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Initially we seriously considered doing the flowers ourselves. My cousin and her mother were florists in another life (my auntie did my parents’ flowers for their wedding). I am also pretty handy with flowers and I like them.
There are a few major snags: we don’t live in Kansas City, we likely won’t have access to massive fridge or cooler space, my cousin will also be traveling for the wedding and we want her to enjoy the adventure, AND I don’t want to be frazzled. I know myself enough to know that I would probably be frazzled if we DIY’ed the flowers. Just The Facts of Life.
So we started hunting for pretty florists that hopefully used local, in-season flowers. Boy oh boy we did. Ashley with Good Earth Floral Design Studio (and Mr. & Mrs.) will be our flower mistress. Check her work out:
Just over a year ago the State of California processed our domestic partnership paperwork and officially made us “domesticated in the eyes of the state.” Would you like to see what it looks like?
(personal photo)
It looks kind of plain right?
You have been warned: this is a pic-heavy post…
Pretty pictures…we want ‘em. We also want a photographer who will be OK with non-pro paparazzi (i.e., my family and various other wedding guests) and who will play well with other vendors. (I talk a little more about our vendor requirements here if you want to read all of the randomness.)
You see, my dad doesn’t just like playing with motion pictures—he also likes photographs, as do my sister and a few other guests. These people will most assuredly have cameras on them at the wedding, and they will probably try and sneak shots alongside the pro. AND we want them to do their thing, because that is a good time for them. We absopositively do not want a photographer who is snippy and tells people to go away, or worse yet points at people and says “you here,” “you move.” So impersonal. Oh, there was a laundry list of wants, likes, and “oh no they didn’t”s to consider. The list included things like we get the rights to our own pictures, maybe they set up a faux-to booth, they are fun, they like people, etc. So we looked and looked.
There was something really surprising to us that we didn’t anticipate at all: at least half of the photographers in the Kansas City area mentioned G-d on their website. Some of them are fantastic photographers, but we didn’t want to risk it because our photographer is going to be interacting with all of our guests and spending a fair amount of time with us. After creating spreadsheets and showing websites to our nearest and dearest, we reached out to three photographers who had pictures that captured emotion and were modern.
Image from Melissa Lin Ellis on Facebook / Photo by Melissa Lin Ellis / Wedding: Nikki & Tobias
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After rambling about some details and random thoughts, I realized I haven’t talked about why we decided to plan a pseudo-destination wedding in Kansas City. (I say pseudo because the term destination wedding always reminds me of Mexico, Hawaii, or Jamaica—not Kansas City.) People that have known me for years look at me a little sideways when they learn where we are getting married.
I grew up in northern California (five hours or so north of San Francisco) and Oregon (Eugene), I went to college in western Massachusetts, most of my family is sprinkled along the West Coast (with heavy concentrations in Oregon and the Bay Area), and we currently live in the Napa Valley. Sweetie Scone, on the other hand, grew up in Kansas City, went to college in Kansas, headed west a few years back, and then her parents became snowbirds and landed in Phoenix. Now initially we had no idea where we should get married—my hometown (Eureka), her hometown (Kansas City), somewhere in the Northwest, or the Bay Area—so we talked a lot about what was important to us.
Let’s talk a bit about catering…
We were ecstatic that we had found a caterer the first time out. My FMIL and FFIL had recently attended a wedding that they had catered, and they had rave reviews for them. The sales manager was gay, they had catered for other same-sex couples, and when we met the owners they were really nice so we felt really comfortable with them. But there was a catch: we could not taste their food before signing a contract and laying down $2,500. That made me kind of nervous, but as I said they had great reviews, FMIL and FFIL were still raving about the food, and they seemed to have their stuff together.
So in September we asked them to put together a contract. We decided that we were OK laying down a hefty deposit before tasting the goods. So we waited…
October passed and we hadn’t heard anything. I sent an email just to check in; we were way ahead of the game and totally understood they might have more pressing events. The response we got back confirmed that they were “super busy” and were working on our contract—OK, no problem.
November passed and we hadn’t heard anything, so again I sent an email to check in. This time we didn’t receive a response—kind of concerning, but it was the holiday season.
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
After spending our flight back to SFO making pro and con lists for each venue and talking about the possibility of going with the first caterer we met with, we had some decisions…
Our reception would include good beer and a great view of Kansas City! Check out these pictures:
Image via Erica May / Photo by Erica May / Event: Kate & Justin’s Wedding
…sisters, that is! (Forewarning: this post is pic heavy.)
Sweetie Scone’s family goes on a canoe trip just about every July in the Ozarks, and in 2010 we were able to head east to join in on the fun. The whole family was going to be there, including my FSIL. She was still head over heals in love—she and her boyfriend were starting to plan for their Kansas City wedding (pre-engagement) while they were in town, so we decided to do a little multitasking and we checked out venues together with my FFIL.
Now to get the proper idea of what the weekend entailed, there was some drinking on the river, some playing on the river, some more drinking on the river, a quick trip to a beautiful national park, and did I say drinking on the river? Oh yeah, floating in inner tubes and playing in canoes…we also had a couple hours driving down and back. Wanna see?
When we got unengaged it was a couple of weeks before I started a masters program, and we had a long list of things we wanted to accomplish prior to making it official.
