Weddingbee Blog

… and a teaser, but you have to read through the post first.

There are a lot of things I wish I could have changed about our wedding and the planning. The first and most important thing I wish I could have changed would be asking for help. Like Ms. Beagle, I have a hard time letting go and asking for help. I had very little help planning and prepping for the wedding until about 10 days before the wedding. I knew I would need the help, but I didn’t do a good job of planning that help.

As friends and relatives started to arrive, we started getting a lot of offers to help. Instead of accepting the help immediately and assigning someone a task, I politely thanked them for the offers and told them I’d let them know if anything came up. BIG MISTAKE! What I should have done was make a list of who offered to help and noted what their special talents were, if they had recently gotten married, and if they had access to a car.

Why is this important?
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When I said teaser, I meant teaser. :)  Recaps are coming next week. Enjoy the long weekend!!

image: Jess Carmichael

Before I start the other posts I promised, I wanted to get one thing off my chest - my two wedding day heartbreaking moments. I feel like I need to get these out of the way (and the “week before the wedding” post) in order to really share happy memories of our wedding day.

Heartbreaker #1

The first dance. While we were taking pictures after the ceremony and before the reception, our piano player and Mr. Joey’s bandmate, Paul, called us and let us know there was a problem with our mics. One was broken. We needed 2 mics, one for the singer and one for the guitar player. Paul said he’d call around and see if he could locate a mic near the reception venue. I was a little freaked out, but Mr. Joey said the boys would figure it out.

When we arrived at the reception, the guys said they figured it out. They would position it so the singer and guitar player could share mics. They tested it and said it sounded fine. I was relieved. I was really excited for the first dance. We found the perfect song and the guys were going to play it for us. Both Mr. Joey and I worked with all the guys in the band. Josh, the lead singer, was the first person I told when Mr. Joey and I were thinking of becoming a couple. It all made for a sweet, coming full circle-type moment.
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Thanks to everyone who voted on how I should tackle the daunting task of recaps. It looks like I’ll be starting with the budget, then what I’d do differently, followed by the week before, and the recaps.

Right. Now to the task at hand: the budget breakdown.

image

A few months back, when I was a new bee, I shared with everyone our budget. We were hoping to pull off a wedding AND a honeymoon for $15,000. We originally invited 130 guests which eventually ballooned to 162 guests. Oops! In the end, our final count was 116 people. Children under 5 were free, and kids 6-11 were half price. If I had to guess, I’d say we had 130 people including all the kids.
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So, we’re starting to get pictures back from the wedding, and I can’t decide what order to post recaps in. There are the bridal events before the wedding, like the shower and bachelorette. There’s all the prep work we did the week before, the rehearsal dinner, the ceremony, the reception, and the after party. Of course, there’s also the honeymoon. In addition, I have a budget breakdown post, one about what I’d do differently, and one that discusses the hardships of the wedding week. I thought about being different and starting with the most recent events first, but I can’t decide.

I’m open to suggestions, so please comment below if you have an idea!

I was very late to blogs. Why lie? I’m really slow with technology in general. We’ve only recently (like, a day ago) ordered an iPhone and I think Mr. Joey was the last person in the world to join Facebook (2 days ago - seriously). I never heard about blogs that I thought sounded interesting. People always told me about blogs that sounded weird. I passed on the blog about cats that looked like famous people.

I found blogs by accident, really. I was looking for ideas for what to make people for Christmas in 2007. I had this idea earlier that year that half of all the Christmas presents we were going to give during the holidays would be homemade. That’s when I did it—I found blogs—crafting blogs, to be specific. There were so many; it made my head spin. Crafting blogs turned into design blogs, and I was instantly hooked on Design*Sponge. But that was it. My blog reading stopped there, apart from a few visits to food blogs like Chocolate and Zucchini. It’s not that I didn’t like blogs, it was that I hated sitting in front of my computer when I wasn’t at work.

When we got engaged, I knew I wanted to do something different. All the weddings I had been to had all blurred together. I didn’t want mine to be one of those.
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During the planning process, I neglected a lot of things — cooking, cleaning, me. All my free time went into crafting things for the wedding. Our apartment turned into craft central. I don’t think we saw the surface of our living room table for months.

On the flight back from Sydney, I asked Mr. Joey if he was excited to get back to normal. He enthusiastically said he was. He was looking forward to a very tidy apartment, pre-planned meals, and me not crafting while we were watching a movie. I agreed. Then he said he had a request, but that I may not like it—he wanted to ban crafting for an entire month. I thought about it. On the one hand, I couldn’t think of a craft project I was ready to take on immediately, but on the other hand, well, you never know. After some thought, I agreed. No crafting from August 18 - September 18.

