Weddingbee Blog

The smile on my face today has looked something like this:

Engagement Session photos by Philip Gabriel Photography

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I thought February would be a good time to start sharing our honeymoon ideas since, well, who doesn’t like reading about vacations in the dead cold of winter?

Mother Nature seems to have different thoughts, as Philadelphia has experienced uncharacteristically warm weather lately. In fact, I’d take some of the recent weather days for our wedding day!

The last time the Turkeys wore their heavy winter coats—January 2 for the Winter Classic

But back to the honeymoon.
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I was so excited to see that my post on Catholic ceremony programs was helpful to other brides struggling with the same issue.

I wanted to pop back in quickly and share with you the final draft, as it was approved by the priest this weekend…with just a couple changes.

I’ll point out what’s different from the original, as it may not be entirely obvious. Here are the new snapshots and their accompanying adjustments.

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Now that we’ve past the 100 day mark until our wedding, there are a number of things that have started creeping up on the “to do” list.

We interrupt this post to say, AHHHHHH!!!When did we get into double digits?!?!?!

One of the things that has been coming up in conversation recently is “thank you” gifts. We’ve finished the bridal party gifts already, but there are a number of other people involved in our day that we want to thank in a special way. The question becomes…how?

Dear Turkey family and those involved in the wedding…please read no further!

Love, Mr. & Miss Turkey

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Before I get to the central topic of this post, let me back up a little.

Source

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It’s been quite some time since I announced our engagement, so I wanted to share some of the inspiration The Ginger and I have been gathering along the way, mostly thanks to Pinterest. To give you a quick recap, we’ll be having an uber intimate wedding in our own backyard with 15 guests (our parents, siblings and significant others, and our pooch, Betty White).

For starters, we’re planning on having two long, wooden tables in our backyard, picnic-style, with benches for our guests. It’s been quite a challenge trying to nail down a vendor for renting a few rustic tables, but I think we’ve finally found a reasonable option thanks to Craigslist. We snagged some yellow, grey, and gold streamers which we plan on slinging over bulb string lights to give the yard a pretty glow (and hopefully not catch our house on fire).

We had been debating whether or not we should make an arbor, but I think we’ll be dyeing and tying ombre-style pieces of yellow fabric to the dogwood tree, along with hanging mason jar vases with flowers and candles. I really love these tissue paper-covered lanterns and we already have oversized yellow balloons from our barbecue party that never happened, so those should look pretty (assuming we don’t get another Hurricane Irene).

{1: Image via Once Wed / Photo by Jose Villa 2: Image via Once Wed / Photo by Our Labor of Love 3: Image via Green Wedding Shoes / Photo by Katherine Elizabeth Photography 4: Image via Martha Stewart}

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Yes, I know we’re throwing a great big rocking party for our wedding guests and that should be enough. However, with a 6:30PM ceremony our out of town guests, even those that arrive Saturday morning, will have a decent amount of time to spare. What ever will they do to keep busy?

To help our guests use their free time wisely, Mr. Turkey and I spent this weekend creating a section on our wedding website entitled “What to do in Philly”. We took this pretty seriously, as we always enjoy exploring when at an out of town wedding and haven’t always found a lot of help prior to our trips.

Visiting the Parthenon (Nashville)

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Hi, hive! Long time no see!

I wanted to pop back in to share a secret that I’ve been keeping for exactly a year. I was dying to tell you this back in January of 2011, but Mr. S and I decided to keep it on the down low for the time being. But I think that it’s time to finally share.

Remember our wedding, the one that took place in May, the one that some of you probably read about last summer?

Well, by the time that wedding happened, we’d already been secretly married for three and a half months!

See, last January, I interviewed for and got a new job. The only problem was that I wouldn’t be eligible for health insurance for three months after starting, and continuing my benefits with COBRA would be expensive as hell. So, the solution seemed simple: Mr. S and I have a quickie secret wedding at City Hall so that I could jump onto his benefits.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple.
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When we started planning our wedding, Mr. Turkey and I were 100% set AGAINST hiring a videographer.

We saw videography having a number of “strikes” against it. Besides being expensive, what was the point? We already had a fabulous photographer to capture the moments of our day. We also worried about intrusive filmers. At a recent wedding, we found ourselves tangled up with the videography team on a number of occasions, including when they forcibly removed us from the dance floor to film a message for the couple (liked the idea, not the execution). Many of the guests commented after the fact about the hassle.

And even gorgeous links like Lioness’s love story (never even knew this existed!) or Bee preview reels (most recently, Seal) couldn’t convince me. I just didn’t think there was a “use” for videography beyond sharing it on a blog and posts like Fox’s just furthered that point of view. The Turkeys were non-believers.

But then something changed. Well, two somethings changed.

