Weddingbee Blog

One of the things my friend who recently got married used to joke about was the fact that if her husband wanted her to look her best on her wedding day, he better be prepared for some Spanx removal that night. I’ve heard this a few times actually, people debating between whether they want to wear something ’shape controlling’ or ’sexy’ under their wedding dress (especially if it’s a curve-hugging dress!).

A couple of weeks ago, I discovered that Spanx now has a line called “Haute Contour” (funny)! They say: “Have your shape and sexy too…” and I have to say, I quite like a couple of the pieces, and they all come in a color that would easily be disguised under a white dress! My favorites are these:

(Luxe Thong, in Blush)

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(Forget-me-nots, from here)

I fell in love with these wildflowers when I was wandering through a Botanical Garden in Madison, WI. I saw them out of the corner of my eye in a section of the garden filled with little tiny flowers, and I audibly gasped. They are such wonderfully colorful, delicate flowers with an equally fantastic name. And they have our color scheme built in - blue and yellow! I really wanted to incorporate these flowers into our wedding, but alas, as wildflowers, it can be difficult to predict exactly when they will be flowering and it’s too risky to base our whole flower scheme around them (even though I was completely willing to; I love them that much).
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Mr. Guinea Pig and I have been working on the wording for our invitations, and surprisingly, it has been a bit of a struggle! Our invitations have a floral design on them but they’re not overly formal, and we’re having trouble finding a balance with the formality of the wording.

Our invitation designer recently sent us several options to choose from but Mr. GP and I gravitate towards different ones. Here are a few of the options we saw:

1) Dad and Mom Guinea Pig request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of their daughter…
2) … joyfully invite you to share in the marriage of their daughter…
3) … invite you to share in the celebration of the marriage of their daughter…
4) … invite you to share in the joy of the marriage of their daughter…

So, Mr. Guinea Pig likes #1 (I, for some reason, have a completely baseless aversion to saying it this way), and I like #3, but I don’t like all the ’of’s. #2 sounds like I’m asking people to share my marriage! I’ve been trying to find other options for this type of wording (i.e. my parents doing the inviting), and it turns out, there aren’t as many choices as I would have thought. Some other ones I’ve found are:
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I love our venue (which I will tell you about soon!). One of the things that sold us on it was its proximity to the water (something Mr. Guinea Pig really wanted). Another added bonus is that we will have a fantastic view of the sunset over the Chesapeake Bay! Our ceremony starts at 6 PM, and thanks to the Navy’s handy ’Complete Sun and Moon data’, I know that sunset on our wedding day will be at 8:05 PM.

(taken from our venue’s website)

The sun will be fairly low on the horizon by the time our ceremony gets underway, and our guests will be facing the water (and sun). So while I’m super excited for the sunset, I’m a little worried about our guests’ eyes during the ceremony!
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When Mr. Guinea Pig and I first got engaged, we weren’t too concerned about the long engagement we had planned. We wanted to get married in the spring, and 16 months didn’t sound impossibly long. I also figured that with all this time, I wouldn’t stress about the planning (ha) because it would give me plenty of wiggle room for making decisions. Then, a month and a half after we got engaged, one of Mr. GP’s friends got engaged. At a big dinner with a bunch of friends, everyone asked, “When’s the big day?” and his friend responded, “June!” “Oh,” people responded, “a month after Mr. GP and Miss Guinea Pig get married?”

“No,” she replied, “ this June (4 months from their engagement).”

11 months before Mr. GP and I will get married! Mr. Guinea Pig turned to me and suddenly wanted to know why we weren’t doing that; why couldn’t we get married this past May (3 months away at that point)? I fumbled around, trying to come up with a reason more than just, ’because it will be easier to plan’.

