Weddingbee Blog

Now that you’ve seen what dress I chose (and I’ve gotten so many lovely comments about it!), I wanted to take a brief pause in the recaps to sort of finish up the wedding dress narrative. If you recall, I was close to renting a gown from Rent the Runway, but ultimately decided not to and chose a dress from a designer I found on Etsy.

There were a few reasons:

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After getting dressed, we had a few minutes for bridal pictures before the first look. One of the features I loved about the Whittemore House is this little vanity room next to the bridal suite. I mentioned to my photographer when we first met that I was excited about some bridal portraits in there, and she knew exactly what I meant.

My mom happened to have that pink makeup case with her, and I pretended to put on some makeup. I’m being really careful not to actually touch my face and mess anything up, but if someone actually thinks I did that makeup job myself—great.

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I was so happy to finally get to the venue. I would have loved to do all of our getting ready there, since they have this beautiful bridal room designed for that exact purpose. But we would have had to pay for more rental time, so I figured just getting zipped up in my dress there would be the most important thing.

Champagne and cheese. Breakfast of brides.

I did the awkward get naked in the bathroom and half put on the dress thing before I had my mom help put me all together.

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I set my alarm for about 8:00 AM on Saturday morning. Since we were doing a first look, getting ready started pretty early. My MOH climbed in bed with me around 7:30 and surprisingly woke me up. I thought I’d be up at the crack of dawn, but I slept soundly (the previous night’s cocktails probably didn’t hurt). I felt calm and took the dog out. At that time of the morning, the city was quiet, and it was nice to have just a few minutes completely alone before the day began.

My sidekick. Personal photo.

Once everyone had risen, Melissa and Ashley came to handle makeup and hair. It felt weird to be putting “nighttime” makeup on at 9:00 AM…

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We all arrived at our venue right at 6:00 PM to start our rehearsal. I felt like we were running kind of late, but being 30 seconds away (really) has its perks.

Me and my lovely maids

Rehearsing was a breeze. My coordinator, Crystal, and our officiant just ran the show and we were able to go through everything in about 10 minutes. We’d met with our officiant twice to go through exactly how we wanted everything to run, so in retrospect I’m not sure we really needed to rehearse at all. I’m normally so stressed about logistics—which hand should I use to put on the ring? Where will the microphone be? How will I hand my bouquet off? But for some reason I just stopped caring. It seemed like it would be easy.

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On Friday morning, I met one last time with Crystal, our weekend-of coordinator, and loaded up cars en route to our hotel. I haven’t written much about having a coordinator—mostly because she was there for weekend-of duties and didn’t affect the planning portion too much—but she was worth her weight in gold just for the transportation of the massive amount of STUFF. I knew we had a lot of boxes…but it barely fit in two giant cars. Those + my dress + my dog + a bunch of people = a sort of harrowing ride through downtown DC to our hotel. It was cold, but I was sweating bullets by the time we arrived. Whoops.

But by noon we checked in, got settled, and my bridesmaids arrived. I had made reservations for a casual lunch with them—we hadn’t all been together since the shower (my sister being younger = didn’t go to Vegas) and I wanted to make sure we got to sit and relax a little bit. We went to Lincoln—I’d never been, but it was recommended as a good “DC place to go” (the president had recently been)—and that was a theme I was trying to keep up all weekend. The entire restaurant’s floor is made of over one million pennies. It was pretty awesome.

That’s the Gettyburg address on the wall, and a beautiful mason jar chandelier. In total bride mind, I thought, hey I could do that. Probably not (Image via Lincoln’s blog).

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About three weeks before the wedding, I made a gigantic to-do list—I’m talking a page for every day, stapled together, so that when I randomly thought of a small thing to do two weeks later, I’d have a place to write it all down. I laughed when I got to the entry for the Friday a week away from the wedding:

I guess I know myself, huh?!

Gigantic list-making aside, I was actually pretty calm in the weeks before the big day. Everyone kept asking if they could do anything and how I felt, and honestly I was more stressed about the fact that I wasn’t stressed. I kept searching for things to do and felt so weird that there wasn’t a huge project left. I know this goes against all the advice you hear, but I kind of wish I had left something until the week before. It would have given me something to focus on, rather than feeling like I was just twiddling my thumbs.

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Hi hive! I’ve missed you! A couple of weeks ago, we got a super-cute little package:

Personal photo

Our pictures! Emily was lightning fast with them and I am so excited to share all the details of the Wolves’ Winter Wedding with you. Before I get started in earnest, here’s a teaser (and my favorite photo!):

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From Rome, we took a short, pretty pleasant train ride to Florence. Right away I was struck by how much smaller the city was. Compared to a 40-minute cab ride from the Rome airport to our hotel…this one was about four minutes from train station to hotel. We stayed about a block away from the famous Duomo:

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Hi hive! Missed you all! I’ve been a little busy, getting married and all…and it was really awesome. I’ll wait until I get our pictures to spill any details, but I am SO excited to tell you all about it.

In the meantime, I thought I’d tell you a bit about our little Italian honeymoon. We left for Rome the Monday after our wedding…

My blingy wedding nails and new initials!

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Dear Miss Gray Wolf,

First off, high five.

(GIF via Imgur)

You made it here in one piece! A slightly stressed piece, but that’s OK. You and Wolfman coordinated this whole weekend almost on your own and it’s finally here…and no matter what happens, or what last-minute issues arise—it’s going to kick ass. Remember to take a minute to really be proud of yourself for what you’ve planned. You both deserve it.

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I knew I wanted to gift my girls something awesome. Save my sister, I’ve been in (or will be) in all my ‘maids’ weddings, and they were incredibly generous with their gifts…like, really generous. Plus, they took a lot of the good ideas!

First, in lieu of a card, I got everyone a copy of this book:

(Photo via Deep Discount / Book by Sandol Stoddard Warburg)

We’re using part of it as one of our readings, and I love how it appropriately translates from how I feel about Wolfman to how I feel about my ‘maids. Some sample pages:

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Alright everyone. It’s almost here. Gulp.

(Gif via James van der Memes)

First, since we’re close enough, let’s take a look at the forecast:

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I always love these posts from other bees, so I figured I’d give you a glimpse into our guest list and RSVP breakdown.

For the ceremony, our venue holds 100 at the absolute maximum. We knew we would get some declines, but we didn’t want to risk too much. Save some of my side of the family, we didn’t invite any “peripherals”—you know, the second cousins you never see, or old college classmates—and there’s not much else going on in February, so we were fairly confident that most people would be able to make it. We ended up inviting 108:

Whoops. I didn’t realize how skewed this was until I looked at it in a nice chart fashion.

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We’re quickly approaching crunch time, and lately a lot of little tasks have been popping up. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

Sent rehearsal dinner invitations

Y’all know by now I love me some paper products, and for awhile I was sort of designing rehearsal invites that would match our entire suite. I wasn’t feeling very inspired, and I counted how many we actually needed to send—just 12—and ordered some. I picked this design from Wedding Paper Divas and was pleased with the quality (and price):

(Invitation via Wedding Paper Divas)

I felt a little guilty for not matching it (crazy, I know), but I figured if anything didn’t need to match, it’d be the rehearsal invites.

Started making table numbers

Remember this inspiration post? I decided to do something like the table numbers for ours. Originally, I thought I’d use maps from the locations we’d traveled (we’ve gone to as many places as we’ll need tables), but again…I got a little lazy, and it seemed like a small detail that wouldn’t really be noticed. I got those 99 cent Ikea frames and used map paper I had left over from my invitation envelope liners.

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