Weddingbee Blog

When we left off, I told you what Mr. Mary Jane and I are looking for in a [belated] honeymoon.

With lots of searching, here’s what we found out.

First, let’s talk cruises. Sites like CruiseCritic.com are really valuable for personal opinions regarding specific cruise destinations and ships. See, every ship has different amenities. This is actually something I didn’t know prior to looking into this type of vacation. Also, some cruise lines are aimed at families and children; others aren’t. There are such things as ’adult-only’ cruises also. For example, while I’d heard of Carnival, Princess, and many of the other ’big name’ cruises, I had not heard of Regent, Silver Sea, Seabourn cruise lines. These were very luxurious cruises, but most were too long in time frame to fit our needs.

After a lot of searching and review-reading, we decided that we should steer away from cruises to the Caribbean or Hawaii. Reviews of various cruise lines and routes were full of complaints regarding overcrowded restaurants and decks, little kids screaming everywhere, and overall poor service. We just didn’t want to take the chance.
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Hiya! How’s it going? I am back and ready to do a little more planning with you all. Not wedding planning this time though… now we’re on to HONEYMOON planning!

In case you’re new and don’t remember the Mary Janes, we got married on Sept. 9, 2009 in the courthouse. I just spent a shit-load of time updating my bio so that you can check out my wedding details in one nice little place. Enjoy!

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Last year, Mr. Mary Jane and I made the decision to postpone our honeymoon. We had a lot of reasons for doing this, ranging from unstable finances to busy semester schedules. But boy, did we feel it! Going right back to work and school after getting married kind of sucked and really didn’t put the “exclamation point” on our wedded bliss. (So if you’re on the fence, definitely take some kind of honeymoon right after your wedding if at ALL possible. I highly recommend.)

Due to a friend’s May wedding an some classes we’re taking in May/June, our honeymoon would be pushed to July. Early August would be OK too, but we don’t want to return home and go directly back to school. And my job gets kind of busy during August too. Long story short, we’re now focused on finding something unforgettable and awesome to do between late June and mid-August.
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I smile whenever I see articles like this.

I’m not going to do a round-up of trends… this blogger already did. But I will give you a little bit of my own $0.02 about it.

A small wedding isn’t for everyone, I definitely know that. Some (OK, maybe a lot) of couples really have the need and yearning to throw a huge party and celebrate with everyone: from their second cousins to former coworkers to their parents’ mailman.

See this? This is the entirety of our wedding guests. I love this picture.

Photo by Shawna Noel Photography; faces blurred by me.

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I’m going to be in a wedding in May, and this is the dress we maids will be wearing.

[I’m not either of the bodies in the picture above; no one gets to see my dress on me until I have it altered to fit my, um, extreme height difference and smaller bust.]

Anyway, that’s the dress. (The bride, by the way, is wearing a short dress, too. It’ll be a sassy soiree for sure!) The bride has requested that we choose our own shoes (thank you, bride!), but they should be pink ballet flats to match the dress. I figured that since we’re getting in to springtime, you Weddingbee girls might appreciate seeing some of the options for pink flats I have found.
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… It’s more like, “smell ya later.”

Hi, remember me? *waves*

I got married about four months ago, finished my recaps, and have been blogging pretty erratically since then. It’ll be another 4-6 months before Mr. Mary Jane and I think taking about our belated honeymoon, and I’m pretty much out of stuff to say, wedding-wise.

But I’m here to Not Say Goodbye.

I do still have a few more posts up my sleeve (wedding-card scrapbooking, anyone?), but I do not know exactly when I’ll be getting to those. And when we do plan our honeymoon (and go on it), I will be back to post about that, too. Right now, Mr. Mary Jane and I are both focusing on school and our careers, working on our house, and trudging through another butt-cold upper-Midwestern winter.
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Mr. Mary Jane and I wanted to give our parents and grandparents something special to remember our wedding by. Aside from the obvious framed photo, I decided to make some photo books for them. There are a lot of options out there at various price-points. I chose Shutterfly for a few reasons:

1. I’m generally happy with stuff I get printed there.
2. I have ordered a Shutterfly photo book before, and was impressed by its quality.
3. We received a $20 coupon for Shutterfly when we started our registry at Target.

I started the process by narrowing down our wedding pictures. We were provided with over 500 shots, and I had already whittled it down to about 150 “good ones” (in which neither of us was making a strange face or generally being odd). I went through them again and found about 50 that I really thought were great and/or meaningful to include. I also threw in some shots I’d taken (e.g. one of our rings, some from the picnic), and some that my dad and FMIL Mary Jane had taken during the cake-cutting at our house.

When I finally had the photos selected, I painstakingly edited each of these photos for blemishes, red-eye, and other distractions. Then I color-adjusted all of them so that there were two types of photos: color and black-and-white. I decided to omit sepia, vintage-toned and otherwise treated photos because I really wanted a crisp-looking album.
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Several months back, I told my newly-engaged friend that I wanted to throw her a bridal shower. The wedding date was set for March. Then they moved it to December.

December and late November are — to make a gross understatement — very busy times for us. Aside from the usual holiday rushes, we have the end of the semester and finals upon us. It’s a busy time at work, too. We’re also dealing with wedding-aftermath stuff this year (photo sorting and ordering for gifts, sending Thank Yous, etc). But a December wedding for my friend meant I couldn’t push off the bridal shower until February (like I’d originally planned)! I needed to get off my butt and plan this thing!

Thankfully, it’s not at my house. There were over 30 invitees, and my friend’s mom offered to host the shower. Her home is larger and more of the guests know where it is. The moral of that story is: I won’t have to clean. But I did need to create some invites!

