Weddingbee Blog

Happy December, everyone! I don’t know about you, but I appreciate the snow while it’s here and often dread it until then. So how about we take a look back at a warm-ish and awesome day in the fall? Yes, let’s.

After our first look, it was time to head to the ceremony itself.

Here’s something big, folks: I was prepared to feel something really enormous. I was ready for something powerful to take me over. I had tissues in my pocket, and I was ready for the tears…and they never came. The whole time, it was like I was watching from just outside. Were these the words we had asked the minister to read? Why, yes, they were, and they did sound quite nice. Was that the meaningful poem? Yes, it was. Hmm, I can see why we chose it. Hey, are we doing things in the right order?

This didn’t make the ceremony less special to me. I look through these pictures, and it’s almost like my world has shifted a little; I am moved enormously now. But at the time, I was so focused on how it was going that I had trouble being there for it. Now, every picture brings back the emotion from the whole day.

Anyway, on with it.

(All photos by Ellie Leonardsmith or Alison Abreu-Garcia)

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Oh, hello there!

Okay, so I know I said I would get back to your regularly scheduled wedding recaps soon…but instead I got sucked into the “Then and Now” Series. I mean, who doesn’t love embarrassing pictures of me in high school? With my boyfriend?
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Let’s continue with the recaps, shall we?

After our rehearsal in the backyard, it was time to actually get ready for this thing. To be completely honest, I was sort of winging it at this point: I hadn’t really made a timeline beyond “Arrive at lodge around 9:30,” and the ceremony was set to start at 10. At some point I had a vision of all of our bridal brigade in our room with us, helping us get ready and drinking champagne or mimosas and toasting ourselves and each other… yeah, I may have already mentioned that some of my envisionings did not come to fruition. For one thing, 8:30 or even 9 AM really is too early for champagne; for another, our room was very spacious for two people, but was crowded with more than three. So everyone else bopped around the rest of the inn while we got ready.

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I didn’t want to overwhelm you with the beauty of our fabulous invitations, so I saved the actual invites for today…lucky you.

Okay, but really, there have been some really fabulous invitations on the internet, and ours were not those. As I said before, we wanted to keep it simple. That said, I do really love how they came out. They were pretty, but still simple and got the message across. I think the hardest part was figuring out exactly how to convey the message that everyone getting the invitation was invited because they were so important to us. We didn’t do courtesy invites or friendly invites—everyone was very intentionally invited, and we wanted people to know that. We went back and forth on this for awhile, considering almost every single word, and finally settled on:

Because your love, guidance, and friendship have been important to us in our individual lives, we would like you to join us in celebrating and affirming our life as a couple. Please join us for our wedding…

The wording we used was inspired by this post on So You’re EnGayged. Since going through this whole Getting Married thing, I’m finding I have a much greater appreciation for details, like exactly what words are where on invitations. Which invitations did we end up going with, you ask? Well, here:
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We interrupt your regularly scheduled recap posts to bring you—ready for it?—our invitations. Okay, so these were a long time coming, and I’m sorry we didn’t share them sooner, but here goes. I had seen a lot of other people’s prospective invitations, and it helped us to hone in on what we did and didn’t like in invitations. To start, we knew we liked an outdoor theme: birds, trees, leaves. We knew that fancy folder invitations were really pretty, but that we didn’t have the finances or the patience to do something fancy. We knew that we would keep our invitation, and maybe immediate family and best friends would, too, but we also knew a lot of people would throw them away, and so we only wanted to put enough effort into it that we loved it and were okay with other people not realizing how Absolutely Amazing our invitations were.

Fancee’s face to express how awesome our invitations were

A friend of mine from roller derby does graphic design stuff, and she offered to design and print our invitations essentially for cost.
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I’ve been really nervous about writing recaps of our wedding because I don’t want to break it. The whole thing was so magical and important and special that part of me has been afraid some of that will be lost if I let it out in to the world. But then two things happened: first, we had some friends over and played a slide show of our wedding, and it was so moving for everyone that I just felt better afterward. Nothing was lost. And second, I started really following some of the other bees’ recaps, and I am just loving following their weddings. Really, it is kind of amazing (/weird?) how warm and fuzzy reading some of those recaps makes me. So, with the hope that putting all of this out into the world increases the general warm fuzziness, I’m going for it.

We had lots of big plans a month or two before our wedding about how things would go. You guys, things did not go remotely the way Seahorse-in-May thought they would. We were going to have a nice rehearsal the day before, a big group dinner with all of our out of town guests, and then go home to our apartment and get ready there in the morning. Did I already mention that’s not what happened?
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The past month of marriage has been awesome, but you knew it would be. You’re pretty smart. Here’s the thing, though: you don’t know everything, and you can’t prepare for everything. You’re doing a great job trying, but here are some lessons I’d like to share with you:

There will probably be drama. It will probably not come from places you expect, and will come from places you don’t expect. The point of this is not to say that you should be paranoid and always on the lookout for it, but that, really, you should stop worrying about it, because you can’t do anything about it. Whatever the drama is, it has nothing to do with your wedding—it’s just a reason to bring up something that is already there. It will not matter on your wedding day, so why worry about it now?

Identify the details that are really, really important to you, and make them happen. The rest of them just don’t matter, and they don’t have to be amazing. You can spend the morning stamping table numbers two days before your wedding, and you will get compliments on them. They’ll be cute, and everyone will notice the flowers more, anyway.

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A lot of the time, Fancee and I really collaborated on this whole wedding thing. We took details and discussed them together and then figured out which one of us would  be in charge of really carrying the whole thing out. Other times, it was really one of us that was thinking we’d do just that, and instead the conversation went like this:

Me: Do you want to get ready separately so we can have a first look?

