A real update!

I know I do not post nearly as much as I should. But in all honesty, I do the majority of my wedding "planning" on twitter these days. I am also the featured bride on Tuesdays over on TweetMyWedding. The other brides are amazing and you should really go check us all out. :)

sneak peek of the design for all the "invites"

That little plug aside, I've finalized the design for our "invites" and just need the final head count to order them. I put it in quotes because it's a whole package of Vegas wedding announcements, Miami reception invitation cards, Miami reception RSVP cards, and little cards for our photo dump website. Our what? You know... when you go to a wedding, take tons of pictures with your camera then eventually get around to putting them on Facebook. Well, I created a Shutterfly site specifically for people to be able to upload everything there so we can see what everyone has done. We, and anyone viewing the site, can create books, bags, or whatever else from those pictures.

My main reason for posting is that we have been working on the guest list in the last few days. We have a fairly comprehensive list of family and friends. The problem lies in my father's family. To say they're all estranged is probably too harsh of a word. I am good friends with one of my cousin's, and facebook friends with her and 3 others. However, my father hasn't uttered a word to his step-mother, step-brother or step-sister in years. We kinda like it that way. My dilemma is do we be the bigger people and invite the lot hoping the "adults" decline and the cousins I like accept, or just not invite anyone?

What do you think? I can give back story if you want via email.

Thanks!

Vegas On My Mind...

The dress? She is G-O-N-E! Seriously. The 843rd time was the charm I suppose. It was lowering the price considerably and just continually reposting it on ebay that most likely worked. Within 2 hours of the auction ending, I already had the money in my Paypal account. It is amazing! And it only took 10 very freakin long months to sell...


Now onto other things.....

Steve keeps asking me what I will do with my free time after the wedding is over. Seriously, I can sit online for hours and look at cake boards, dresses, cupcakes, new projects to undertake, ketubah imagery, look up and customize favors, and the list goes on and on and on. I could occupy a very large chunk of my days playing with wedding things.

Want to see our suite and Vegas party reception? I am so excited and can't wait to stay here! Sure, it's not the highest end hotel, but I don't care. We're staying in a suite for 4 nights/ 5 days and enjoying ourselves the whole time.  Our wedding is actually going to be IN our suite, followed by a cupcake/ champagne reception.

 Image from Luxor Las Vegas

Slide show and 360 video

Info page with the floorplan

She's just a really pretty room and I'm super excited. 6.5 months to go.


Also, we're moving to Miami in a little less than a month. 17 hours away by car. It's been coming for a long time, but was finalized a few weeks ago. Well, about a week and a half ago when I gave my notice at work. It seriously hurts that I'm leaving such an amazing job and the best bosses I've ever had (sorry Jeffy) but I have to do it. Also, after giving my notice, I learned that I don't take  praise all that well. I am the person that laughs it off or turns 6 shades of red. Who knew I was so.. humble?

We're leaving to move into my parents place, well, the cottage on their property. It's a 2/2 complete with kitchen, family room, dining room, and everything. It's really cool. Right now my family (yes Cathy, you're my family too!) is renovating and painting it for us. It will be difficult at first moving back to the place I swore I wouldn't return, but it will definitely help when we have children. My parents are about 150 yards away, brothers, aunts, uncles, everyone are super close.

As crappy as I feel about leaving my job, this means I will be able to have a bridal shower. And start planning our Miami reception. And plan for zee bambinos. Ahhh bambinos!

Ring Dishes & Ketubah!

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i'm totally getting these for Steve's and my mama's for the wedding! http://bit.ly/8D37Ry

I was perusing etsy tonight and flipping through my favorites. And saw these little ring dishes. How adorable are they?! Oh, I'm totally getting one for myself as well. I'm thinking of this dish: http://bit.ly/4zQjB9 either keeping the claddagh or replacing it with a 4-leaf clover or something Celtic. I have no idea why, but I'm totally drawn to Irish/ Celtic things. Maybe my grandmother was Irish. I like to think she was. I mean really, we're all freckled with blue eyes. A girl can pretend, right? ;-)

Have you purchased ring dishes? What did you use it for or did you just hang it on the wall? I'm picturing ours hanging near (probably underneath) our beautiful ketubah.

