Getting Ready for Our Wedding

I had been thinking about weddings for a long time before we actually got engaged, but when Will proposed I didn't have much of a picture in my head except that I knew I wanted it to be formal-ish. Err, formal-ish for the Panhandle. See, to most people around here "dressing up" means starching your Levis and wearing your "good" boots, and though I love the people here and our culture, I really wanted it to be more elegant because it's always been my style.

I went back and forth, looking at tons of weddings on the internet and getting ideas. I knew pretty quickly I wanted a black and white wedding (totally beat Kim K on that one...), but other than that I was undecided. For a while I was thinking black, white, and gold would look really elegant, but I soon realized that was just not my cup of tea. We also alwasy assumed we would get married at the church where we more-or-less grew up, but when we heard the price we decided to look elsewhere. Though the church held a lot of special memories for us, it wasn't "home" anymore and it really is just an ugly place to get married. The reception would have been in a gym, the sanctuary has red carpet, and I simply couldn't see the big picture in my head.

Also, right after we got engaged we set a tentative date for the following January (Janurary 18th, I think) because I wanted to do something "different" and get married in the winter. In mid-February we decided to screw that and changed our date to the summer. We ended up getting married at Will's parents' church (which actually happened to be the church I attended as a little girl). They had blue carpet, but everything else was nice. The room where we got married is actually meant to hold over 1,000 people, but they were able to turn off the lights on the sides of the room so it didn't feel like an empty cavernous room during the ceremony.

As for decorations and the "theme" I eventually decided on black and white, with accents of grey/silver and light pink (but not too much pink- a pink wedding reminds me prom). We paid for almost all the wedding ourselves, and therefore had a tiny budget. It was stressful to try and stick to at times, but it did mean that we had to do everything ourselves. Honestly, the memories of working on stuff for our wedding is almost as good as my memories of the actual wedding itself. We DIY'ed everything, which meant our wedding was truly a labor of love. Will was awesome at supporting my vision and trusting my process.

For the tables at the reception, we scoured thrift stores for candle sticks and other "usable" things that we eventually spray-painted either black or off-white. We bought a bunch of fabric from JoAnn's in white, baby pink and grey with very subtle patterns to put over the black table cloths the church provided. We used small boxes under those squares to break up the height and make the tables a little more interesting.  My mom spent hours and hours making little topiary-ish things out of pink and white crepe paper hot-glued into rossettes on round and square pieces of foam. We also got several tall candle sticks from places like TJ Maxx and Ross, and spray painted those to match. We had bought a ton of silver Christmas balls for 50% off the previous Christmas (in anticipation for a wedding and/or our own Christmas tree the next year), so we used those to scatter around the tables. Each table scape was completely unique.

Enough talking, here are the pictures of setting up the wedding. We had an AMAZING group of friends and family help us out all day on Friday to set up everything. There is no way this could have happened without them, and I am forever grateful for their support.

I was not a bride-zilla, but I was a master Type-A bride. A few weeks before the wedding I got our all our big decorations for the tables and grouped them by table so I could make sure I liked each table scape. The Christmas balls didn't go on top of candlesticks like you see in this picture- that just so I could make sure each table had enough. Each table was wrapped and put into individual boxes to make it easier to unpack at the church and to ensure every table ended up decorated the way I wanted, even if I coudn't be there.

We also got a ton of little mirrors and candles from the Dollar Tree. One of my big "musts" for the wedding was that it have a ton of candlelight.

My BFF Brandy helped on Friday.

AWESOME friends and family who put up with my crazy requests.

I think my cousins worked all day on getting the aisle *just right*. Seriously, it was an all day job, but it was perfect and beautiful and everythign I had pictured in my head. I told both of them that when they get married, I will be their slave for anything they need.

This is a terribly blurry photo, but you can see the process of setting up each table. The one behind us is a little more finished than the one we were working on. On the stage behind us where we had our first dance, you can see that we mounted a few of our favorite engagement photos on black foam core. The pictures behind the towels were some of my bridal portraits that we eventually moved to the back of the room with the groom's table.

This was the morning of the wedding. I was scattering those big crystal things around all the tables for a finishing touch.

Another shot of the pretty-much finished room. For the reception they turned the lights way down low so the ambiance was much nicer than the photos would suggest.

I wish I had a few more photos from that Friday. Will's parents served all our "workers" a good breakfast, and we hit the ground running from there. Most of us didn't stop until after the rehearsal dinner that night, and a few of us (my mom, my cousins and me) worked on a few details even after that. I made some snickerdoodle cookies for our cookie bar and my mom made the flower girl basket "cuter" as I vaguely asked her to do last minute.

Next post is the actual wedding!