My friend’s wedding invitations weren’t anything too elaborate. They were a beautiful tan and green design, traditional and simple. Very nice. So I knew I did not want a wild-and-crazy, elaborate and brightly-colored shower invitation; it would not match her style. (That worked out great too: simple = faster!)

I really wanted something I could print and send in an afternoon, so I turned to Office Max to look for some patterned paper. And boy did they deliver!
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You’ve seen our announcements, but what about our Thank You cards?

We decided to use photos for those too, but this time, I opted to order them from Shutterfly.

I chose the blank photo note cards. They come in boxes of 12 and are blank (duh) inside. Because of this, I used Photoshop to just write our sentiment on the pictures themselves. The cost was about $40 for 4 boxes of 12, so 48 note cards with envelopes. They’re small cards, too - perfect for Thank Yous and juuuust big enough for mailing. (Unfortunately though, they still require a 0.42 stamp!)

Here they are, from afar.

I chose four different pictures, as you can see.
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Remember the announcements I was going to send a few weeks after the wedding? Yeah… well… It was more like 7 weeks. I have an excuse for 4 of the weeks: I was waiting for pro-photos. But the other three weeks? I was just procrastinating.

Anyway, I finally got around to it. Since I’m suffering from the post-wedding lethargy (which makes us put everything wedding-related on the back burner and focus on stuff we’ve neglected during the wedding planning process), I kind of dumped all of my fabulous DIY ideas and instead had VistaPrint do it.

Our announcements cost $27.44 shipped, for 50 of them with standard envelopes. According to my ’order details’, I saved $20.01 with coupon codes and specials they were running. It was a pretty good deal (though I really only needed about 20 and now I have tons of leftovers!!). But as is often the case, there’s a reason VistaPrint is so cheap.

First off, I “splurged” and paid the extra $3 to have them print it on the fancy Linen paper. Now maybe it’s just me, but I really didn’t think the Linen finish was very good. The paper was not very thick (Michaels cardstock is thicker than that), and check this out: it shows lots of dust.

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Our wedding took place on September 9, 2009 in Hillsboro, North Dakota at the Traill County Courthouse. There were seven guests: our four parents, two siblings, and one mutual friend. Our original budget, set back in March almost on a whim, was $1000.

This post will break down the costs of each element of the wedding. Then I’ll tell you how close we came to our goal budget, and where we splurged/saved.

Ceremony Site Fees: $50 (original estimate: $0)

• Fee to marry at the Courthouse: $50

[Shawna Noel Photography]

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A good while back, I presented you all with this inspiration board.

[sources: cupcakes, pearls, pink/green bouquet, green shoe, couple, jewelry (my photo), men’s ring, courthouse, car, orange/green bouquet, green shoe, barrette.]

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Mr. Mary Jane and I hadn’t planned on having a reception. But Mr. Mary Jane’s parents offered us a picnic! I created save-the-dates and invitations for the picnic, and they were sent to much of the Mary Jane family, a few of our friends, and friends of Mr. Mary Jane’s parents.

The picnic was to start at 6, and Mr. Mary Jane and I arrived at his parents house a little before five to help greet any early arrivals. The Mary Jane household had been buzzing all day as MIL Mary Jane and a few friends and family members scrambled to get everything set up. When we arrived, it was all mostly done.

I did my makeup in pretty much the same way I had done it for the wedding day. I wore blue jeans, a pink tank-top and a ruffly white pin-striped shirt I’d found at TJ Maxx for $14. The white, I figured, made me ’bridal’. (I didn’t want to wear a dress because I knew the mosquito and flies would be bad — and I was right!)

Mr. Mary Jane snapped this shot of me just before the guests started to arrive.

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Well folks, that was it for my pro photos (aside from the family-shots, but did you really want to see those? Yeah, didn’t think so. You don’t know those people anyway). Shawna and Kory did an excellent job capturing our wedding, and Mr. Mary Jane and I were so glad to have them there. They took basically the entire afternoon out of their day to record ours for us, and then provided us with a ton of photos: 3 times more than I was expecting. Kudos to them.

But don’t worry! This isn’t quite the end of the recap train. I’ve still got a little more to share.

After we finished snapping pictures in Hillsboro, we parted ways with our photographers and headed back up to Grand Forks to meet our parents, siblings and friend at L’Bistro.

L’Bistro is a restaurant attached to the CanadInn hotel in Grand Forks. Attached-to-a-hotel makes it really beam with ambiance doesn’t it? It’s actually a really quiet, adult atmosphere with jazz playing softly in the background. It’s one of the few places in town where we figured we

1. Wouldn’t encounter a bunch of screaming kids
2. Could still dine at with Mr. MJ’s youngest brother (other choices were 21-and-over-only).

Well, it turns out we were right on only one of those points.
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After the vows were said, the papers signed, and the hugs administered, it was time for more portraits!

We sent our families on their way back up to Grand Forks, and spent a little time touring Hillsboro (or the area directly around the courthouse, at least) with Shawna and Kory. They’d arrived in Hillsboro early and had already scouted out a bunch of fun backdrops for our couple portraits…

[All photos in this post were taken by the fabulous Shawna Noel Photography unless otherwise noted.]

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While taking pre-wedding portraits, our two families had arrived at the courthouse. Mr. Mary Jane’s parents and mine had never before met, so this was kind of a tense moment (for me, at least). Would they like each other? Would they get along? When you’ve got such a small guest list, you really have to hope that no one will offend each other or anything right off the bat. There isn’t really anyone else for them to talk to. We’re glad that everyone got along really well, and enjoyed each others’ company throughout the afternoon and evening.

[All photos in this post are credited to Shawna Noel Photography unless otherwise noted. Cropping and/or blurring of faces was done by me.]

But where were we? OH YEAH, WEDDING TIME! Let me set the scene…

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