And on that note...

packed up the ketubah paper & the deposit and will be sending it to @swoonoverit on Monday! it's really happening!!! #wedding

It's going out on Monday! I cracked open the paper package tonight for the first time. It's beautiful and thick white paper. The hardest part was finding something to ship the paper to Amanda totally flat. I ended up finally finding a scrapbooking paper keeper and putting thick cardboard on either side of the 15 sheets in the keeper. So exciting!!

My Own @TweetMyWedding Update

At the request of my practically-sister-in-law and all around amazing woman, I need to write more. The problem is that much of my wedding related topics are posted to my twitter feed and then I just forget to post about them here. But then, isn’t that the whole point of having a blog... to be able to expand on those 140 characters of text?

So here goes... in the format of the @TweetMyWedding blog postings that many of my friends write for.

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ARGH!! why must people say one thing then change their mind after over a month?! this damn dress is never going to sell. #stuck

wow, a consignment shop only offers 40% to the consignor? there's no way my dress'd sell for $1000 to get the $400 i want to make recoup.

i have about 1 month to decide on keeping, selling or burning the dress. Brides against Breast Cancer comes to Raleigh in early February

These were posted yesterday about my wedding dress sale. The latest with the sale is, well, rather disheartening to me. I have been emailing back and forth with a potential buyer for about 6 weeks. We discussed Vegas, honeymoons, family, and more during that time. On Monday when I was expecting the “ok, I just sent the money via Paypal” email, instead I received one that crushed me. Never in the 6 weeks of communicating was there a hint of fears of making such a large purchase online. I actually told her about the previous potential buyers that backed out at the last minute and she assured me that wasn’t going to happen. Yes, there was more to the email and I do believe she genuinely feels bad, but that doesn’t help me any.

I am about ready to just burn the dress. Don’t worry; I’m not stupid enough to burn a piece of clothing with an $850 price tag. (Not that I paid that much for it...) It is perfect in every way: unaltered, never worn outside the store, clean, corset back for a variety of sizes. Only I just don’t love it anymore like I did nearly 2 years ago when I purchased it. Unfortunately, no bridal salon offers refunds. My entire style and viewpoint on wedding dresses has changed. I no longer want big and poufy; I want streamlined and something that can be worn multiple times. If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve seen my new choices.

There isn’t much that I can do now. It is still posted on a variety of wedding classifieds sites and I re-posted it on eBay Monday evening after I got the email. So there’s that.

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i think i might need these for #vegas! bit.ly/8QGBkr the personalization is "SF 42 RB" since 101010 is 42 in binary. #geek

Click on the above link. I really want these shoes, but not just for Vegas. I love Chuck’s. While I do think they’re exceptionally fun, they also have a $62 price tag. We can barely afford to pay our rent let alone buy $62 sneakers.

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awww my baby bro & his girlfriend are coming to my MBA graduation! i love them so stinkin much

Yes, I will be an MBA graduate exactly 4 months from tomorrow. I need to book our hotel rooms since they’re rapidly filling up. What, you mean I’m not the only graduate from ECU in May?


i made some of the tastiest perfectly golden brown fried chicken for dinner. makes up for the burnt grilled cheese from lunch..

This was just funny. I’d made grilled cheese and tomato soup for Steve and I a few days ago. My grilled cheese is as basic as can be: butter on both sides of 2 pieces of bread, a slice of cheese in the middle and then cooked in a frying pan until golden brown. Only, this time there was no golden brown, only burnt. It was annoying! Later that night for the Gators bowl game, I made the most perfectly golden brown chicken wings. There wasn’t a speck of burned flour on them. And oh boy... were they delicious!?


So now, don't you feel properly updated? Yeah, I didn't think so. =)

Interesting Turn of Events

I had no idea until today at lunch that Steve had no idea that we were having a bridal party in Vegas. since his family isn't attending, as in his brother who would be a best man in a traditional wedding, he thought we were just going out there with a few friends to get hitched. nothing formal, nothing traditional, nothing wedding-y. he just said that the more traditional my outfit is (closer to white), then more traditional things will turn out even though we're heading to Vegas to do the most untraditional wedding possible.

huh. I had no idea. I wonder who in the bridal party would still want to attend. Ii mean, my brother and Cathy are totally still attending as our family representation. but I've heard rumblings about the date falling on a Sunday and us staying out there for 5 days and some other stuff. With zero obligations to attend, I actually wonder how many guests we'd have. Oh yeah, it's a trip to Vegas with a 2-3 hour ceremony/ cupcake party.

