Weddingbee Blog

… you kiss me when we’re playing the kissing game!*

(www.wedpix.com)

Mr. Pumpkin and I have been trying to decide what to do about the dreaded glass clinking/kissing business that always happens at weddings. It isn’t that we don’t like kissing  , we just aren’t really a PDA kind of couple and we certainly don’t want to be standing up every half hour to smooch during dinner. Our original line of thinking was just to not say anything and hope that nobody remembers to do it. Our MC (my big brother) feels strongly that if we want to control it at all then we need to have some sort of plan. So, we have been trying to think of some ideas of how we can make this fun but also difficult so that we don’t have to do it too many times. These are our options thus far: Read more…

On Friday I volunteered at a golf tournament hosted by the Saskatchewan Wine & Spirit Association and benefiting the Saskatchewan Down Syndrome Society, and I am so glad that I did! I had agreed to work at the tournament weeks ago but as the date was approaching and my to-do list remained full I was thinking that it had been a mistake to commit myself to a full day of volunteering this close to the wedding. In the end, I couldn’t have been more wrong! Spending a day thinking about something other than the wedding, and frankly other than myself, was exactly what I needed. It reminded me to keep all of this in perspective and that my choice in underwear on June 16th could not be more inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Read more…

We have had just about as much trouble finding Momma Pumpkin a mother of the bride outfit as we did finding me a gown! We have spent about six months looking in three provinces and two US states, scouring the internet and going through several trial outfits that were all eventually returned. Today we had a major victory when the possible last resort dress that we ordered from Mon Cheri through NWL turned out to be the absolute perfect dress that we have been looking for all this time. Momma looks beautiful and, more importantly, she is comfortable in the dress.

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I received the following e-mail in my account on Friday:

“A Party in Celebration of Mr. & Miss. Pumpkin!

Host: MOH & BM of the Pumpkins
Location: Younger brother of Mr. Pumpkin’s Farm
When: Saturday, June 9, 8:00pm

Please bring your fun self, along with your fun friends (all are welcome!), for an evening of fun and frivolity at the expense of Mr. & Miss Pumpkin!

Snacks, Hot dogs, Hamburgers, and Mix will be provided, and $2.00 shooters will also be sold! Those interested in the highly coveted Shooter Girl positions may send your resume, along with picture, to the attention of Mr. Pumpkin’s single older brother at ……….@hotmail.com. Only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

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…and of strife and upheaval! But I’m certain honey, that life would be sunny, with plenty of money and you!

Money is never a safe topic, but it may never be more dangerous than at the beginning of planning a wedding. The average cost of weddings are climbing like crazy, and the “need” to have the best of everything can drive you nuts! How do you combat all of this? With a well thought out and properly constructed budget. There have been a couple of posts on Weddingbee in the past about what all should go into your budget and what percentage of your budget should be spent on what part of the wedding, but what about the very first step? How do you know how much you can or should spend? Who will contribute to the costs and how much will they give?

In most cases it will happen in one of two ways: you will either know how much you can spend first before you really start planning anything or you will be asked by people who are contributing, or just may want to determine for yourself first, what a wedding will cost. This can be a very hard question to answer at the beginning of planning as you have yet to see what is truly out there in terms of options for you and you have so many decisions ahead of you, some you may not even know about yet! In our case the wedding will be paid by both sets of parents as well as by us, in an unequal three way split.

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No, no. I am not going to write a review of that incredibly awful movie with Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney (or was it Dylan McDermott… I always get those two confused, sort of like Tai Chi and Chai Tea….), in response to Robyn’s comment in the Diversity post I thought I would write a little sumpin’ sumpin’ about the start of my wedding planning experience, beginning with how we chose our wedding date.For Mr. Pumpkin and I this was a pretty easy decision due to the circumstances that we were in at the time. As I mentioned in the post on how Mr. Pumpkin proposed, we have been dating since we were 15 years old and so we always knew we would get married, it was simply a question of when. When I applied to law school we knew we would be putting off getting married for another 3 years. So, last spring when we could see the light at the end of the tunnel and we finally knew where I would be articling after I graduated, we started to really talk about planning the wedding.

Mr. Pumpkin’s favorite number is 8 and when we originally talked about what kind of wedding we wanted, we both agreed that we wanted a small intimate Friday night affair. So we looked it up and 08/08/08 was perfect. I thought that we were settled on that until Mr. Pumpkin surprised me with the proposal a whole year early!

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Mr. Pumpkin and I had our joint shower in his hometown this weekend and it was an absolute blast! As I blogged about earlier, the hostesses are the moms of all of the kids in town who are the same age as Mr. Pumpkin, so they all know both of us really well and the embarrassing/secret stories all came out! They told stories that even our moms didn’t know about, and we were all just rolling in laughter. Mr. Pumpkin even showed up in his Sunday best (I was a little worried that he would show up wearing a t-shirt with skulls or profanity on it) and the hostesses made me, my Mom, his Mom and his Grandmom very pretty corsages. I couldn’t have asked for a better afternoon! It was, in every way, the perfect shower.

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I am totally not bitter about the fact that it is impossible for me to have chiavari chairs at my wedding. I am sooooo okay with it. Really, I am fine with it. I could care less. There are so many more important issues in the world today than whether or not Miss Pumpkin has pretty chairs at her wedding. I didn’t really want those ceremony programs from MS Weddings that hang on the sides of the chairs by cute little ribbon loops.