Fancee: Sure.

Me: “Sure”? That’s it?

Fancee: Sure.

The decision about which wine to use for 1. champagne toasts and 2. mimosa was definitely collaborative.
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A week before our wedding, my sister asked us which part we were most looking forward to, “besides getting married.”

“Um, the ceremony, I think,” I answered. Because that’s what I was looking forward to the most. I was excited about getting all trembly and teary and emotional. I was excited to finally read my vows and to finally hear Fancee’s vows. I was excited for all that mushy stuff.

My sister rolled her eyes. “That’s what I meant. What else?”

And, you know? Besides that, I couldn’t think of a specific other thing that I was excited about. I was looking forward to that part and to seeing everyone and to eating the delicious food we’d picked out (I gave up being a vegetarian for the day because that bacon was just SO. GOOD.) and dancing to the music by the awesome band we’d found and to being surrounded by so much love…

Surrounded by love: best friend from college appears two nights before the wedding to make our programs! one-eyed jake assists by putting himself where the hands are.

And so it was sort of surprising to look back on the day, three weeks later (happy three week-iversary to us!) and be able to pinpoint the exact favorite part of the day, and have it be none of those things. And at the same time have it be all of those things.
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Hi hive! Sorry I’ve been MIA… I’ve been, uh, busy, as maybe the title of this post suggests (tee hee). Many of you might read it and think, She’s married! She’s pregnant! The Seahorses are getting a baby! Yay babies! Others of you might read the title and think, Whaaaaa? I thought she said she and Fancee weren’t having babies.

And you’d both be (sort of) right. You see, the Seahorses are married, we are (in a sense, to be explained soon) getting a baby, and we definitely are not having biological human babies. Instead we’re having this:
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…and help me find something to do with myself?

When we were in the midst of wedding planning, I would occasionally turn to Fancee and say, “I think I’m going to have post-wedding depression. What will I do with all of this energy post-wedding?”

Don’t worry, the downtime will be short lived: derby tryouts start at the beginning of next month, if I decide to do them. And there are about a million volunteer opportunities I should be taking advantage of… but none of it involves so much love, so many crafts, so many things to show to internet strangers! And, at the same time—and I thought this might happen—I am just way less interested in weddings than I was a month ago. I even unsubscribed from some wedding blogs that I used to love. Yay less blogs to feel bad about not reading! Boo less blogs for when I’m bored and don’t know what to do with myself.

Anyway, here’s what I have been doing: “wifely duties.” I’ve been doing a whole lot of cleaning, and I’m trying to channel the creative energy into creating delicious food. That said, I am not interested in food blogs. If I want to look at it, I want to eat it; and if I can’t eat it NOW, I don’t really want to look at it. That said, I’m typing this while standing next to the caramelized butternut squash that’s baking in the toaster oven. NOM NOM NOM.

So, okay, whine whine whine. Speaking of favors, where’re the pictures? Where’s the good stuff? Fine. Here are our favors, part 3. Or maybe 4. Sorry, I have no idea.

First, we started with our awesome wedding stamp. We had to stamp carefully so that the tree didn’t get on the tags, and only the words were actually inked.

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Amazing everything.

This is a picture of combined awesomeness. In this picture, you can see the beautiful table that our amazing caterer set up, and at which our wonderful wedding coordinator (Hi Laurie!) arranged for our pie-cutting to happen. You can see the hair wreath that I had made for my lovely wife, and you can see the hair flower that I purchased from another bee on Etsy. You can see my amazing suit, version 2.0, which fit just right, and you can see our beautiful, beautiful flowers.
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photo by S. Merand

Before we got married, I spent a long time thinking that when people said your wedding was “the best day of your life,” they were cheapening other things and exaggerating and trying to force the “my one day as a princess” mindset on me. But really, really, the days immediately before and after our wedding day were possibly, and probably, the best days of my life. The people who came made it magical, and my wife continues to help us both hold onto that magic.

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Two weeks ago, a friend of mine who got married last summer said, “Just wait until the week before your wedding. It is so full of love…that was the most amazing week ever.” Well, two weeks before our wedding, I was all, “WHAT WERE YOU TALKING ABOUT THIS IS NOT FULL OF LOVE.” Two weeks before our wedding, things were effing nuts, stressful, we were bickering all the time, and I was crying in therapy.

Then Saturday happened, and marked the change from that week into this week—if you use the right kind of calendar—and DUDE. She was right. The love, it is coming from everywhere. The love is coming from people I’ve never met, it’s coming from our bridal brigade, it’s coming from my family and Fancee’s family, and from people I’ve almost lost touch with. It’s amazing.

So here, my friends, is how it’s happening.

First, I had a bachelorette party. Amazing in and of itself, and I won’t ruin the recap for you with more teaser pictures now, but suffice it to say that walking into a room full of strangers and friends and a man named John ready to serenade me was a-maze-ing. And you would think that being violently ill for the next day might taint the experience, but no no no…it just showed me more love. While I was like this:

My sister showed up to help Fancee make beautiful escort cards, like this:

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Hello, hive! Did you miss me? Did you wonder where I was?

I was in CRAZY BRIDE TOWN. And now I am back. And by back, I mean poking my head in to say hello to the people who faithfully visit me on the interwebs. Hello!

So here’s what’s happening, guys: the little countdown ticker dude on the side of my webpage is counting down. It’s a stubborn little thing, but luckily I caught on a few weeks ago that it was counting down ’til midnight on the day before our wedding, so it appeared to be a day ahead of time. I’m glad I realized that when I did because otherwise I would be FREAKING OUT right now. Not that I’m not already.

So here’s what is happening:

1. I got my hair flower. It is amazing!

My flower, made by a fellow bee!

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