I think part of our reasoning was that since we hadn’t been dating for that long, why not take our time being engaged? By the time we get married, we will have been fiance/e longer than boy/girlfriend! But I couldn’t shake the feeling that really, when you decide to get married, shouldn’t you be ready to get married? Why wait?
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As I mentioned in a previous post, it is hard to keep a secret in our house. This is because our favorite thing to do with surprises - even small ones - is to come up with obscure, tangentially related hints, then see if the other person can guess what it is. For example, last month Mr. Guinea Pig called me at work and said, “I have a surprise for you to guess: you can’t touch it, and it’s related to the Wizard of Oz”. I’ll spare you the random guesses I texted to him all day - when I came home I found that Mr. GP had gotten a (long overdue) oil change for my car! Wizard of Oz -> Tin Man -> Oil. Of course.

Naturally, the hints just make me more curious to know what a surprise is, which leads to a lot of time spent quizzing Mr. Guinea Pig about birthday gifts, anniversary plans, and of course - the proposal (you’d think I’d just let that one be a surprise, but noooo). Thus by December, I was pretty sure Mr. GP was going to propose within the month, but I (mistakenly) thought it would be on our 11-month anniversary. When that came and went, I assumed that he would wait until our one-year anniversary, and sort of forgot about it. Then we went to my parents’ house for Christmas, and I walked into my dad’s office one day to have both Mr. GP and my dad yelp in surprise and tell me to get out! When my mom was secreted away to the office while my dad distracted me, I thought, ‘Aha! Sometime soon.’
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Although Mr. Guinea Pig and I had talked a lot about marriage before the proposal, we both wanted the actual proposal to be a surprise. Let me tell you, that is a very hard thing to do in our household as apparently we are incapable of truly keeping secrets from each other.

When we first started talking about marriage and rings in particular, I mentioned that I would love a sapphire center stone instead of the typical diamond. So Mr. GP diligently started scouring the web for ideas, sending me ring pictures occasionally to get my feedback on what I liked and didn’t like.

Then one day in September (~8 months after we started dating, if you’re keeping track), we were watching a movie and he was fidgeting like mad. Finally he turned to me and blurted out, “I got your ring, will you look at it and tell me if you like it?”

I tried to pretend I didn’t want to see it, but let’s be honest, I really REALLY wanted to see it! So, after a few overly dramatic protestations, I jumped up and down and finally said, “Go get it, I want to try it on!”

It’s hard to describe the feelings that came when he opened the box and hesitatingly showed me the ring - awe was one. Disbelief and disappointment came in next (you’re probably thinking “WHAT?”). A little factoid about myself: the only jewelry I wear every day is a watch (well, and now my engagement ring). Occasionally, if I’m doing something really fancy, I’ll wear earrings. In all our discussions of rings, I had never thought to mention that I might like something low-key, as I don’t really wear jewelry. The ring that Mr. Guinea Pig nervously showed me was HUGE!
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Who knew Twitter would play such a role in planning our wedding?

After reading a post from Mrs. D’orsay about following her vendors on Twitter, I decided to track down my vendors (two of whom happen to be the same as hers, so that was easy - thanks Mrs. D’orsay!).

That move turned out to be a good idea, as it’s how I decided on our Save-the-Dates!

Well, maybe decided is too strong a word. But now we had a direction to go in! Back in September, I looked at my to-do list and thought, ‘Yikes! If we want to send out Save-the-Dates in October, we have to get moving on those!’ I posted my thoughts on Twitter, and asked if anyone had any ideas. A few hours later, our officiant replied with: “Since April showers bring may flowers, maybe ’plantable save the date cards’ that turn to flowers.”

Genius! Guests can hold onto the cards as a reminder until we send out our invitations, which will be the perfect time to plant them for spring flowers! Not just that, but the ’flowers’ theme seems to be popping up (pun totally intended) everywhere in our wedding, from the invitations (which I will show you down the road when we send them out), to the paper flowers I’m folding, to the stamps I have for embossing things (I haven’t decided what, yet)!
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I haven’t talked about our photographer yet, but sadly in the beginning of September, we found about an unbelievable tragedy. On a Wednesday afternoon in early September, our photographer Arthur Remanjon was killed in a motorcycle accident.