Mr. Joey said that cooking is not crafting.
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Hi All!

The Joeys are back from what seems like an eternity away! We don’t have many pictures from the wedding yet, but I’m told some will be coming soon.
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Ah, my last post as an unmarried bee. I had to write it today, since we start really early tomorrow (before 7AM!).

I have to say, I (or we) didn’t think we’d make it to this day. The last few months and particularly, this last week, has been filled with more drama and madness than we thought we could survive. And here we are, almost at the finish line.

I can’t tell everyone how much Weddingbee has meant to me through this planning process. Besides a few out-of-state friends and Mr. Joey (mostly in the last 8 weeks), I’ve been largely alone in the planning process. No one understood why I was DIYing so much, and it was hard to find anyone who understood our vision or look for the wedding until I found the hive. It was like having 1000 friends to bounce ideas off of and help with the wedding. For this, I will always be grateful to you all.

And for Mr. Joey, I have a little antidote.

A few times a week when I’m waiting for my bus on 1st and Jackson, I see this elderly couple.
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For the most part, I’d say we’re pretty much done with all of our wedding tasks except for the flowers, delivering things to venues, and a few other minor details.

Over the last few months, I’ve been picking up random silver platters and picture frames at Goodwill with no real idea of how to use them. We’re doing a modern-vintage wedding, so I figured I could use these pieces somewhere.

I finally found a place for them in our wedding. Behold…

I painted the silver trays and old picture frames yellow and grey, then put scrap fabric and paper on top of them. We’re going to use them on our breakfast bar.

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Since the Joey wedding is 5 days away (!!!!!!!), I don’t think I’ll be able to get pictures up of my AWESOME shower until I get back from the honeymoon. Just to give you a taste of the fun and creative presents, I want to share with you a picture of one of my gifts. Get ready to be impressed.

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Even though we’re not done with the wedding madness, I’ve already started prepping for the honeymoon. We got all the big plans out of the way like hotels and transportation, it’s just all the little details like packing we need to do.

I’m a pretty experienced traveler but this trip is going to test my packing skills. We’ve got all sorts of packing requirements. We need clothes for spring weather (cool temps) and clothes for summer. We need to be able to go from beach bum to opera goer, but still fit everything into fairly small bags since we’re going on planes, trains and a boat (oh my!). Plus, we need to be able to pack enough reading and listening materials to at least get us to Australia.

I’ve got the reading and listening materials covered. I’ve been saving magazines for weeks and picking up books at Goodwill. We also have plenty to listen to thanks to everyone’s suggestions. I’m still working on the clothes part. Every time I think of a versatile outfit I can bring with me, I jot it down on a notebook I carry around. I also jot down all the random things we’ll need that I may forget in the heat of packing like my reading glasses, lip balm and a reusable shopping bag.

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It was pom night at the Joey household yesterday. There was fluffing. There were decorations. There was dancing.

We finished all the poms. These are just the ones we did last night.

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That’s right friends, we’re down to single digits.

It’s starting to feel real. My sister (Joey MOH) arrived yesterday and I feel like that was the official start of the wedding countdown. She’s the first of the wedding party/guests to arrive and today FMIL Joey will be here.

I am SO glad Sister Joey is here. For one, because I missed her, and also because she can manage all the last minute details I don’t have the capacity for. For example, where I’m going to stay the night before the wedding, and what is our wedding transportation will be.

I was going to stay at my parents’, but they now have 8 out of town guests staying at their house. That feels like too much madness and not enough hot water for me. Mama Joey is upset that I’m considering not staying there and possibly staying at my apartment the night of the wedding. She says it’s tradition to stay at your parents’ house the night before the wedding, and I say it’s a logistical nightmare. I do not have the energy to fight this out with her so I’m leaving MOH/Sister Joey to figure this out.

Where are you staying the night before the wedding? Did anyone spend it with their FI?

Yes, I have one. I know I shouldn’t, but I think this one will be OK. It may turn out to be less work than the first idea.

So way back when, our ceremony coordinator said the flower girl couldn’t throw/drop fresh or dried flowers as she walked in. I was contemplating buying a bag of fake rose petals from Michaels but it just didn’t feel like something that went with the style of our wedding. I then had this brilliant idea to make flowers out of the scraps of fabric we used for the table runners. It would tie together the reception and ceremony nicely.

Well, time has passed and I still haven’t started on those flowers. I thought about having FMIL Joey take them on, but it may be too time intensive.

Guess what? I have a new plan.
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