I’m trying to use these little daily affirmations to help me get over the fact that I can’t have my coveted chiavari chairs at my wedding. Do you think it’s working? Me neither…

One of the hardest parts of wedding planning for me has been accepting the fact that there are some options that are just not possible for me. Flipping through MS Weddings or InStyle is sometimes painful because I know that the set-ups featured in them are just not offered in my neck of the woods. Chiavari chairs are one of those thing that I would be willing to splurge on but there just isn’t anyone around here who offers them to rent.

These are the best options available to me:

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Our reception is being held in a big white tent on the deck of a restaurant. While it will be decorated and lit by strings of white lights, I was worried that it would still be too white from about 8 feet and up. When I was originally planning I loved these pictures (from MS Weddings and The Knot respectively):

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Miss Lovebug recently said that she wants to move to Canada because of all of our cute wedding traditions. Well, I think it’s only fair to fill her, and you, in on everything before she makes that rash decision. I fear she may change her mind after hearing this one…

One of my least favorite traditions at wedding dances around here (maybe this happens in other parts of Canada and the US as well, but I *think* this is unique to Saskatchewan) is the Bride/Groom dance with all of the members of the opposite sex at the wedding.

In most cases the female guests will request “I’m Too Sexy” or some similar song and then form a circle on the dance floor with the Groom in the middle and take turns dancing with him and removing articles of his clothing! You can’t see me right now but I too am shaking my head in disbelief, even though I have seen it many many times. It never gets to the point where they remove his pants but it gets close sometimes. Crazy.

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Sephora is hosting a contest called “Put Sleeveless Back in Your Ceremony” by DERMAdoctor. You can win an Anne Barge wedding gown and a year’s supply of KP Duty! Enter on-line here! Good luck to those of you who can enter! As always the contest is only open to those in the USA. Booooourns!

I have been stressing about our two big moves and changing our address for about a month now. I had made a huge long list of everyone we would need to notify and I have slowly been changing our address to my parents. Since we are somewhat homeless for the next three months while our house is being built, I’m living with my parents. And as I blogged about earlier, Mr. Pumpkin is either living and working on the farm or is on the road with work. As I mentioned before, I am totally anal about my mail, so this has been such a weight on my shoulders–what if I miss someone? What if the new tenants of our apartment get my mail–can they use it to steal my identity? Etc…

After weeks of typing my new address into on-line customer service pages for everything we have mailed to us on a regular basis (it’s shocking how many services/company send us mail!), I finally went to the Canada Post website to do the final step: have our mail forwarded. I can’t say enough about how easy and surprisingly cheap it is to have your mail forwarded through their Smart Moves program! It took about 10 minutes for me to put in all of the info and verify that it is actually me doing this and then it only cost $36 for 6 months of mail forwarding! How great is that? It also had a nice checklist of things you should do when moving and the option to send an e-mail to all of your friends and family with your updated address. I’m sure the USPS has a similar (if not identical) service. Read more…

I recently heard an incredibly sad and horrifying story about a young girl who went to Africa to volunteer in an clinic and contracted some sort of disease in her eyes. Within two days she was completely blind! It took five days to arrange a flight for her back to Canada where she had to have both corneas replaced. YIKES!!!

So, today I am researching Travel Insurance for our honeymoon.

I would like to ask any insurance agents out there if they could please make this process just a little bit easier. Good lord! No two companies use the same terms for anything so it is impossible to compare these products and they all seem grossly inadequate to me. Granted, I am looking for full eyeball protection after hearing that story, so my standards may be a smidge too high. But still, I’d like more than a five-day trip extension in the case of double dismemberment!

So far I think it will come down to CAA (Canadian Auto Association) and RBC (Royal Bank of Canada). They are the most comparable and seem the most comprehensive to me. At a cost of about $50 each, we will have emergency medical coverage, trip interruption/cancellation coverage, and baggage coverage (including travel documents and a 24-hour number to call for the 15 days that we will be away).

Have you purchased travel insurance for your honey or mini-moon? Did you find the process as frustrating as I am? Am I missing anything big in the coverage that I am looking at?

Our RSVP deadline was yesterday and we have received about 70% of our responses! That is higher than we thought we’d have at this point so I am feeling alright with where we’re sitting at the moment. What I am having trouble with is the wishy washy answers I am getting from some of our guests. Some examples of these are, “Well, I don’t really know my summer schedule yet but I am really hoping to come!” and “I am coming to Regina for another wedding in July so it might be a little hard on the wallet but I am hoping to make it!” and my personal favorite, “Well, our plane home from Thailand gets into Edmonton at 10:00pm on Friday night so we should be able to make it to Regina (9 hours away) in time for the wedding on Saturday!” It is true, it is technically possible for them to make it to Regina for the 5:00pm wedding but c’mon buddy! It ain’t gonna happen! I really love them for wanting to come but that just seems silly to believe that they will make it. Read more…

How new does your “something new” have to be? I was counting on my dress being my “something new” but after watching Desperate Housewives this weekend, I am starting to think that may not be good enough.

In this Sunday’s episode Gabby was frantic moments before her wedding because Bree had not yet arrived with a bracelet that was to fulfill Gabby’s “something new”. Now, I know that this is Desperate Housewives and that there is often drama where there needn’t be any on that show, but now I am really wondering… how new is your “something new”?

(Photo from justjared)