What am I most looking forward to

Here is the grand list:


1. This may seem sad, but Josh and I have both been quoted saying that we cant wait for it to be over. This is not us wishing away our wedding at all, I'm beyond excited for the big day, however, I can't wait to feel the weight lifted off of my shoulders the morning after. The wedding is going to be fun but I think that if you are most looking forward to wedding as opposed to the marriage then you may be getting married for the wrong reason. I'm excited to have a hubby and I'm excited to move on with our lives after the wedding day.

2. I'm excited to see Josh's reaction when I walk down the aisle. Dont get too excited here, it would be far fetched to think he will shed a tear (he's not that type of dude). However, most of the days of my life I think I look like a troll; I dont have good style, my hair is almost never brushed, much less done in any nice way, I never wear jewelry and yet that guy still tells me I'm beautiful every day. When I try on that wedding dress, I feel gorgeous like I cant even describe. It doesn't matter if I have no makeup on and unshowered hair in a bun on the top of my head, I feel awesome in that dress. It hugs all the right places, it sparkles and the fabric is just to die for. So I'm excited to see Josh's reaction to me all dolled up and feeling like a queen.

3. Words cannot even begin to describe how excited I am to dance with my dad. I've been looking forward to marrying Josh since we basically started dating, but I've been looking forward to dancing with my dad at my wedding since I was a little girl. I'm the biggest daddy's girl in the entire world, we are the same person, which is probably why most people either love or hate both of us equally. I truly feel that this will be the most special moment of the wedding and I can't wait.

4. I'm so excited to get drunk after those first waltzes and just enjoy my night with everyone. There is a reason we invited 230 people to this wedding and its because we wanted a huge party so you guys better live up to our expectations.

5. I'm excited to change my name on facebook. Yup there I said it.

The End Is Near (What Would I Have Done Differently In Retrospect)

With the wedding a mere 3 months away and things starting to ramp up, I find i'm often looking back at the last fifteen months of wedding planning and thinking about what I would have done differently.

1. My absolute biggest regret of my wedding is not hiring a videographer, I am heartbroken that I dont have one. That being said, its not that it was a detail that was overlooked in the littlest, they are just so expensive. I'm not trying to devalue their work at all, I think that having those moments captured on film in a professional way is invaluable if anything but being on a tight budget means that you unfortunately have to make those sacrifices here and there. This really is the only thing that eats away at me because of our low budget. Everything else I am very satisfied with.

2. I should have numbered the response card envelopes and recorded the number with who it was sent to somewhere in my records. It is really inconvenient to get a response card back and have absolutely no idea who sent it lol.

3. I should have put stamps on the return envelopes although I really can't say I regret not doing it because what is 60 or whatever cents for a guest would have been 200 bucks for me to do all of them. I've been really shocked by the amount of people who have sent back response cards when it clearly says you can rsvp on the website and that's way more convenient (at least I would have thought).

4. And we both agree on this one, but looking back if we had known what this process was REALLY going to be like and not what pinterest told me it was going to be like, we probably would have saved our money, flown to a gorgeous island and eloped. Planning a wedding and I mean planning it, not hiring someone to plan it for you is probably the most frustrating task in the entire world. Part of the reason is money, part is the numerous opinions that you get that you really dont care about, the guest list, the food, it all just wears you out after a while. If I didn't see the value in a wedding planner before, I certainly do now.


With all this being said, the big day is three months away. Its going to be a beautiful wedding, I can promise that but there were certainly some things I would change looking back!

Great News

The thought of September had me panicking until very recently. As a substitute, September is basically a write off because most teachers dont take sick days during the first month of school. I didn't have very high hopes of getting a position next year since the HRSB is so competitive but I managed to land a pretty awesome job for the whole year. Panic is now gone, but now I get to add lesson planning to my lovely to-do list :)

Jewellery

Another fun part of the process. I've never been the type of girl who is big on accessories, and its not that I have anything against accessories, but i'm broke and that shit is expensive. That is why teaching back home has been so great because I could steal some of my moms stuff, who is like the accessory queen.

Regardless of whether you love jewellery or not, I've found that with the wedding it has brought out the little lost girl who loves sparkle deep inside of myself. So I've had a lot of fun shopping for my jewellery and in the process I've picked up a few good tips that I am now going to share.

The one enormous and most important piece of advice that I have for Brides is for the love of god do NOT buy your jewellery from a wedding dress shop, this includes any hairpieces too. Holy mark-up batman. Seriously you wont find one piece of jewellery for less than $150. I shopped around a bit at the beginning looking at different jewellery stores (also overpriced) and then someone suggested I check out Etsy.

(Cue birds singing, sun shining, rainbows and lollipops here) Etsy is heaven on earth. I LOVE ETSY. For those of you who dont know what it is. Essentially it is like an online marketplace for very small businesses. So these businesses set up a shop on the website and you can find them by searching for a product or by searching for the shop. Most of the stuff is handmade, there is a butt load of vintage stuff as well. You can buy multiple things from different shops or you can do like I did and buy multiple things from the same shop and save on shipping.

