Weddingbee

Wow what a lot of work this guy put into his proposal!! Congrats!

For people that want to do lemonade/ice tea/beverage bars or candy buffets, Crate and Barrel has some great affordable retro lidded glass jars. 2 gallon for $18.95, 1 gallon for $10.95 and 1/2 gallon for $9.95.

I love the beverage bar idea for an outdoor summer wedding. If you set it out before the ceremony begins, it’s also an excellent way for guests to have a refreshing drink and mingle if they arrive a little early. A nice little touch that’s afforable, thoughtful, and something your guests will definitely appreciate.

After obsessing over every single detail, I knew in the end that I would really be the only person who noticed. But I’m an obsessive perfectionist and I wouldn’t be able to have it any other way. Yes people loved the little personal touches - the photo collage of guests, bathroom baskets, newsletters, etc. - but in the end I think only a couple of things had the biggest impact on the success of the wedding. It’s easier for me to see what really mattered in retrospect because at the time everything matters.

I truly loved, loved, loved my wedding day and I got so many letters, emails and phone calls from guests telling me that it was “the best wedding” they’d ever attended.

These are my top 5 suggestions for a great wedding:

1) A great band and/or dj/mc. You don’t need both, but you need someone that’s good. Music totally sets the tone for the reception - I’ve been to weddings where crappy music totally destroys the mood. At our wedding, a band played for the first four hours and we paid a little more for a dj to spin the last 1-2 hours. It was totally worth it - it really kicked the party up a notch.

2) A fun crowd. We had some really fun guests that were constantly on the dance floor for both fast songs and slow songs. They really set the atmosphere and guests that aren’t big dancers all danced.

3) Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. We created two custom drinks - Love Potion (for the ladies) and Magic Mojito (for the gentlemen) and put the recipes in frames on the bar. This took the guesswork out of ordering so people were drinking these all night long. Many a guest were inebriated. We also ended up saving a fortune in alcohol by having custom drinks made from one type of liquor - I got a $1000 refund!

4) A day of wedding planner. They kept the flow of the wedding going and everything on schedule. So many things went wrong and my wedding planners were there to handle everything. They’re also a neutral party to help wrangle all your crazy relatives from both sides. I would have paid double for the peace of mind they gave me on the big day. It’s a stressful day and believe me you will absolutely need one.

5) Personalize it. Show your personalities/religions/cultures. We had a Paebaek ceremony to reflect my Korean background and most people told me that this was their favorite part of the wedding.

All the other things that I agonized over - linens, flowers, stationary, cake, etc. They didn’t matter as much in the end. I think the wedding would have been just as great with the 5 things above.

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I had 6 months to plan the wedding once I moved to New York. We already had the venue - the beautiful Westside Loft - but nothing else done yet. I started this separate blog dedicated to chronicling every aspect of my wedding planning and I quickly became OBSESSED with every single little detail. My subscribers increased quickly and xangans even forwarded the site to their engaged friends that weren’t on xanga. Soon I started receiving emails from prospective brides daily asking me for advice, thanking me for my helpful site and asking me if I wanted to plan their weddings. (I’m not going to plan any weddings except for those of friends because it’s hard work!)

I love blogging and I love weddings and I love helping people. My little wedding blog made me realize that I could actually turn all of this into a profession! Mr. Bee is also in the blogging industry so he helped me map out my business plan and the concept for a wedding website. I’ve been planning on launching www.weddingbee.com (the site isn’t up yet) for quite some time now. I hit some stumbling blocks and got a bit sidetracked for awhile, but I’m back on track so be on the lookout for the site launch soon!

On March 5, 2005, Mr. Bee and I got married exactly 1 year and 4 months after we met. Today is our 10 month wedding anniversary in fact. So how’s married life? It’s absolutely wonderful.

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I’d been helping my parents out for 3 1/2 years when I first met Mr. Bee. It was one of the most miserable, stressful and depressed times of my life. I had been running my parents’ vocational school but after September 11th, all their schools were in crisis. Public programs the vocational school relied on were heavily cut because of the war, all schools that granted international visas had to go through a grueling renewal process. I oversaw every application, every contract, every site visit, everything for 4 schools during that time. It would be one thing if I were doing this for myself. Because I was doing it for my family I took so much personal responsibility - I felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. Failure was not an option.

One day I just broke down and cried in front of my dad. I couldn’t take it anymore. My family felt immensely grateful for everything I’d done, but I was involved with everything from legal maintenance to finances to administration to day-to-day operations and they relied on me so much, there was never a good time for me to leave. I’d sacrificed a lot to help my family and I’d do it again in a heartbeat but it was time for me to be a little selfish and think of my own happiness. I felt so guilty wanting to leave but if I stayed, I would have died. I told them I’d oversee a summer program that was coming up and then I wanted to move to New York. My family agreed.

