Weddingbee Blog

Long time, no see, friends! I know I said goodbye already, but when Mrs. Avocado suggested this series, I was excited to play along. Since I haven’t really looked at our wedding pictures in almost a year, it was a lot of fun to revisit some pictures I’d forgotten about!

I suppose there is no harm in starting at the end, is there? My first random photo is from late in the reception. I was dancing with my brother and some law school friends, while one of the groomsmen was trying to pick up one of my girlfriends.
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This was a very difficult post to write, and I still wish I could have said it better. But it’s one of my favorite posts because I don’t think there was anywhere outside of this community where I had a chance to voice some of the ambivalence I felt about “getting married.” There was no doubt that I wanted to commit to spending the rest of my life with my husband. But confronting the prospect of “being married” still gave me pause for thought.

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It was an exciting day in the Spaniel household when we finally got our wedding invitations in the mail! I didn’t take any pictures—our focus was on staying dry during the latest torrential downpour—but oh, the relief! I carried them all in a plastic bag inside a plastic tub to keep them dry on the way to the post office, and only managed to drop one into a big dirty puddle on the sidewalk. Luckily, that invite was headed to New Zealand, so I can blame the vagaries of international mail delivery for that one, and no one will be the wiser!

In addition to excitement, though, I feel a little bit of… alarm?
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I’ve been wanting to write A Bee’s Life post pretty much since I became a bee, so it seems appropriate that I should finish my tenure here with my contribution to this series.

How did I find Weddingbee?

A few months after getting engaged, I started to think more about the cultural traditions that I hoped to incorporate into our wedding. You already know I had a non-traditional mehndi, but you have to know the rules to break them! So I did some Googling on mehndis and came across this archived post by Mrs. Jasmine. Jasmine and I go way back—to high school and college, so when I saw her picture on the blog, I got curious! (Fun fact: when I saw her picture and occupation on the side of the blog, I thought an impostor blogger was pretending to be Jasmine. Who knew I was so suspicious?!) I read through a few of her posts and some of the newer bloggers’ posts, and got hooked!

Before finding Weddingbee I garnered most of my wedding inspiration from sites like Style Me Pretty and Green Wedding Shoes, which I still love. Our wedding had a different aesthetic, though, and seeing the great variety of bloggers here made Weddingbee my go-to site pretty quickly.

My application story
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People who have been there and done that will warn you that things will go wrong on your wedding day. It’s probably true, and you’re wise to accept it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do something to prevent some disasters from ever taking place by doing just a little bit of research early on. I signed contracts with and gave deposits to at least three vendors that I would never do business with or recommend again, and I did it because I did not do my homework!

(source)

Let’s say you are budget-hunting and found a potential wedding vendor through a Facebook ad or on Craigslist. You don’t have any local bride-friends who have used the vendor, and a Google search doesn’t yield much that is helpful. Neither does a check of Yelp or the usual wedding review sites. This isn’t a red flag in and of itself, because the person you’ve found may be new to the industry and without much of a portfolio. Maybe this is why he or she is willing to offer you such a tempting deal! But before you commit, there is one site you should search if you are in Canada or the United States:
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Well hello, Hive, remember me? I already told you that I wasn’t ready to say good-bye, but now that I’m nearing on one year of blogging for Weddingbee (holy crap; that’s coming right up!), I thought it was time to start wrapping things up with my last few recap posts. *tear*

For the sake of brevity and fairness, I’ll only be review the vendors that I would recommend—those that I’m neutral or negative on I’ll either leave in the Vendor Reviews or in my head.

Venue: Calamigos Ranch

Highly recommend

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When people get frustrated with you and your crazy planning ways, they’ll condescendingly tell you that “it’s just a party” and you shouldn’t get all caught up in it (not that this happened to me, oh no… actually, I’m really not being sarcastic; I just hear it happens to a lot of brides) ;), you can tell them: Mrs. Spaniel says you’re wrong. Actually, don’t tell them that, because then they’ll really think you’re crazy. Who is Mrs. Spaniel? In any event, I know now that a wedding is not just a party, and I know that because it’s the part of the wedding about which I have the least to write.

I can honestly say, in hindsight, the most important part was the ceremony—it was the whole point. The most rewarding parts were the speeches our friends and family made—we had a wedding because we wanted to share this momentous occasion with our community, and feeling their love coming back at us made it worth it. The party? It was fun.

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After a few pictures and a chance for guests to grab a drink, the DJ called everyone into the reception area to continue the cocktail hour inside, while we made our way onto the dance floor for our “grand entrance” (we boogied into the room to Wilco’s Hoodoo Voodoo, which was the only adequately celebratory song for such an occasion, I think!), from which we would go straight into our first dance.

So let me tell you a little about this first dance business. I mentioned before that we were going to attempt a Danish wedding waltz, but we were really nervous about how it would play out on the wedding day. So in addition to our two private lessons, we practiced twirling around our living room almost every night for a month, sent the video to our wedding party, our DOC, our photographer, and our DJ just to make sure everyone was prepared for the awesomeness that was going to happen on the dance floor. And in case that wasn’t enough, we practiced with most of our wedding party in the hotel suite the night before the wedding.

And then we rocked the hell out of it.

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Way back when I was a wee ’bee, I promised I’d share our final budget numbers at the end. I don’t want to say goodbye on a budget post, though, so you’re stuck with me through a few more recaps.

Yes, that’s what you’re stuck with (guest photo)

So without further ado…
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I would like to take full credit for how beautiful the dining room looked, but I can’t—we picked Calamigos Ranch because we wanted something that was nearly finished already, and it was beautiful before we added a thing.

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After the ceremony, the cocktail hour began. Mr. Spaniel and I didn’t want to miss our entire cocktail hour with our guests, and had planned our entrance to the reception area and first dance for only fifteen minutes in as a result. While we waited for our cue, Mr. Spaniel and I took a few minutes to sit and reflect on the huge step we had just taken.

Just kidding. We sat and took directions from about seven different photographers.
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It was time.

(This was our recessional music, and the unofficial “anthem” of our wedding, because we married on the Persian New Year… and it’s one of the happiest love songs I know. Play it while you read!)

Surrounded by our closest friends…
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And the first step in that procession is getting down the aisle.

First the groomsmen and Middle Brother Spaniel took their positions…

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The portraits finished with fifteen minutes to go before the wedding ceremony(!!!). Mr. Spaniel grabbed the ketubah, and we were off to sign our lives away!

I love how excited we look here.

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Okay, and dudes, too!

(Hey, a barn! We had an accidentally rustic wedding!)

We had (what I think was) a really large wedding party. I liked the idea (in theory) of asking just a few people who were especially important to us, but it just so happened that we couldn’t think of any less than enough people to make up a small army. Still, how awesome to have such a troop stand beside you on one of the most meaningful days of your life!
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I haven’t talked much about our flowers other than a tangential post of my “inspiration” bouquet, and I’m pretty happy I didn’t over-think it. Instead, I asked Devi of Les Fleurs de Vie for a green, cream, and lavender bouquet in muted tones (with a more monochromatic green scheme for the bridesmaids), and decided not to get too particular about the details. The end result was soft and lovely, and perfect.

(BM-Noe models the bridesmaid bouquet)

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