Weddingbee

When we first got engaged, our original plan was to have things downtown and have a very deluxe affair. We were thinking of doing an early fall shindig in rich colours in either the glassed-in rooftop bar of a hotel, the ballroom of a trendy downtown boutique hotel or a vintage pool hall. While I absolutely loved all of these ideas, I wasn’t so keen on waiting so long (longer engagements=more stupid fights about wedding stuff) and once we started seeking quotes out, I began to feel incredibly discouraged at the numbers I was getting back, not to mention what I would be getting for the money I was paying. One place was charging almost $200 per person for food and food alone and another place, while their website had given me a rental fee which seemed possible, sent me a quote which was almost $1,000 more and only for a room. No tables, no chairs, just four walls and a door.

While we were both not averse to paying what we needed to pay, this seemed excessive, especially with our respective salaries. Up until just before our engagement, Mr. Hummingbird had been interning for his videogame company to gain job experience and as for myself, I had quit a higher paying job so that I could do something in a field that was actually related to my degree. These two decisions were better for both of us and considering where we were in our lives when we made them, they were definitely the right ones for us, but now it felt like they were financially crippling us.

Read more…

I thought I would start off the day with the story of how Mr. Hummingbird and I got engaged. I have to admit, it wasn’t completely a surprise. We’d been discussing it for a while until one Saturday morning when the discussion turned more serious.

It had been a busy week and was set to be a busy weekend when, for whatever reason, everyone we were supposed to meet up with cancelled on us. One after one, we got calls just bailing. This is not particularly uncommon for us since a lot of our friends work shift work and/or are kind of flaky when it comes to planning things (don’t get me wrong guys - I love you, but it’s called time management), but it kind of sucked since we were both looking forward to blowing off some steam and having fun.

So instead of going out and partying, I went off to have a bath and Mr. Hummingbird went back to his office nook/cave to work on some new project (he’s an art guy on a developing online video game and he always draws an online cartoon strip called Patrick Grey).
Read more…

Ever since I was born, I have basically been a human pinball. I was always kind of big for my age and, as a fairly large adult (I am 6’1″ and most of that is long spindly legs), the world always feels like it is slightly mis-sized for me. I am always mistaking how much room I have to move around, which results in me smashing my head or my legs on things like lamps, shelves and tables. Sometimes this leaves me with a bump on the forehead, but more often than not, my shins are the victims, covered in large, dark, purply brown bruises. During the height of my bruising phase, when I was a very little tree-climbing girl, my mother often thought I was just dirty and would make me sit in the bathtub for hours, trying to scrub them off.

Read more…

I have to admit it. I’ve got a bit of a body issue that’s coming to light now that we’ve actually decided to get married. It’s not my butt or my hips or my thighs or my feet (although at 6’1″, they are kind of freakish) but something that most brides don’t even give a second thought about. It’s my hand.

Five years ago, while at the part-time job I was working to help pay for school, I got into an accident. A serious accident. Through some slip of fate, my left hand got slammed in a steel door and the tips of two of my fingers were crushed and severed. Although the doctors I had were great and worked hard to give me as much function as they could, at the end of the day, I was still left an amputee.

The first few months after the accident were devastating, not just physically, but mentally. I had to get used to seeing myself in a new way, to reconcile the loss of a physical piece of myself and still accept myself as whole. It was a very hard road. A lot of my friends dropped off the face of the planet, I guess not knowing what to say to me, and the guy I was seeing at the time ended up not being a support of any kind so we broke up. I didn’t know what to do or what to say to anyone, so I kind of ended up receding into myself for some time afterwards because I felt like such a monster.
Read more…

Mr. Hummingbird and I met in a mall. That sounds kind of lame, but it’s true. We met at a Second Cup in a mall near my parents’ house in The Saug (a suburb outside of Toronto). The meeting had been pre-arranged after we “met” and talked on the Internet for the month prior. It was a very weird thing.

This was partially because I was in a weird place in my life. I had just split from a boyfriend not too long before and I was still working the crappy retail job that I’d worked for the past three years to pay for college, so pretty much my whole life felt transient. Although I really liked the way Mr. Hummingbird sounded in e-mails, would it be as good in person and was I ready to be pulled into a relationship if that was the way things went?