3.25 miles

That's how far I ran this evening. Not too far, but farther than I've run since early last fall, and the farthest on ground (as opposed to a treadmill) since... this summer, I guess? But those runs involved pretty much 2 miles of nonstop running and various bouts of running to interrupt the walk home. I forgot to time my first 10 laps (we have a tiny indoor track at our university and 8 laps = 1 mile), but I'm guessing I finished in about 37/38 minutes. I tried the run 10 minutes/walk 1 minute technique, but that got kinda screwy since I was *so close to finishing the mile* that I pretty much ran a mile (about 12 minutes... yeah, I'm slow) and walked a lap. So what got me motivated to run that tonight?

Well, you see we have a little group of friends and we call our selves Team FIT (Friends In Training). We ran and worked out together pretty much all last semester, with the intent to run the March for Babies 5k in March. I was actually pretty bad about sticking to their workouts (the times just didn't work with my schedule a lot of the time), but Will is the creator/"coach" of the thing, so I've made an effort to be more present this semester. We're running our first 5k as a group this Saturday, and last Saturday I looked at my calendar and realized the race was only a week away, and I hadn't run 3 miles in God knows how long. Hence the run tonight. Now I know I won't die at mile 2.87, although I'm likely to be the last one across the finish line. Oh well, at least I'll finish my first race, right?

All that to say, I can't believe it's been almost two months since I've blogged. I've had every intention of blogging, but it takes time and coordination with photos, something that's been difficult to come by for me since the start of the semester. We reset my computer to factory settings after it started acting funny and when hubs restored all my photos, well.... let's just say they aren't exactly organized like they were before. And I got rid of Picasa since Will got my Light Room for Christmas, and so I'm trying to use Photobucket for my photos and that website is reallllllllly slow. Or maybe it's just the internet at our house. Anyway, no photos for a while. But you know, I'm not blogging for anyone except myself. I want this to be journal of a sort, for myself years on down the line and for family once we move away. Pictures are awesome, but not necessary.

It's late and I have a 6 a.m. wake-up call, so I guess that's where we'll stop for today. I'll be back in a few days... or maybe 2 months.

Our Story, Part 5

How long can our story possibly be? I mean, we're still back in 2010 and it's almost 2012- I could still cover the last two years to get "caught up." But I don't think I'll do that, at least for now. Maybe it'll give me some motivation to actually blog more regularly, so I can keep up with current every-day life. After all, the goal for this blog is to capture the memories so that some day, we can look back and smile. Or laugh.

Here a few more pictures from winter 2010:

 We had a pretty awesome snow day in January, so Will and I took the opportunity to make a kick-a snowman. See the neighbor girl in the backyard? Yeah, our snowman was way better.

Dawson turned 5. He was really in to Spider Man.

The semester was relatively quiet, we were just planning our wedding and focusing on classes. When we got engaged, we planned to have our wedding a year later, and set the tentative date for January 18, 2011. But then we got to thinking about it, and realized that the most important part of the day for us was that all our friends and family would be there. January is not an ideal time because A) weather- there could be a blizzard/ice/snow that would prevent a lot of people from coming B) we wouldn't be able to take a honeymoon because we would be in classes. The 18th was the first Friday after classes started because we knew a lot of college friends wouldn't have a place to stay if they came into town a week early for our wedding, and C) we realized we didn't want to wait that long. So in February we decided we were getting married in Summer 2010, six months earlier than we originally planned.

We had the typical "Holy crap we're getting married in five months and we don't have time to plan it" freak-outs at first, but once we had a plan everything went smoothly. I'll do another post on all the wedding and planning details, but planning our wedding really was one of the most fun things I've ever done. 

In March, I traveled to Turkey as a Readership Ambassador. I had traveled abroad before, but this experience was completely different. Again, it's a topic for another post, as I cannot do it justice in this one.

My host student, Sevda.

Brandy and me at Ephesus

Journal time

Our group

;

 We had our engagement pictures taken by a friend:

 Once the semester was over, we packed our bags and headed to Costa Rica with our Honors program for a seminar.

I know it looks like all we did was go the awesome white sand/crystal clear water beach, visit the volcano, go on the best river rafting trip through the jungle, go ziplinning through the rain forest, and take awesome hikes with a panoramic view at the top, but we really did have class while we were there. And we learned a lot about how patriotism is becoming an excuse for propaganda in the United States. Snort.


***** I think I should explain that our honor's program partnered with another honor's program from a university in Florida, and the professors from that university were the ones who actually taught the course while we were there. We (including our program directors and the professor who took  us) all thought the course was going to be about Costa Rica's lack of a standing army and what that means for them as a country, but the other professors totally blind-sided us and it turned out to be a ridiculous course. However, it was one of the most fun trips I've ever taken, so not all was lost :)

We came back in early June and it was all Bridal showers and last minute planning until the day of our wedding, July 10, 2010.


Stay tuned for a wedding related post!