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It’s hard to shop for swimsuits in December. A lot of retailers, online or otherwise, are still stocking heavy Fair Isle sweaters and fleece-lined jeans instead of bikinis and cover-ups. When I do find suits for sale, I also find that my blinding white skin tends to distract me from the cuteness of the pattern or style.
I did, however, have some luck finding a very important swim suit accessory on Amazon. I even picked up an extra one for Mr. Mole.
His and hers snorkeling kits
Or, an alternate title: Why Mr. Mole and I Almost Got Married Before Our Wedding
Mr. Mole and I moved to Los Angeles in July. He had found a great job with a higher salary and benefits; in fact, that job was the reason we decided to move in the first place. I, on the other hand, would be unemployed. I had a couple of good leads on some jobs — including an available teaching position in the Los Angeles Unified School District — but nothing concrete.
Good news: I ended up finding a job in my field within a week or two of moving. Bad news: the job offered no benefits. I still took it, and I immediately started the process of finding insurance. Going without some form of medical insurance was not an option for Mr. Mole and me. Want to see one very convincing reason why?
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Our invitations have now made it to most of their destinations. Faster than expected, even: we got a text from Mr. Mole’s sister the day after I dropped them in the mail. So now it’s time that they make it to the hive’s computer screens! My warning is that there are lots and lots of photos ahead. The coral envelopes are our Vegas invitations; the sage envelopes are our Milwaukee invitations.
Two kinds of stamps: USPS, Personalized Address
Imagine you get one of these in your mailbox.
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Yesterday, I made two important trips to the post office. First, I went to buy a stack of stamps. If you are interested, I walked away with a stack of the Herbs for our RSVP postcards and an assortment of the Lunar New Year: Year of the Rabbit and the popular Garden of Love stamps for our envelopes. Second, I returned to the post office to drop off all of our invitations!
One box of invitations, ready to go!
Featured on Weddingbee
All-Inclusion Invitation Suites
“Make an elegant invitation statement without the fuss. Stylish invitation sets with matching envelopes, reception and response cards included.”
As you may know, we are having two wedding-related celebrations: a reception in Vegas and a party in Milwaukee. This means that I need (or, at the very least, really want) to come up with two sets of unique and fun favors for our guests. I know that favors aren’t necessary, but I think that they can add a nice touch to the event.
Luckily for us, it was pretty easy to come up with favor ideas for Las Vegas. We could give our guests personalized playing cards. We could give them dice embossed with our wedding date. We could give them slot-machine keychains. We could give them poker chips made out of chocolate.
Mr. Mole and I eventually decided on poker chips — but we decided to go for the real deal. Our guests will get $5 chips to play at the Venetian casino. (Or, if they are like me, to cash in at the cage to get money to play the video poker games; for all of the times that I have been in Vegas, I have never played any games at a table. I am too chicken to bet more than a dollar at a time!) We figure that it will allow our guests to have a few more minutes of fun after our reception concludes. Maybe someone will even turn it into a huge profit on the blackjack tables.
Our favors, waiting to be played
The next thing to figure out was how we were going to display these chips at everyone’s seats. I found my solution in a blog post on Weddingbee!
After we got engaged, I was surprised that one of the first questions that friends and relatives would ask was, “So, what are your colors?” Huh? Really? Not about the cake? Or the venue? Or the music? Or the booze? For me, this question about colors seemed to come completely out of left field. I started to think that it was somehow social etiquette: Always be sure to ask a newly engaged woman about her wedding colors! It’s only polite! I stuttered my way through a response, offering up insight such as, “uh…green?” as I motioned frantically for Mr. Mole to offer up his own color choices into the conversation.
Mr. Mole and I aren’t having a bridal party — which means that I am not asking any of my lovely ladies to dress up in the color/s of my choosing or hold complementary hued flowers. Thus I delayed (read: procrastinated on) any decisions about the color palette. Yet it started to dawn on me as to how many other things in our wedding would reflect whatever colors we chose: the invitations, the venue decor, the favor cards, the programs, the bridal accessories, etc. I knew that I needed to start making some decisions.
I ended up finding our colors in an incredibly roundabout way. First, when Googling reviews of Mexican resorts for honeymoon ideas, I came across a photo shoot on Style Me Pretty. The photo shoot took place at Zoetry Paraiso de la Bonita, the resort at which Mr. Mole and I got engaged. This bird is even the same one that bit Mr. Mole on the ear. Maybe this is kismet?
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
Hi. I’m Miss Mole. I’m a white girl from small -Wisconsin. In two short months, I will be Mrs. Mole, where “Mole” is a stand-in for an incredibly common Chinese last name. It’s so common that it has its own entry on Wikipedia. According to that website, there are over 16 million living people who share that last name.
Characters / Image via Wikipedia
So what does this mean? On a superficial level, it means that I have no chance in hell to get my preferred Gmail address: first-initial-last-name. My last name, in contrast to Mr. Mole’s, is so uncommon that I have never had any problem getting an easy email address. (In fact, I’ve never even met anyone else outside of my relatives who shares my surname.) I probably spent about 40 minutes playing around with different combinations of my first and new last name before giving up and just throwing my maiden name in the address.
In my last post, I talked about the search for a destination-wedding photographer in Las Vegas. After Googling things like “wedding photography + vegas” and checking out reviews, we ended up narrowing down our search to three photographers: Bentley & Wilson, The Cohens, and Brian Saculles Photography.