First, a friend, A* (getting married in summer 2012), told me that she had just booked a local videographer. When I shared that we were not going the videography route, A said that prior to finding this vendor, she had been in the same boat. However, she had found a great price and rapport with this individual. I didn’t ignore her per se (very happy she had found success), but I did file it away in my email brain without plan to revisit.
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I don’t know about you all, but the guest list was probably the hardest part of planning our wedding thus far. Honestly, aside from that (well, and the venue change), wedding planning has been pretty fun. I couldn’t really understand why people found themselves so stressed.

Ha. And then HA again when I think about how I’ll probably feel in 3ish months.

Anyhow, back to the guest list. Today I’m going to talk about one particular issue we debated when making our list and checking it twice. That is, the issue of inviting people to your wedding after they’ve invited you to theirs.

I’ve mentioned we’ve attended a lot of weddings together. You might vaguely remember that I once posted about that and think, hmm…was it really that many?

A snapshot of some of the weddings we’ve attended together Only 4 of these dresses featured have been re-worn (I have a problem)

In three years together, Mr. Turkey and I have attended 32 weddings. That means, if we invited each and every one of these couples, they would account for 64 of our 200ish guests.
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There’s been a decent amount of shoe talk around the hive the last couple weeks (Snapdragon, Mink, Mole and Coyote have all shared tales), so it seemed an appropriate time to jump in with my own shoe story. I’ll keep it short for you, though, as you may be on shoe overload!

I decided early on that I was totally jumping on the colored shoe bandwagon.

I just LOVE photos like this Yoko and Sean’s wedding - Philip Gabriel photography

I’ll talk about the rest of my “somethings” at a later date, but for me, it was a no brainer to have my shoes meet the “something blue” criteria. After all, I love shoes and one of our colors is blue. However, it was a serious struggle to find a cute navy shoe that wasn’t a pump* / didn’t require dye.
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’Tis the season for engagements!

I don’t know about you all, but it feels like more than half the couples I know were engaged between Christmas and Valentine’s Day (is there a stat out there about this, Penguin?). The TV commercials and jewelry stores definitely encourage the behavior, that’s for sure.

Anyhow, with all these engagements come great opportunities to shower a new bride (and groom) with love and attention (and presents)! I thought the timing might be right now to share some of the Turkey favorites for engagement gifts. This is a combination of both gifts given and received.

1. Planning Gifts

As a new bride, you’re basically a sponge trying to absorb as many ideas as possible. Blogs, Pinterest, magazines, TLC…you name it. I found some of my most helpful gift to be in the planning realm.

A gift for a recently engaged friend—some bridal magazines + subscriptions for 1 year I had 2 friends gift me magazine subscriptions when I was engaged—love the fun mail!

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…with wedding rings!!

We’ve just returned from a quick upstate NY trip to pick out our wedding rings. Mr. Turkey wasn’t the most excited about this part of the process based on our travel schedule and the overall prospect of wearing a ring (more a watch than a jewelry kind of guy). However, when I reminded him the trip would include chicken wings (from either Ralph’s or Scubber’s), a dinner at the Barnsider including their unlimited salad bar and, most importantly, saved money, he quickly got on board.

As I shared early on, Mr. Turkey had my ring custom designed with a jeweler my family has used for years. Due to this relationship (now including Mr. Turkey), it made the most sense to make the trek north to choose our rings.

Beforehand, we sent some “inspiration” for our rings so that we could optimize our visit. It would also give Eli (the owner) time to think about some options that he might have on hand and pull them out. Here is what we sent:
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You call it Pre-Cana, I call it Marriage Prep…whatever you call it, I’m here to share today some thoughts on the required course for couples who plan to get married in the Catholic Church.

I’ll back up for a second. Mr. Turkey and I are getting married in the Catholic Church (not 100% sure I’ve shared that before).

This church, to be exact

This was a decision we made together, with the influence of my parents, who are Catholic and raised me as such. To be honest, my parents’ preference would have been to have us get married in the church where I was baptized, had my first Holy Communion and was confirmed…but the 4.5 hour trip required to have the ceremony in upstate NY and the reception in Philadelphia probably wasn’t going to fly with our guests.

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Despite it being months away, I have a bit of bachelorette brain right now.

So, since I don’t want to count down the days (because that makes the wedding closer and…scary!), I thought I’d put that energy to good use and share with you another bachelorette party idea!

For this one, all the credit goes to Mr. Turkey’s aunt. She did this for one of his cousin’s showers and I thought it was so creative and a little different from what I had done before!

The theme is signals…of the sexual kind, of course. To start, here are the supplies you will need:

• A gift tag
• 3 gift bags: one green, one yellow, one red
• A sexy lingerie outfit
• A cute pajama set
• A not-so-cute pajama set

You start with a gift tag and on there, write (something like) the following:

Marriage is all about reading each other’s signals. Your bedtime attire sends the perfect message to your future husband about the possibility of a little “somethin’ somethin’” that evening.

Then, you have the green bag. You want to put in the green bag something sexy for the bachelorette. In this case, I found a black and pink Betsy Johnson nightie.
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