Weddingbee

But I can still wear flowers in my hair, right?

I love the look of a large bloom affixed to a loose chignon or some relaxed curls, so I went to my dealer — ahem, I mean Etsy — for my fix — uh, I mean for some ideas. If you help me choose one, I’ll show you a little somethin’ somethin’, if you know what I mean.

[Mikiye Creations]

Simple, a touch of glam.

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Wedding planning, let’s face it, is 40% fun and 60% a big pain in the buttocks. If I could, I’d offer you a xanax and a Mindy-Weiss-bot. I can’t, so I offer you the next best thing: puppies and Polaroids.

Well, it’s actually one puppy — Jellyby, the queen bitch of our household — and Poladroids. iDIY, one of the newer additions to my ever-expanding blog roll, introduced me to a fun little application called Poladroid that lets you turn any digital photograph into a Polaroid-like picture.

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[La Vie Photography]

* Title courtesy of Leigh Miller; I love a lady who puns.

As I mentioned in my previous post, prior to Weddingbee, I had no clue what engagement photos were. And I’m fairly certain that Mr. HC still has no idea what an engagement shoot involves. But now that we are scheduled to have an engagement shoot, I thought I’d better do some research on how to get ready for this event. I asked our photographer, Leigh Miller, for some tips on how to prepare for an engagement shoot. She had such good advice that I thought I’d share it with the hive. (Bonus: This gives me an excuse to show more of my favorite e-pics.)
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[Samuel Lippke via Snippet & Ink]

Let’s split up this year into two epochs: BWB and AWB (”before Weddingbee” and “after Weddingbee”). BWB, I used to get work done on my dissertation. AWB, what dissertation? BWB, I’d never heard of engagement photos. I mean, what do we need engagement photos for? Proof of engagement?! I guess I figured that people take an engagement photo to put in, say, a wedding announcement, but the idea of taking a whole series of photos with a professional photographer before the wedding was… um, inconceivable? weird? a seeming waste of money?

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Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meaning can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

This was the beautiful quotation that my friends Lauren and Michael used on their wedding invitations, and I pretty much knew from the moment I saw this quotation that theirs was going to be an event that reflected their values, commitments, and personalities. Let’s just say that I was not disappointed.

I blogged about their extraordinary wedding vows the other day. And if you liked those vows, you’ll love the other creative, personal touches they had throughout their wedding!
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Let me start off this post by thanking the makers of Kiss Me mascara. Without this miracle invention, I would have spent much of Sunday afternoon looking like a reject from a Lifetime movie casting. My dear friends Lauren and Michael got married Sunday afternoon on a dock in the middle of Piedmont Park in Atlanta. And their vows, which they wrote together, were so beautiful and articulate that even a jaded wedding guest like me (theirs was like the twentieth wedding I’ve been to in the last two years) was reduced to a puddle.

Here’s in part what they vowed to one another:
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Confession: I’ve missed more than one deadline in recent weeks. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I had a nightmare last night, in which Mr. HC and I forget to get our marriage license — indeed, didn’t even know we had to get a marriage license — and thus couldn’t be legally married on our wedding day. [Gulp.]
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Did you catch Project Runway last night?!! The designers’ final challenge was to design a wedding dress and a bridesmaids dress. Holy Heidi hauteness! Don’t worry, Tivoers; I won’t reveal who got auf’d. But how could I resist reviewing the designs?

Let’s go in the order of fug to fabulous:

1. Jerell’s designs. Say you got caught in the wedding aisle at Michaels in the middle of an earthquake. And the glue gun you were going to buy with your 25% off coupon exploded, covering you with adhesive from head to toe. And you had to climb through the rubble in order to reach the safety of the Martha Stewart aisle. This is probably what you’d look like.

[Photos, unless otherwise marked, courtesy of Bravotv.com]

Oh, and your maid of honor was there too. Only she got caught in that special clearance aisle where they sell Grey Gardens-inspired tablecloths for fortune tellers.
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Let me make this clear: I am not a feather person.  In fact, the thought of feathers usually makes me want to curl up into a fetal position — a little PTSD from when I was growing up in Hong Kong and the teachers would threaten to beat us with a feather duster if we were being naughty.

[Image source.]

(Just for the record, I was a perfect angel. Except for that time in first grade when I stole some kid’s glue because I forgot mine for art class. Yeah, you read that right: my first crime was indeed craft-related. And I’m betting it won’t be the only craft crime I’ll have committed by the time my wedding planning is done.)
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This is the 127th day of our wedding.

No, I haven’t been snorting the embossing powder. Nor is this about how long our actual wedding will be, though with all that is going on on our wedding day—Chinese groom’s games, a tea ceremony, a bedecken (veiling) ceremony, the signing of the ketubah (the wedding contract), a Jewish wedding ceremony, cocktails, dinner, dancing (yes, I’ll be blogging about all of these)—it might seem like we’d need hundreds of days to get through all the activities.

It’s the 127th day of wedding in the sense that Anita Diamant writes about in the introduction to The New Jewish Wedding:

In Judaism there is a willingness to ignore the boundaries between everyday life and holiness. Thus your wedding begins when you first announce your decision to marry and includes every aspect of planning and preparing for the big day. Even arguments about who gets invited and what gets served for dinner are part of the festivities. Nor is your wedding over until the last thank-you note is written, the last photograph is pasted in the scrapbook, and the last bill is paid.

I think there’s something so beautiful about the sentiment that a wedding is not a single “perfect day.” Instead, it’s a long process that begins with the moment you declare your commitment to marry (May in our case), encompasses actions and decisions both significant and banal, and involves discussion, compromise, and community.
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