Mr. Guinea Pig and I booked Arthur well over a year before our wedding - photography was the most important thing to us, and we wanted to get it nailed down before our top choices were booked. We ran through so many photographers’ websites they were starting to blur together, but when we finally sat down to write our ranked list, Arthur came in number one for both of us. We immediately called to make an appointment, met with Arthur at his studio a week later and booked him the next day.

Our first meeting was so much fun - Arthur immediately put us both at ease, and even managed to make me want to have my picture taken (no small feat). He was funny, down to earth, and knew exactly what we were going for in our photos. He had years of experience and his portfolio was filled with photos I loved:
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A little darker; not quite so periwinkle; brighter; not that dark; more vibrant; too teal…

When I picked our wedding colors (I’ll be fair: no use of the royal we here unless ’we’ really did it) and Mr. Guinea Pig OKed them, I had no idea just how difficult a task I had embarked on. All I knew was that blue was both Mr. GP’s and my favorite color so it had to be in our wedding, and pale yellow seemed like a nice match.

(love the bouquet in the upper left as well as the cakes)

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Before I get to how Mr. Guinea Pig and I started out, I’ll begin this post by saying that when you first sign up for an online dating site, the possibilities seem very exciting. ‘You mean, I can just check these boxes and a list of guys will pop up with every quality I ever wanted?!’ So I immediately went through the ‘Advanced’ options of the search feature and created my dream guy. Let’s see, he had to be 6’3” or taller, dark hair, blue eyes … you get the idea, I’ll spare you my whole long, 25-point list (which included ‘must speak Russian’).

(Peter Facinelli, although I’ve never actually seen Twilight)

I anxiously await as the spinning wheel of my browser takes me closer and closer to the list of guys just waiting to hear from me. Hold breath. Nervously clap hands. Hum. There it is!

“Sorry, there are currently no profiles that meet your criteria within a 250 mile radius of your location.”
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Online! Yup, on the interwebs. Mr. Guinea Pig and I met on Match.com, as I mentioned in my intro post. Don’t get me wrong, I knew there were plenty of crazies ‘out there’ (as one friend put it). It’s just that I also thought there were plenty of crazies in the real world, too. So I figured, why not give it a shot? It can’t be any more awkward than meeting someone in a bar.

Overall I’d say the experience wasn’t so bad. To be honest, I’d dabbled in online dating before, but had never really thrown myself out there and been willing to actually meet someone.

It started with Homer (names have been changed to reflect the person’s most… captivating… quality). He was the kind of guy I completely expected to find on an online dating site:

(not actual picture)

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I am so excited, honored, and a little in disbelief (more on that later) to be writing this post! I’ve been hooked on Weddingbee since I was first introduced to it about 4 months into our engagement, and am definitely guilty of hitting refresh more times than is healthy to admit!

A little about Mr. Guinea Pig and me: we live in Baltimore, MD - which explains the title of this post. I couldn’t resist throwing in a little Baltimore flavor! BELIEVE is one of Baltimore’s slogans, and Hon is a really common term of endearment used in Baltimore - there’s even a HonFest every year! I was at work when I found out that I was going to be a bee, and the only thing I could think or say was, “I can’t believe it!” I jumped up and down, then ran through my lab squealing to tell my labmate, who responded, “BELIEVE, hon!” It was perfect for Weddingbee with a little ’bee’ modification!

I’m a science PhD grad student and since I spend all my time working in a lab, I couldn’t resist being Miss Guinea Pig! But don’t worry, even though guinea pigs are the iconic ’test subject’ I don’t actually work on animals… only bacteria! It’s not as gross as it sounds. Plus, the adorable guinea pig icon looks suspiciously like one of our cats, Buster! It was meant to be.

(orange and white, pink nose, short little neck and stumpy legs!)

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