready bit. I think you can tell.) We curled my hair and poured margaritas!

(guest photo)

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How did I find Weddingbee?

To be honest, I don’t remember. I think I was so confused about this whole wedding thing that I Googled “how to plan a wedding” or “wedding planning” or something along those lines and ran into it that way. I remember the forums being really helpful for figuring out big things (”What’s a save the date?”), while the blog became useful for inspiration and motivation.

My application story

I’ve always loved to write and already had a blog about my ex-pat adventures in Japan to keep my friends and family updated. Writing a wedding planning blog was a whole new ball game! At first it was just a collection of thoughts and random musings, but as plans became solidified I started writing cohesive posts focusing on one aspect at a time—here’s our venue, I’d like these flowers, etc. I tried my hardest to write for an audience and shy away from the diary-like tone I had used for my ex-pat blog. I thought I had a pretty good collection of wedding posts and I had met all the requirements so I applied. After a few weeks of anxiety I got an email from Pengy and held my breath… I was rejected.
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There’s not much to say about me in high school. I was rather unremarkable. I was in a few clubs but for the most part I blended in to the crowd. I was a little weird and awkward, but not in a I’m-different-and-proud kind of way.

(source)

For the most part, my besties and I kept to ourselves. I was all about my part-time job, shopping, going to the movies and the beach with my girlfriends. I had crushes and a few dates, but nothing ever panned out and I went my whole high school career without a boyfriend. I wasn’t too interested in having a boyfriend; I just wanted to survive school.
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Allow me to take a brief interlude from recaps to vent some rage. I have been, and always will be, keeping it real with the hive. While our wedding day was fabulous, fun, amazing, etc. there was some truly awful behavior demonstrated by our guests. I want to talk about how to be a good guest in the realest way possible so that (hopefully) future brides will be prepared for what to expect. Now when I say you, you know I don’t mean you, right? I mean the heinous people that might potentially pull these faux pas, and yes, some of our  guests. Not you. You’re lovely.

So you’ve sent in your RSVP (promptly, of course) and now your etiquette duties are over, right? Nope! First of all, don’t bother the bride and groom close to the wedding. I cannot tell you how many needy phone calls I got the days leading up to the wedding.
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Early on the Saturday morning of our wedding, my eyes snapped open. As I lay in bed in my parents’ house, I listened closely to the sound of Mr. G snoring quietly next to me, birds chirping, and not much else. I got up and opened the blinds quickly…beautiful blue skies! The storm that had passed over Los Angeles in the night was gone quicker than those silly weather people had predicted. I ran downstairs to the backyard, still in my pajamas, and pulled off all of the garbage bags that had been protecting the rented tables, chairs, and chafing dishes from the rain.

Mr. G joined me in cleaning up the garbage bags eventually. I knew that we had a lot of work to do before the wedding—more than expected because we hadn’t been able to set up a lot the night before due to the storm.

I hit up Target in a last-minute dash for supplies with my girlfriends from England that were staying at the house. While we were doing that, Mr. G and my dad were doing the grunt work—setting up lights and bringing the heavier things from the garage.

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A few weeks before the wedding, my mom took me to a membership flower wholesale market right here in my hometown.

(source)

I picked out all the flowers I liked, and a week later she ordered the exact opposite of those because she wanted me to have a heart attack on my wedding day.

The flowers came in 3 days before the wedding and we had to prep them to be arranged for the wedding day. Here is some of what we were working with:
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It was the day before our wedding and the scene was set. Me, crying and screaming on the bed in front of my laptop and Mr. G trying to hold me and thumping my back to control my breathing. My mom appears and (literally) thwacks me over the head (oh, Asian mothers) and scolds, “STOP CRYING!”

Not the best way to go into our wedding weekend. I was looking at our Saturday wedding forecast,

and feeling very, very sorry for myself. Just the day before we had been with Team England at Disneyland enjoying a lovely Southern California fall day—sunny, blue skies and 80+ degrees. The weather had been gorgeous all week. What did I do to deserve this? I believe my famous last words were, “The backup plan for rain is that there is no back up plan. It just won’t rain.”

I whined to my fellow bees and the love, support, and well wishes you sent my way were amazing.
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I’m signing off for a while. I’ve got this thing I need to do—a couple of dozen people are showing up, I’m wearing something special.

For us folks who had to get married before the Big Day (and there are a lot of us out there—insurance reasons, military reasons, and in our case visa reasons!) it’s sort of like being in limbo, huh?

I’m already a Mrs. My name’s been changed and I’ve had the title of “wife” for several months now. Our day isn’t about two souls and two families coming together for the first time in lawfully wedded bliss. Been there, done that, got the certificate, right? It’s been terrific.

But I want everyone important to me to hear how much I love Mr. G and how I promise to have and to hold him from this day forward. It really is about the white dress and the rings, the family and friends, the drinks and the dinner and the cake—it’s a celebration, heyoooo! All these months of stressful planning have finally culminated into ultimate closure. Wedding limbo is almost over, and soon we’ll be laughing the night away. I hope I don’t drink too much, I wanna remember the fun we had and the things we said!

I really loved sharing this time with you.
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Since we aren’t having dancing, I thought we’d need something fun to do at our backyard wedding. We absolutely did not have a budget for a photobooth but we did have money for a fauxtobooth! We’re not builders but luckily for us, Mrs. Pin Cushion is! We ordered one from her Etsy store!

We used P.C.’s post as a guide…

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Our bachelor & bachelorette party kicked my butt last weekend, but this week I got off my butt and was a busy, busy bee. Our wedding is FAST approaching and I need to get all our projects done so I can play with Team England - they are arriving this weekend!

I’ve got a lot on my plate but luckily my mom has taken over a lot. Even before we were in America, I got this gem of an e-mail from my tiny Japanese mom:

You are so fascinating for cup cakes for dessert, so, I maid two towers for cup cake. I just copy the idea from wedding bee. It looks cute tower. I show you latter.

Do this. Stripes, my mom says big ups.

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The following post is NSFW.

I talked about our combination bachelor & bachelorette weekend before and told you that the destination was a surprise. Weeeeeeeeell….

So we headed down to San Diego on a dreary So Cal Saturday. Mr. G, me and BFF slash our videographer made a quick stop in Dana Point to have lunch with a friend that couldn’t make it that night, then continued on to our hotel in San Diego. We were hooked up in a suite with 2 Queen beds and a pull-out sofa and a handy kitchen.
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Embossing has been covered all over the ’bee. Any of these ladies can show you how. I’ve read all of the embossing tutorials, so when I saw all the tools at Michaels I decided to go for it.

Your tools: embossing heat thing, ink, embossing powder, stamps.

I had the idea to emboss name cards that would go around mason jars. These will double as place cards and message cards for our tanabata wishing tree. Since I only had to do 35 of them, I figured I could buy individual letters to form names.

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