Weddingbee Blog

First off, thank you so much for your kind words and awesome suggestions on my last post about thank you notes!

Let’s continue with those recaps.

In the early afternoon, our wonderful wedding planner, Shelley, arrived! She stopped by the house to touch base with me and then headed off with her assistant to get started setting up at the venue. It was so nice having her there to take care of all the little details. I had collected so many little knick knacks over time, and I knew she’d use her creativity to get everything set up in a cute and creative way. And she didn’t disappoint! Between her and the rest of the guys, they took care of everything.

And then our wonderful photographer, Joy, and her assistant for the day, Lora, had arrived!

The entrance to the gardens

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Please pardon the pause in our wedding day recaps.

Hive, I’ve got to get this out in the open. I have been less than stellar in terms of our thank you notes lately.

Writing thank you notes was of utmost importance to me. If someone is going to go out of their way to spend money and give us a gift, they deserve our most sincere thanks. Bottom line. I can’t even express how disappointed I am in myself considering how poorly this situation has turned out.

We ordered a massive amount of thank you cards right at the beginning of planning, to make sure we always had some on hand for any gifts we received.

Things started off strong. For the gifts we got at our engagement party, I made sure that every single person got a thank you note immediately after the party. It was so exciting to get our first few wedding-related gifts, and it was so easy to get those few cards into the mail in no time. Done and done

Our Dallas area shower went off famously. My mom helped me make a really neatly detailed list of gifts, and again, thank you notes were out in the mail less than a week later.
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Throughout the weekend, whenever I could snag someone, I would hand them their Thank You gift for being a part of our wedding.

Mr. HW kept it simple for the guys and got each one a nice pocket knife with their initials engraved in it.

The flower girls got little dolls that had the exact same dress as the girls wore in the wedding.

Here is Aunt Pam showing off the cute dolls.

We had fun playing with them the morning of the wedding.
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After our yoga class, we had a little tea and breakfast.

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Before I knew it (like seriously, time was going so dang fast! I still can’t believe how fast everything went), it was already the wedding day.

The week before the wedding, I asked all the girls to bring their yoga mats if they had one, because we were going to doing a little optional yoga class the morning of the wedding. During wedding planning, anytime we would visit the guest house I couldn’t shake the feeling that the front porch would make for a perfect spot to do a little yoga.

I knew it would really center me for the day and start everything off on a high note. One of my lovely bridesmaids brought her teaching skills to the table and taught the class.

It was a little chilly at first, but things warmed up rather quickly. (It wound up topping out at 97 degrees that day!)
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After our rehearsal, we headed back to the guest house to sign the Ketubah, or Jewish marriage contract.

I ordered our Ketubah from Ketubah.com and the artist is Nava Shoham (highly recommended, if anyone needs a Ketubah!). Before the wedding weekend, I had the Ketubah matted so it was flat and sturdy for signing. Then after the wedding, we had it completely framed behind glass. Since the Ketubah is on high grade paper, I made sure to bring special archival pens that I picked up from the craft store. An associate at the store can help you find these if you need anything like this for your wedding. Make sure to not use regular pens as this can warp, bleed, or otherwise destroy the piece of work.

Our Ketubah

Many couples do the signing on the actual wedding day, but I was too nervous to have it out and/or on display at the wedding for fear that it might get damaged. So, I made arrangements with our officiant to come back to the guest house with us after the rehearsal so we could go ahead and sign it that evening.
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Before we dive into the rehearsal, I have to say that time was on absolute hyper speed during the wedding weekend. I got off work Thursday afternoon, blinked, and it was time for the rehearsal Friday night. Time seemed to be flying faster than I ever experienced before. It was shocking.

Anyway, we had finished the bridal luncheon and the boys enjoyed an afternoon of bowling, beer, and brotherhood. After getting spruced up a bit, we were ready to rehearse.

We all convened at our ceremony site, the Rose Pavilion.

Daddy HW, our officiant Dr. Roberts, our fabulous planner Shelley, the venue coordinator Melissa, and my MIL chatting it up

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Friday morning started bright and early. At about 7:30 AM, I knew there was no point in trying to get any more sleep, so I crossed over to the opposite side of the house and hopped in between my two bridesmaids who were fast asleep. Luckily, they awoke in good spirits and we decided to take a morning stroll through the gardens. The house we were staying at is on the property of Clark Gardens, and is about a two minute walk from the front door of the house into the main part of the gardens.

We arrived at the gardens and everything was dewy and fresh. It was so beautiful and quiet. The walk lasted well over an hour as we chatted, explored, and even found a sweet hideaway spot on the top of a huge hill that overlooked a big expanse and the highway.