Here are the big-ticket items:
We both had racked up some stiff credit card bills, and neither of us wanted to carry those into our engagement, let alone our marriage. We created a repayment plan to have them paid off in about one year. One of the ways we did that was to live in a little cracker-box-sized apartment that was super affordable and REALLY pushed us to communicate and live together well. (Seriously, the first time my mom saw our bathroom all we could hear was laughter because “it feels like I am on an airplane.”)
When I was pretty young I had purchased a two-bedroom condo in Portland, and my tenants had just moved out. After a huge fiasco with tenants, which included them changing my contact information with the HOA (so not an OK thing), mass destruction of the condo, and a serious flea infestation, we were rehabbing the property to get it on the market.
You know that question…so how did they ask you? Tell me how it happened…
That question is kind of complicated for me because, while she officially asked me way back in August of 2009, we both agreed we had goals we wanted to achieve before making it official. After spilling the beans a bit in my last post, I will break it down a smidge more…
On a lovely hike in Yosemite, Sweetie Scone pulled me to the side of the path overlooking Vernal Falls and gave me a beautiful box (that our wedding bands will reside in until our wedding). We had already been talking about our pre-reqs and our plans to get married and build a life together, but that day really set things in motion and we firmly created the pre-reqs.
Pre-reqs were done, we moved out of the cracker box into a cute standalone cottage, and after waiting for more than a month the rings were ready. We headed to Walnut Creek to pick those babies up on our way to SFO.
Personal picture / In the lobby of the jewelry store a split second after picking up the rings
As we dove head first into wedding planning, we started looking for inspiration and we got caught up. We couldn’t really pin down a theme or a color scheme. (It’s rhyme time.) Instead of getting bogged down in the ideas that we were “supposed” to do, we decided to talk about the feeling we wanted our wedding to have.
It had to be fun, full of warmth and joy. It needed to be about our family. We both come from tight-knit families, and we really want people to feel like they were being cared for. We want our wedding to feel like one big family is joining together because, well, it is. It absopositively had to be kid friendly (they make up at least 25% of the guest list, and at the rate of reproduction among our family and friends that percentage could climb before the wedding), and really it should reflect our love. Oooh, and we want color!
Sounds like a jumbled up mess when I write it out.
Image via Dina Wakely Ponderings / by Dina Wakely
But when we boiled all of that down we ended up with ideas like “young at heart” and “forever young.” That seemed much more theme-like to us but was really based off of feelings.
Jumping head first into planning, we actually had some basic requirements to even reach out to vendors, let alone sign contracts with them. The requirements morphed as time progressed, but let’s talk a bit about our requirements…
A little background in case you haven’t picked up on it—we are a lesbian couple from California getting married in Kansas City, Missouri, which is definitely a more conservative/family-values kind of place. Some of these vendors may not be too excited about a same-sex wedding. We 100% feel that our vendors need to support marriage equality and they need to be interested in working with us as a couple and with any other vendors we hire. So we created rules that automatically eliminated vendors:
Why #3, right?
Read more…
Did I mention we met in February 2009, got unengaged in August 2009, got officially engaged in April 2010, and chose to wait until July 2012 to get hitched? Unengagement to wedding = 35 months. Official engagement to wedding = 27 months…
Just a bit of a heads up—we willingly made that decision. I started a full-time grad program in September 2009 while working full time, and we had no desire to make life hard and plan the whole shindig while I was getting edumacated.
There was the heart-wrenching Prop 8 passage that happened months before we met, but there is still hope. Prop 8 has been in legal limbo and is moving (albeit at a snail’s pace) toward the US Supreme Court, where it might be repealed and set precedence to change marriage laws nationwide. We were hopeful that this case would be decided on before July 2012. We are getting a skosh less hopeful that things will change before we get hitched…but we have some backup plans that I will talk about later.
Our friends invited us along for a last-minute trip to Yosemite. I had never been even though I grew up in northern California. It was sacrilegious that I had never been, and a low-cost getaway with friends sounded like music to our ears. We loaded up the car and bolted on a Friday after work. Hiking was on the agenda for Saturday. Six of us got up and ready to roll in the morning. We decided Vernal Falls was the best route to take. Now I don’t know about you, but when I imagine hiking I envision being one with nature, not feeling like I am at an amusement park. The drive into Yosemite took my breath away; the first part of the hike was a refreshing way to stretch our legs. As we got closer to Vernal Falls and approached the stairs, it felt like we were at Disneyland.
Image via Bill Edwards Photography / Photo by Bill Edwards
Doesn’t that look peaceful and beautiful? Well, word to the wise, on a Saturday in August it is a bit more like this:
So I told you a smidge about our first date, and that I was never really into dating, but I didn’t tell you about knowing she was the one. We fit together instantly like puzzle pieces, which was incredibly scary and exhilarating at the same time. After two months of dating we bought plane tickets five months out to visit Sweetie Scone’s family. After knowing her for two months, I committed to a relationship of seven months, good, bad, or indifferent. SEVEN MONTHS! That was huge—just putting it out there.
This act alone was absolutely out of character for me. I am the girl who hadn’t held a relationship past four months. I actively pushed people away when things started getting too real. In buying those plane tickets, I knew that she had made it into my heart; she had a grasp on me that I couldn’t shake.
After that moment I let her in more and more. Shortly after that we started talking about marriage unofficially…
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