Our first meeting was also kind of weird in that when I sat down to have coffee with him, it was kind of like sitting down next to someone you’ve known your whole life. The conversation was easy, we had a very similar sense of humour and we both seemed interested in what the other person was saying.

Read more…

With regards to my previous post, I just wanted to say thank you to Kate for the program wording idea and to let you guys know that the dress I liked. As Veronica said, it was indeed a Lazaro from the Spring 2007 collection. However, like Veronica said, after I fell in love with the thing, I did some investigating and found it was on the steep end of things, which being a budget bride with two grad school attending attendants, was a bit out of our collective reach.

Thankfully, after talking to Mr. Hummingbird’s Best Lady, she put me on to a great seamstress who will be able to replicate the dresses and alter the style in any way we might need to suit our ladies, so I’m really excited because I want them to look awesome and feel good in their dresses. Anyway, onto my entry!

Growing up in my house, the dinner table served as a place for great debate. Over whatever meal we were having that evening, we would discuss the day’s events and hash out arguments in favor or in opposition of whatever topic caught our collective interest.

Read more…

As Mr. Hummingbird and I have friends of both sexes, it seemed wrong we would pick attendants just based on sex, so we decided to be a little unconventional in this regard. Therefore, he picked BIL Hummingbird and his friend Sarah as his Best Man and Best Lady and I picked SIL Hummingbird and my friend Greg as my Maid of Honor and Man of Honor.

Although I was very happy with this idea, this made things a little tricky for me since, not only did it mean that I had to dress my Maid of Honor but Mr. Hummingbird’s Best Lady as well. After all, they’re two completely different people with two completely different body types.

However, having thought things through and scoured the Internet for appropriate bridal wear, I came across this dress and fell in love with it:

Read more…

I don’t know how or why it’s happened, but for some reason, since I got engaged, I’ve become a lot more of a marshmallow. Love songs make me smile more, good TV makes my eyes moist and romantic movies leave me completely smitten.

So, because it’s Friday and I’m feeling all starry-eyed, I present to you, my top ten romantic movies!

1 - Benny & Joon – Who would not love Johnny Depp making them grilled cheese sandwiches with an iron? I mean seriously?

2 - Say Anything – Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity are among my favourite movies, but this is where my love for John Cusack started. Nervous and sweet, he has you rooting for Lloyd Dobler all the way through the movie, so it’s not hard to see how Diane Court could fall for him. And of course, like every other girl on the planet, I love the scene with the boombox. Ten years after I first watched it, I still can’t believe Ione Skye doesn’t go to the window!

Read more…

A while ago, when Mr. Hummingbird and I first started talking about getting engaged, we were mulling over getting one of our friends ordained and having her marry us. Unfortunately, when I went online to scope out the situation, I discovered that getting married by someone ordained online was not legal here in Canada, so I cursed my luck for being a Canuck and went on my merry way thinking Americans have all the luck (at least in that marriage arena - I still think it’s cool that my gay friends have the right to get married up here).

Anyway, it looks like I was wrong about the whole lucky Americans thing, because after reading this article in The New York Times, it looks like the online ordainments don’t stick too well south of the border either. Apparently, half a dozen states definitely do not recognize those marriages to be legal (in some, you can be fined $500 and jailed for a year) and it looks like the guidelines in others are incredibly foggy (”it might be legal, it might not, we can’t say”).

To me, this whole thing seems crazy. I mean if two people make the commitment to marry each other in front of witnesses and they have a marriage license, how is it not legal?

What do you think ladies? Are any of you getting married by ordained online ministers? How important is the legality of marriage to you?

On a stationery company.

As a paper fiend, one of the things I’ve been really excited about since we got engaged was being able to pick out an invitation that would both match our style and fit our budget. So, the last few weeks, after surfing the web and drooling over what I have lovingly come to refer to as “paper porn” (you saw evidence of my obsession in my last post), I’ve formed my opinions and I think I’ve found my stationery soulmate in baron*cards.

Based out of Ontario, Lianne and Ron Tokey offer a set of designs that are not only crisp and beautiful looking, but that, when all is said and done, won’t break the bank. (Plus as an added bonus, you can have some of the colours in the designs modified so they work with your decor!)

Anyway, we haven’t picked anything out yet as we are still working on the guest list (gulp!), but I think I may have worked out where our invites are coming from.

Read more…