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Why, hello! Are you ready to get this party started? It is finally time to recap the High Wire wedding. The title for these recaps works for us in two ways. 1) There are a ton of Johnny Cash fans on both sides of our families and 2) it is a fun play on words regarding my moniker, the tightrope walker.

The weekend started early and I finished off my work week by working a half-day on Thursday. After that, we loaded up and headed out to the wedding site. Our venue is about 90 minutes away from where we live, so we had a little bit of a drive ahead of us. But luckily, we were staying at a guest house on the property, so as soon as we were there, we were really there. The excitement was palpable!

Here is the cozy living room of the house.

Personal Photo

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It all started with a few months ago with shipment from Steve

It was certainly a scorching Texas summer eve,
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Catching up on our Jamaican honeymoon? Here you go:

Jamaican Me Crazy: Experts at Lounging
Jamaican Me Crazy: Crab Hunting

After being the laziest people on the entire planet (besides acting as crab paparazzi), we finally got some energy together and did a few of the free resort-provided activities.

Shopping Trip

We decided to participate in the shopping trip they offered for the day. However, when we arrived to board the bus, the staff member explained that the shopping trip would take us into the city of Negril, but the shops were owned by people who weren’t Jamaican and weren’t selling Jamaican goods. It was more like “made in China” type retail. An alternative option would be to walk two minutes down the road from the resort to the craft market if you wanted to buy local goods from the local population. There was an organized trip there once a week, but we could go right now if we wanted to. So, we joined up with one other couple, for safety’s sake, and headed down to the craft market.

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Missed the first post about our Jamaican honeymoon? Here you go: Jamaican Me Crazy: Experts at Lounging.

On our first night at the resort, I wound up going to bed early because I wasn’t feeling well. (Trying to stay hydrated by drinking a ton of supposedly “safe” resort water backfired on me.) Well, at about midnight, Mr. HW comes blazing into the room telling me that there are crabs everywhere and that I should come out and look at them.

I don’t know about you, but anything that can walk laterally, like spiders, crabs, or this horrible, horrible thing, is deemed 100% evil by me. It isn’t natural for you to walk sideways, I’m sorry.

And when I’m half asleep and someone comes running in saying these things are all over the place, I’m probably not going to be too happy with you. In my sleepy daze I remember I covered my hands over my head and asked Mr. HW to please please please stop talking about them.

As the week went on, my fear subsided, mostly because these poor little crabs are terrified of people. If they see you, they just run away. They are just out trying to get a midnight snack and don’t want to hurt anyone. And I have to admit, I found them so interesting!! So our nightly mission became attempting to photograph these little guys before they ran off into the shrubs. We managed to capture some good ones:

Crusty the Crab

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After an absolutely whirlwind wedding weekend, we came to a screeching halt and jetted off to the most relaxing and rejuvenating week of our lives in Negril, Jamaica.

We splurged on a couple of first class tickets on our plane ride from Dallas to Montego Bay. It was worth every. single. penny. We sat in a mostly empty first class section in the front row. I could stick my legs out completely straight in front of me and not hit anything. It was even comfortable enough to nap! Which I definitely did, in between feedings. We were immediately presented with orange juice and/or Pepsi before take-off, then a generous helping of mixed warm assorted nuts, followed by a full meal of salad, tortellini, warm rolls, and red wine. Then they followed with a chocolate chip cookie of course! So yummy. I also did a little reading (The Hunger Games—go read it now, you won’t regret it) and a little movie watching. Then it was time to land!

There were the usual customs and immigration lines to get through, but it went very smoothly. We were sent to hang out at the Couples Lounge in the airport while they sorted everyone out who were staying at any local Couples Resorts and got everyone in their way to their respective destinations. We hopped on the bus to Couples Negril, and were on our way.
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After an absolutely blissful honeymoon, we are back and living it up, married style.

We spent yesterday relaxing at home and trying to get our house back in order after covering every surface with honeymoon laundry, tissue paper, leftover wedding decor and gifts galore. It looks like a tornado went off, which drives me batty. I can’t relax in the middle of a household disaster!

There’s lots to fill you all in on between now and when we dive into recaps (which will happen as soon as we get our professional photos back). I’m already hunting around for my next event planning project, before I can get sucked into any Post Wedding Blues. A Halloween party? A trip to Austin? Hosting our first married Thanksgiving? It is all on the radar. There’s been lots of updates on our humble abode that we have slowly been working on over the last few months. I just plowed through the most amazing book series of my life, the Hunger Games. And I can’t wait to tell you all about our absolutely incredibly relaxing and rejuvenating (and somewhat nudist) honeymoon. Oh yeah, we’ll get to it all.

For now, I’ll leave you with the one little taste of the wedding that has surfaced online:
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Well, hive, it is time.

I have poured my heart and soul into this planning process for the last year, and now it is finally time to see everything come to fruition.

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