The summer program ended and on August 22, 2004 (about 10 months after I first met Mr. Bee), I moved to New York. I’ve suffered from anxiety, depression, and ocd for most of my life and this was honestly the first time I’d been happy in a decade. I don’t believe that you can find happiness through another person - you first have to be happy with yourself. And I was happy.

Mr. Bee and I always say that if it weren’t for September 11th, we never would have met because I never would have blogged about our school problems (which were a direct result of 9/11) and he never would have contacted me. Ironically we live right by the former World Trade Center site and pass by it on our way to the subway every single day.

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It was now April and we’d been together 5 months. Mr. Bee’s parents were visiting for a week from the Philippines. I had already booked a flight to New York before they decided to come and was scheduled to arrive the day after they left but I changed my flight so that I could meet them. Dinner went off without a hitch. Mr. Bee’s parents were nice, friendly, and I don’t think they had any objections to us getting married. Phew.

I came back to New York in May. I knew that Mr. Bee was going to propose on this trip. We’d been together 6 months now and I couldn’t wait because 6 months may sound like a short period of time, but it felt like an eternity. My parents would never have let me move cross country to New York unless we were engaged and we desperately wanted to be together.

On May 7th, we returned to that same wine bar where we first met. One waiter was acting suspiciously nice and nervous when we arrived and to tell you the truth, he gave it away and I knew immediately but I played along.After our dinner the jazzy music playing overhead was suddenly eclipsed by Top of the World by the Carpenters.

When I returned home after I first met Mr. Bee last year, my dad caught me walking around the house singing Top of the World. He said to me, “Why are you so happy? You must be in love!” I wasn’t even aware that I was singing! Hehe and he was right of course. When I told Mr. Bee about this, he immediately downloaded the song and listened to it over and over. So cheesy as the song is, it kinda became our song.

I digress. As soon as I heard the song, I knew that he was going to propose at that very moment. Mr. Bee said all these wonderful things to me, but I was soooooooooo excited I’m not sure I remember it all because he opened the ring box while he was talking! He proposed and of course I said yes, yes, yes! When you meet the person you want to marry - you just know.It doesn’t take you years and years to decide if he or she is the one.We both knew that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together after that first week.

The waitress that kept refilling our wine the first night we were there remembered us too! Everyone is so nice to you when you get engaged I wish we could do it all the time.

When I returned home, I told my parents that Mr. Bee and I had gotten engaged. They were shocked. How could we get engaged without telling them?! In Korean culture you don’t just get engaged by yourselves… it’s something that’s decided and agreed upon with the entire family. I explained to them that that’s not how it works in America. Still they thought I was kinda crazy.

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Up until this point, everything was going perfectly and seemed like a dream. But it was now time to MEET THE PARENTS (dun, dun, dun - cue dramatic music).

My parents are both traditional and liberal (well for Korean parents). My dad speaks accentless English, has a masters degree in English, and is an English teacher so he’s not your typical Korean dad. My mom’s English is not as good as my dad’s, but she can understand and speak English fluently. Still… in the end I guess they are your typical, traditional, Korean parents.

Mr. Bee is half Japanese, half White and sadly I knew from the beginning that race would be an issue with my family. I always thought that I would marry someone that was Korean, my family always assumed that I would marry someone Korean, no one in my family has ever married or even dated someone that wasn’t Korean. But I would never wish that Mr. Bee were Korean or anything else because that would make him a different person than the one I fell in love with.

I knew this dinner was not going to be easy and needless to say I was extremely nervous. My family was going to be hard on him. Mr. Bee on the other hand was as calm as a cucumber - he was prepared for my family to hate him for 10 years (yes he actually said that), and he would just show my family how much he loved me. What more could he do after all. My parents, my brother, Mr. Bee and I all met at a galbi restaurant in koreatown. My mom had booked a private room so that we could all talk.

Here’s a gander at some of the questions he had to answer:

1) Can you tell me the difference between: emotion, feeling, sentiment and sensation?

2) You seem like a very intelligent person. Do you think my daughter will be obedient enough for you?

3) Have you ever considered the economic and political direction of China over the next 30 years?

4) How would you define the word philosophy?

5) Who do you think needs the other person more: Hillary or Bill Clinton and why?

6) What were the main factors that contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?

7) Karl Marx wrote a good book on the division of labor that really influenced me. What do you think of Das Kapital?

Korean people believe in “jung.” They say that you’re only in love for the first three years of a relationship and then it’s all “jung.” What do you think about this?

9) Is there any chance your business could move to Los Angeles? (His company was based in New York)

(yes these questions are verbatim)

Mr. Bee also brought my father The Origins of Virtue as a gift because he had enjoyed The Moral Animal by Robert Wright and the two books are similar in subject matter. To which my father responded, “I wonder if this is a gift. Perhaps it is more like a bribe.”

Dinner lasted three hours. Mr. Bee was calm the entire time, and answered all the crazy questions perfectly. Despite their hardest efforts to rattle him, I could tell that my family was impressed. They liked him and they could tell that he really loved me. I doubt they would have been nearly as hard on Mr. Bee had he been Korean. It was a pretty unfair situation for him and I felt horrible. I just sat there the entire time quietly sipping my soju.