In this light, I do think I'll be buying a blue dress, pale blue likely, so I can wear it multiple times. I have a picture in my mind of what I want, but haven't found it yet. Big poofy skirt that I can puff out with lots of crinoline to be super cute 50s chicky.

There was a family event in Miami on Saturday and I was informed afterwards that our wedding was a topic of conversation since a lot of them follow my updates on Facebook. my older brother was telling everyone to "be there or be square!" um, no. i told him that it's going to be a small wedding with just a handful of friends. he said that I needed to stop telling everyone the date and the location if I didn't want people there. I corrected him and said that the date and location, being the entire city of Las Vegas, is out there for anyone to know, but the specific location, like the actual ceremony location, will only be told to the guests we want in attendance. he got all huffy. sure, I'll be inviting family and knowing that 95% of them won't be in attendance due to a variety of reasons.

Also, big news, I've been emailed by the girl buying my dress that she's going to be able to pay me by the end of the week. She confirmed the amount tonight. YAY!

Cakery and my Family

I think I found a cake bakery. Well, potentially 2. Oddly enough, one of them is Albertson's which is directly on the strip right in the middle of everything. As in, we could walk there and not pay delivery fees. The other one quoted me $75. I have to actually contact Albertson's and see if they can remake the cake I like.

Ok, so a totally different subject: My family.

Some of you know the story about my family and our wedding. If we don't have it in Miami, none of them can attend. If we have it in Miami, we can't afford it. If we have it in Miami, we will not have less than 50 guests. I'm not even talking about friends; that's my family only. They all live in south Florida.

It's purely a financial reason that they can't attend. But no way am I going into details here. For similar reasons, we cannot afford thousands of dollars for getting married there. Between the rabbi, the food, the tent, table, chairs, places settings, etc etc etc. I don't care how cheap everything will be for an intimate family wedding; it's still times a minimum of 50 people!

After much deliberation, a few date changes, and my suggestion, we chose Vegas. Jodie suggested SLVW as she and her husband used them for their wedding last year and said they did a great job. I contacted SLVW multiple times and finally worked things out. And my baby brother and his girlfriend (both of whom I adore!) will be in attendance. If I decided to walk down the proverbial aisle, he will be the one to escort me.

Our wedding will cost $399 plus $60 for the marriage license. (It's package 2, but the price was recently increased.) When I say wedding, I mean photography, ceremony, video, flowers, limo transportation, and music. We have to pick the location for the 2 picture locations, one of which will be the ceremony location. At the moment I'm thinking our hotel room and the Welcome to Las Vegas sign. But that could easily change.

Other expenses for any location are the cake, the ketubah (which we can hopefully afford), and plane/ hotel expenses. Our total budget is $1500 for Vegas. $399 (everything) + $60 (license) + tips for photographer, limo driver and reverend are gone already. They're fixed costs. The variable costs right now are our hotel and airfare. I'm estimating/ hoping to get us there and home, for 4 nights, for about $800. But we'll see. Orbitz, Expedia, etc don't even opening bookings for October 2010 until around November. Grrr.

By the way, we are exactly 1 year and 1 week away from being husband and wife!

Just thought I'd throw that out there. <3

vegas sign image source

This Thing Feels Real Now

Our impending marriage feels really real now. It wasn’t the reservation with SLVW. Or the confirmation email stating our wedding date. Or the flowers and Etsy stash stockpiled in the family room. Or even all the design work I’ve been playing with for invitations. Nope, not even having the wedding dress in my closet, or attending Kim and Matt’s wedding this weekend. What made it really real and gave me head to toe goose bumps was when my mother-in-law told the waitress at lunch on Sunday, “This is my son and future daughter-in-law.” I can’t even write that without tearing up.

What made it real for you?


Also, this picture will adorn our wedding announcements. One day. Are those sent out after the wedding or before? Since we’re going to Vegas with about a dozen people and having the reception after the fact, can I include these with the reception invitations? Or send announcements and invitations later? We honestly haven’t got a clue when the reception will be so I don’t want to delay announcing things. Whatcha think?