Absolutely the most frustrating part of this whole process has been negotiating with Mr. Pumpkin and Momma Pumpkin to try to make everyone happy. I think that we are all pretty clear on the fact that Mr. Pumpkin and I will be making the final decisions and that input is certainly welcome in all areas of planning, but nobody seems able to articulate the reasonings behind their answers to my questions. My problem is particularly with the word “no”.
I loathe the word. I cannot stand it! Well actually, I should rephrase that. I hate the word “no” without any sort of explanation accompanying it. If you are going to say “no” then you had better be able to tell me why. Lately these are the kinds of conversations I have been having:
#1
Me: Hey, what do you think about cutting down the late lunch to only cheeseburgers and sweet potato fries?
Momma: No.
Me: *blank stare for about a minute…* What do you mean “no”?
Momma: I don’t like it
Me: Okay…….., why don’t you like it?
Momma: I don’t know…
Me: Okay! Great! I am going to go jump off the roof now.
I finally painted one of our shepherd’s hooks and got my jars and ribbon out to see what they will look like. Originally we were just going to have the jars hanging on ribbon like so:

My hair trial was so much fun! I do not get my hair done, like, ever, but I really had fun today working out what to do with it for the wedding. As is the case in most situations, it is all about the company you keep–and Grant and I hit it off immediately! We talked politics, we talked celebrities, we talked love stories (both his and mine), we talked travel, we just blathered on and on until we were done and I hardly even noticed that a whole hour had passed!
We started out looking at this picture of me in my dress and decided that my head looked waaaaay too tiny in comparison to the rest of my body when my hair was slicked back like that.
… you kiss me when we’re playing the kissing game!*
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.
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.
…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.
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!
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.