The odd thing is that my parents never brought up the fact that everything was moving so quickly. We’d hardly known each other 2 months and we were already talking marriage. When Mr. Bee brought it up, my dad deflected the topic of marriage altogether, and said that he would first need to meet Mr. Bee’s parents. An engagement is not something that takes place until the families have met in Korean culture. It’s not only a marraige of the two people involved after all, it’s a marriage of the two families. The only problem was, Mr. Bee’s parents lived on a remote island in the Philippines….

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So we met in November. Mr. Bee flew to southern California to visit me the first week of December and we drove down to La Jolla/San Diego for 4 days. In retrospect it seems a little crazy that we went away for the weekend the second time we ever saw each other. But we’d been talking on the phone every day including a record breaking 10 hour conversation and it felt like we’d known each other forever. The weekend was relaxing and wonderful. Spending 4 days, 24 hours a day together without fighting is a good sign - we really got along.

I flew to New York to spend Christmas and New Year’s with Mr. Bee. We did all the couple-y things like go to Rockefeller Center, ice skate at Wollman Rink, romantic dinners and drinks out on the town. On Christmas day we had tons of presents for each other. The first Christmas together as a couple is always so exciting. This was my favorite present - I’m a scrapbooker so Mr. Bee bought me a scrapbook and filled it with scrapbooking supplies…

A schedule of scrapbooking classes..

A copy of this astrological chart Mr. Bee’s friend did for him before we met…

There’s a good story behind this chart. Before we met, Mr. Bee emailed his good friend:

“I am meeting a Xangan for drinks tomorrow night. It was meant to be casual, but as I called her to coordinate it occured to me that it felt very “date-y”. Hmm… should be interesting.”

Her response:

“I put up a chart for your meeting tonight (it will be significant if you were to wind up together… er don’t worry about this, it all goes on behind the scenes when you have an astrologer friend)”“This is the chart of a (good) accident, waiting to happen and it’s all about Venus. Love and money… I am very sorry, but I have no bad news for chart, okay? There is a major window of opportunity here. Use it!”

Basically, it means that there were a lot of factors working in our favor from the day we were meeting, to the time, our birth sign compatibility, and something about a “harmonic convergence.” In other words, our “date” was gonna go unbelievably well. And boy was she ever right. She’s the same friend Mr. Bee called the day after we met and told her that he just met the woman he was going to marry.

Finally on the last page of the scrapbook, there were these stickers of a wedding dress.

The next time we would see each other in January, Mr. Bee would fly out to LA to ask my parents for their permission to marry me…

I joined xanga in April of 2003 and little did I know that it was soon to become a part of my daily life. The site is very addictive if I do say so myself. In June of 2003, I posted about a serious problem I was having with my family businesses. I was stressed, overwhelmed, and just venting. Mr. Bee contacted me through an email link on my site after he read the post because he thought he might be able to help me out. I’d never had any prior contact with him, but I gave him my work phone number, he called, and we talked on the phone briefly. He gave me some advice about different things I could do and if that didn’t pan out, he said he’d call in a favor from someone he knew in local government. Luckily, the problem worked itself out soon after and I emailed him to thank him for offering his help to a complete stranger.

Months went by. We commented on each other’s sites from time to time but we didn’t really have any other interaction - not a phone call, not a text message, not an instant message. One day I blogged about coming to New York for a vacation in November (I was living in LA at the time), and through a series of comments back and forth on each other’s sites, we somehow decided to meet up while I was there. I didn’t know anything about him other than his job and his age because he didn’t really blog, but I wanted to thank him for trying to help me out. He had an unfair advantage because knew me thru my xanga where I detailed pretty much every moment of my life.

We met on a rainy night at a small wine bar in the west village. I didn’t think it was a date, but soon it sure started to feel like a date. We hit it off instantly. I don’t mean in a “gee this is going well” sorta way… I mean in a “this is the coolest person I’ve ever met in my entire life” sorta way! I’m usually very guarded, but he made me feel very comfortable and at ease… he made me laugh a lot. People were sitting inches away from us on both sides, but we didn’t even notice because it felt like we were the only people in the room.We were so into each other our waitress kept refilling our wine carafe - we didn’t even order it and we didn’t even notice she was refilling it! The night was perfect - and it wasn’t just all the wine we had consumed. After that night, we were inseparable for the rest of my vacation.

The next day, Mr. Bee’s friend called to ask how his “date” went. He replied, “Barring an act of God, I just met the woman that I’m going to marry.”

I was surfing wedding messageboards yesterday so it’s picture time! I love the pink/brown color scheme. Initially I wanted to do it for my brother’s wedding, but the venue is a little dark so we decided to go with something more vibrant and season appropriate.

Cakes:

Favors:

Table Decor:

Invitations: