Weddingbee Blog

This will be a picture-less post, as I will be focusing on the one snafu in what could’ve been a perfect wedding day: NYC traffic.

NYC traffic on a Friday afternoon is pretty bad. NYC traffic on a Friday afternoon when various VIPs are in town is worse. Who exactly was in Manhattan on the day of my wedding? Let me give you the list, along with my mother’s reactions.

• The Pope: “Your wedding is a blessing from God!” (We’re not Catholic.)
• The President of South Korea: general happy freak-outs because we’re Korean.
• The British Prime Minister: “He is not as handsome as Hugh Grant.” (She loves the movie Love Actually.)
• Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in preparation for the Democratic presidency campaigns: “Do you think they can come to the wedding?”

Fortunately, the bridal party got around without too much delay because we had given ourselves an extra hour of padding in the schedule. However, the bus that we had charted to shuttle our NYC guests to our venue got the worst of it.
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By the time February rolled around, it was official. I was a failure at wedding planning.

Or, rather, I was a failure at beginning to plan my wedding.

Well, we had a venue and chairs and a color scheme. And we had the female side of the wedding party. (It’s possible that Mr. DD didn’t finish asking the male side of the wedding party to be in the wedding until June.)

But that was it. We still needed to pick out a photographer, a videographer, a caterer, a coordinator, a florist, a cake baker…

I tried to make progress. But I was overwhelmed. Not just by wedding planning but by starting my own business, renovating Mr. DD’s place (um, because that was a wise project to take on right after getting engaged), officially moving into Mr. DD’s place (and therefore officially moving out of my place), taking graduate law classes on tax law and estate planning, making plans to go help out my sister once her twins arrived, trying to actually see my friends once in a while, and being okay transitioning from unmarried person to married person.

The last one was strangely the most difficult thing. Sometimes it still feels like it is.
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One month from now, I will be walking down the aisle to meet my groom. It is kind of surreal to me how fast time has been moving lately. It seems like Mr. M proposed just last week, but it’s been over a year now! This engagement has been one of the most fun and exciting times for us as a couple, and also one of the most stressful times, trying to juggle all of the wedding planning along with our normal lives. Speaking of stress… I’m beginning to feel it. I have a few too many items to finish in the next 31 days, and I’m praying that somehow I’ll be able to put everything together.

(source)

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In an attempt to regain my sanity after hitting the mother of all roadblocks, I decided to take the advice of a few fellow bees and super smart hive members. My first plan of action was to lay out what needs to be done. I love lists; I love crossing things off and feeling accomplished afterward (yeah, sometimes I write things down I already did just to cross them off. Want to fight about it?), and I always feel better when I know how far my progress is and how much further I have to go.

My brilliant solution? This bad boy is now proudly hanging on a door in our office (it’s okay if you laugh, Mr. Cloud did, a LOT).

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I love making lists. I make lists of lists.

I am also, unfortunately, very likely to lose said lists.

With the wedding only one month away (eep!) these lists are becoming more and more precious. Lists of things left to do, things to remember to bring, people I need to call, etc.

So, I’ve made my lists digital:

Enter the brilliance of Google.
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This is not the easiest post for me to write. It means I need to be honest with you about myself - honest about my faults.

With less than two months before Mr. Bear Cub and I are back in Portland, I feel like I don’t know what to do. Oh yes, I know there are tasks that need to be taken care of - check up on the finalization of the invites, write our ceremony, learn our dance, pick some more key songs, do something substantial about the tables, pin down the menu… It just doesn’t feel like I’m getting anywhere with anything. As much as I try to fight it, I have one incredibly awful quality to my character. I crumble under stress.

It’s worse when the list of to-dos is longer. I physically can’t function with the thought of an insurmountable task list. And if I don’t know how to do some of the things on the list? (Um, hello, white vs. ivory??) My motor skills begin to shut down. The only way I’ve found to “reboot” from this mess is to take a nap. Everything’s always better when you have a new day to attack things, right? I’m well aware that this is not a productive way to deal with my stress. It’s just a Band-Aid, and it’s not helping me take care of wedding tasks.

The killer in this vicious cycle is I don’t actually know what I can cross off the list at this point.
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With just about two months to go, all of a sudden I hear Europe’s The Final Countdown playing in my head (this could simply be because Mr. Ducky is humming it). It’s one of those moments when you say, “Oh.My.Gosh, I have SO much to do!!” I think I’d redo this music video with flashes of loading my Cricut and Cuttlebug, with lots of glue and paper everywhere, and wedding magazines scattered across the floor. (Maybe without the ’80s hair as well!)

The biggest things are all the DIY projects that I need to get moving on.
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So today marks the big 1-0-0 for the Star household. I can’t believe how quickly everything’s coming up!

I’m beginning to feel a little frazzled and like I need another month or two! Luckily for me, I’ve seen many a bee get stressed and feel like she couldn’t possibly get everything done, but totally pull it off with time to spare! I know we can do it.

What’s helping me to stay sane is a little organization. At the beginning of our engagement, I started out with one long list of things to do. Talk about overwhelming. On top of that, I was getting email reminders from The Knot every few weeks nagging me about all the “unfinished to-do list items” that I had piling up. No bueno. Then I stumbled across Mrs. Cheese’s post about how she was keeping her last minute to-do list from terrifying her by putting items into either a “sooner” or “later” category, according to the urgency of the task. It sounded like an awesome idea to me and so I created a Google Document with my to-dos organized in this format and spread the word to immediate families and the bridal party that they could take a look at it, too, if they were wondering how they might be able to help.

Unfortunately, this method of organization still wasn’t enough for my frazzled self and I still found myself staring at this impossibly long list and wondering where to start. And my bridal party, as awesomely helpful as they’ve been throughout this process, was having trouble looking at it, remembering that it existed, etc.

Enter: Fairy Bridesmaid, the most organized woman on the face of the planet.
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The summer is flying by and our wedding is quickly approaching. I feel as though I’ve barely gotten anything nailed down due to both financial issues, and being so “on the go”. I recently finished one internship and will be moving on to my next come Monday (after some good old fashioned 4th of July fun!). In between, I came back home for 3 weeks to pick up some shifts at work and replenish my bank account since, well, internships are basically slavery (see video below).

So what does this all have to do with our wedding?
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I’d prefer to have everything on our wedding day go in perfect order and on time - I mean, who wouldn’t? But beyond that, even though I’ve been trying to pay close attention to the happenings at all of the wedding receptions I have been to over the past 15 months (since getting engaged), I’m still worried that I’m planning things out in the wrong order. What if the toasts come at the wrong time? Will there still be enough people there when we do the garter and bouquet toss?

On top of my timeline worries, I have my photographer to think about. We’ve only booked her for 7 hours, but we’re hoping to tack an extra hour onto that, giving us 8.
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Augustitis [aw-guhst-eye-tis]: inflammation of the calm, rational, stress-free portion of a bride-to-be’s mind, caused by her impending August wedding.

To my knowledge, there are only two known cures for Augustitis: an elopement, or enhanced planning and organization. Fortunately, Mr. Bruschetta — another useful antidote to my particular case of Augustitis — recently stepped in with a simple, manageable way of tackling the to-be-completed items. (We were both inspired by Miss D’Orsay’s decision-making time line — it seems to have helped with her Augustitis, too!)

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I was really, really productive while Mr. Joey was away. I started and finished the assigned seats, designed the table numbers, made good progress on the centerpieces, figured out the bouquets for MOH Joey and myself and I finally found the wedding inspiration I’ve been searching for.

Despite the progress, I’m really, really glad he’s back. His return has reminded me how little time we have left until the big day. We’ve got a month, or a little less than 5 weeks left, and our to do list is still pretty long.

We’ve managed to get a lot of the big things out of the way like collecting RSVPs and finishing seating assignments, but we have a lot of the little details still left to complete. Now that Mr. Joey is back and done with school, he has lots of time to take care of the details. Some of the ones I trust him with are getting the liquor license, picking up the beer, mixers, and wine orders, and assembling the table numbers/menus. I say, “trust,” because Mr. Joey isn’t the most patient person when it comes to detailed crafts.

I might have to outsource a few tasks or eliminate some altogether (gasp!).

What items on you wedding to do list have to delegated to your FI?

(source)

Oh my, hive!

I feel like I am jumping through hurdles right now. This is the height of my busy season for my job. I am now traveling four days per week. I’m beat. I’m tired of traveling, and I’ve still got to plan a wedding. It took us a month to schedule the appointments with our minister because she’s pretty busy, and I’m never home!

When I am home, I spend time running errands and making a feeble attempt at actually relaxing. Sometimes I actually get some work done. I will say that I am glad that I have stuck to my “Keep it Simple” mantra and that has allowed me to not have an exhaustive list of to-dos. Planning ahead during last fall truly helped. I also have to give a big shout to Mr. Swan who has been holding down the fort at home and has been extremely helpful.
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There is a strong disconnect with the reality of time in the Gloss household.

We are coming up on the two month mark…..THE TWO MONTH MARK!! I get all nervous and flustered when I hear it, while an ever expanding to-do list races through my head.

I casually mentioned to Mr. Gloss the other night that the two-month mark is rapidly approaching and that we should really get a lot of major things done, like talk with the caterer about food options, figure out music for the reception and cocktail hour, find a location for the rehearsal dinner (and figure out who’s coming), and figure out what readings we are doing (and other program relevant information). And his response was, “Well, we have TWO WHOLE MONTHS!” (Like that is a lot of time or something?!)
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If you are planning a wedding, don’t plan on building a house. Building a house sort of dropped (like a cement block) into our laps. I don’t know if I shared with you how this all came about, but here’s a little background. When my maternal grandma died, she left me and my parents a pretty good sum of money. Instead of spending it or putting it in a college fund, my parents decided to buy some property.

When Mr. Joey and I got engaged, they started talking about giving us part of the double lot. Then in January, everything was a go. Building prices were down, we could get the money, my Dad (the contractor) had time this summer — everything fell into place. In March, the lot was signed over to me and I became a property owner. Just in time to pay property taxes — my parents are no dummies.

It wasn’t my intention to plan a wedding and build a house at the same time. The cards fell into place and my Dad gave me a “Build it or Bust” speech. So we went on with building it. In hindsight, I should have tried to convince him to start later — like after the wedding. Just the permit process has been all consuming. I feel like I can’t put anything into my regular life, let alone wedding planning. I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten a call from someone at 2PM telling me to pick up something here and get that notarized there. Luckily, because I’ve made my life flexible for work, work is now being flexible for my life.

It’s hard to stay positive about one good thing (the wedding) when the other good thing (the house) is draining me of all my energy.
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