Bentley & Wilson is a photography group that consistently receives high reviews and awards on websites like The Knot and WeddingWire. They are a great budget pick, offering customizable packages for low prices. Their packages seem to start around $500. Bentley & Wilson also do Strip photo tours and trash-the-dress sessions.
Today—November 30th!—I am celebrating my Golden Birthday. A Golden Birthday (or a Lucky Birthday or a Champagne Birthday) occurs when a person turns the age of their birth date. So, even though a lady is never supposed to reveal her age, I’ve just given you enough information to figure out how old I am going to be. That’s right, I’m going to be celebrating the big three-oh. I’m officially entering my 30s. I’ll be a thirtysomething bride.
Image via Zazzle
I remember the first time that I ever heard of Golden Birthdays. I was five years old at a classmate’s birthday party, complete with balloon animals and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. I burst into tears once I realized that I wouldn’t get to celebrate mine for another 25 years. In between hiccups, I wailed, “I will be sooooooo old and a mom. You don’t get special gold dog balloons at mom birthdays!”
Picking a wedding photographer isn’t easy. We spent quite a long time looking, in contrast to how we found our photographer for our pre-engagement “engagement photos.”
B-Roll Footage / Photo by Frank Dalton and Lucian McAfee
You wade your way through dozens of websites, mostly Flash (so they don’t open on your iPad) and often with music (so you have to listen to classical love songs until you can find the mute button hidden somewhere on the page). You normally have to make wild guesses about three important things:
From my own incredibly biased perspective, Mr. Mole and I have some pretty awesome engagement photographs. They capture our personalities, our sense of humor, and our affection for one another. The only thing that they don’t capture is my engagement ring: Mr. Mole and I had these photographs taken a good five months before he actually popped the question!
A ring-less shot / Photo by Frank Dalton and Lucian McAfee
Mr. Mole used to work for an ad agency in Milwaukee. Every year, that agency would have a holiday photo shoot for its employees. The resident photographer and other members of the creative team would set up the equipment and scenery and take the shots. Mr. Mole and I jumped at the chance to participate, especially since some of the props alluded to one of our favorite shared hobbies: cross-country skiing. We also decided to allow Tom Boonen to frolic in the “snow” as well. Here’s a sampling of some of our favorite shots.
As an incredibly generous wedding present, Mr. Mole’s parents will be giving us 5,000 Euros for our honeymoon. Mr. Mole’s older sister and her husband took the money after their wedding and ran off to Spain on a fabulous vacation. I feel serious trip envy when I look through their pictures and hear their stories of fabulous hotels, dinners, and sightseeing adventures. So I immediately started dreaming about spending our honeymoon drinking great beer in Brussels or eating paella in Madrid or riding ferries around the islands in Greece.
Image via Fodor’s Europe Travel Guide
However, there was one major roadblock to these European dreams: time.
Mr. Mole just started his job in July, so we have to be careful about how many vacation days that he takes in the first quarter of 2012. We are already having to take four days off in January between our destination wedding and hometown party. We can probably get another five days off in February for our honeymoon. If we leave on a Sunday, the day after our hometown reception, as planned, we are probably looking at a max of a seven-night vacation.
This is not the first year that I won’t be home for Thanksgiving. I went to college 2,000 miles away from my family, and I always was too broke to fly home for the holiday. So one year was Thai food in the dorms, another was a takeout meal from Boston Market, a third was turkey sandwiches in Vegas. I stayed in Chicago a couple of years when I either volunteered at or ran in various Turkey Trots.
However, this is the first year that I will away from home for Thanksgiving because I am at someone else’s home. This year, Mr. Mole and I are going to Vegas to celebrate the holiday with his parents.
FMIL and FFIL in Vegas last Christmas
As I was packing my bag in anticipation of our trip to see our friends get married, I started thinking about the interesting phenomenon of brides at other people’s weddings. Now, I don’t mean the time when my best friend K., who lives in NYC, saw nine different bridal parties in one corner of Central Park on a holiday weekend. And I don’t mean the situation that occurred in the chick flick Bride Wars, where one of the characters crashes her frenemy’s wedding and tackles her in the middle of the aisle.
Image via Amazon / Screenshot from Bride Wars
In a previous post, I talked about my efforts to become a healthy, happy, and confident bride (and person) before I walk down the aisle in January. Now I want to talk more specifically about what had helped me lose those 90 pounds and what has been working again this time around. There’s nothing particularly special or unique about me physiologically; if I can do this, so can anyone. So can you.
As everyone knows, there are two major components to weight loss: diet and exercise. You’ve probably heard the saying that weight loss is 90% diet and 10% exercise, right? Well, for me, starting a consistent exercise routine was absolutely, without a doubt, the most important part. Like many women, I am a stress-eater. I tend to eat when I am worried, when I am anxious, when I am nervous. I quickly discovered, though, that a good workout does an even better job of taking away my stress. I could work through my frustrations at my job over a spin class, not with a dozen chocolate chip cookies. I could clear my mind after a disagreement with a friend by running it out on the treadmill, not by smothering it with mac and cheese. With each substitution, I felt better—and grew lighter.
Going to the gym also made me feel like a badass in a Nike ad. That’s right: I just did push-ups! And some free weights! Now I am going to do a couple of miles on the treadmill—faster than I did last week! Faster than you! Regardless of how fast I was actually running or how much weight I was actually lifting or how many push-ups I was actually doing, I felt powerful and strong. The last thing that I wanted to do was feel weighed down by greasy or calorically dense food.
My favorite Nike ad and source of fitness inspiration / Image via Nike Blog
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