I found this great shop called DivineJewel that solely does wedding jewellery, and mostly with a vintage feel which will work well with my dress. The best part of Etsy is the price. Everything that I have found has been reasonably priced. I got my bracelet, necklace and bracelet, plus a gorgeous hair piece all for 190 dollars including tax and shipping. BAM DEAL. The hair pieces alone at Winchesters were around 200 dollars. And I wanted a hairpiece because for the ceremony I have a cathedral veil, but obviously I'm not wearing that to the reception so i like the hairpiece to spice up my hair for the reception.

Here are the items I got:

 hairpiece

 necklace

 earrings

 bracelet

Staying Organized, For The Unorganized Bride

I like the idea of being an organized individual, however, I have found that in practice, I tend to fail miserably at ACTUALLY being organized. When it comes to the wedding, I dont have a choice, but to be organized. So I've been a control freak for this wedding. Everything has a place and everything has been recorded in a number of different places.

For instance, I have a guest list on my wedding website, and I also have a detailed excel spreadsheet with all of the guests names, email and regular addresses etc. So every time I sent an invitation I would change the colour of their row on excel to blue and every time I get a RSVP back I change the colour to green.

Next I have printed out a bunch of circles to represent tables with 10 blank squares around them to represent the 10 seats at each table. I print out each guests name when I receive an rsvp and using sticky tack (because that's not PERMANENT) i'll assign them to a table. It is a lot easier to do seating plans with a visual.

Ta Da Organization!

The Tuxes are Picked!

We went into Tip Top last week after work one day and decided on the Tuxes. It was one of the easier choices we've made throughout this whole process and here is how it all went down: 

Before we went to Tip Top I looked through a Freeman's Formal Catalogue, which if you go through Tip Top, Rofies and a bunch of other menswear places with the exception of Moores who orders from the US, this is the company you will will be renting your tuxes from. Now there are some pros and cons to this, the pros are that they have a lot of options because they are the largest and only formal rental place in Canada, the cons is that you cant try on tuxes in the stores because they dont bring them in from Freeman's because it would cause chaos during the prom season etc. So you are ordering from a catalogue. I didn't mind this because Josh has stood in a bazillion weddings and has never had a huge problem that couldnt be fixed with the tuxes. Like one time the sizes were a bit off but they were able to handle that. 

Our biggest issue with choosing the tuxes was in order to match the groomsmen with the bridesmaids we would have to find a very particular colour purple which I hadn't seen in the catalogues and I didn't want them to wear non matching purples. I also have a things with the male side of the bridal party where I dont like the Groom to wear the exact same thing as the groomsmen because I dont like having to guess which man is the groom in pictures. So I wanted Josh to be wearing a Black Tux, with a black vest and Black Tie with a white shirt and pocket square. HATE BLACK TUXES WITH BLACK SHIRTS, makes the boys look like they are mobsters. So I wanted the boys to wear Black Tuxes with Black Vests and some variation of purple tie and pocket square. I ended up going with a polka dotted purple tie, sounds tacky but it isnt. It has a number of shades of purple so it will easily pick up the purple shade from the girls dresses. 

Here are two important things I learned from this experience: 

1. Choose them early because men can be slackers when it comes to getting sized. I know this because I always had to light a fire under Josh's ass to go get measured for his two best friends' weddings. Also if the boys put in their measurements before like 3 and half months before the wedding they get thirty dollars off their rental. Also there is a plus to having a large bridal party. If you order five groomsman tuxes the Grooms is free. AWESOMENESS.

2. Not all of your men have to wear the same tux. This sounds weird but when I was looking at the prices and stuff I wanted the older guys to get nice two button tuxes that were the most expensive ones but were still around 150 bucks which is pretty standard for formal rentals. However, I thought that was a bit much for the two ring bearers who are 4 and 8 years old. So they had a one button tux which would work fine for them for 89 dollars that I could get the same tie and stuff for as the bigger guys. 

Here are the tuxes

 groomsmen

 Josh

Ceremony Music

This is yet another post about how important it is to call in all of your favors for your big day. Little costs add up quickly and being able to get those little costs for free can help a great deal!

One of the ways I'm cutting costs and also making my ceremony more unique is by calling in a huge favor for the ceremony music. For those of you who dont know, my dad plays in a band, he can play the guitar better than most people in the world in my opinion and his band who have been together in some form or another for around 10 years have become like my crazy fake uncles whom I love to death. Over the years some of the members of the band have included my own family members, my uncle Louis was in the band for a bunch of years and now my brother Joe is in the band. So when it came to ceremony music it made no sense for us to go out and hire people we dont know to do it, when it would be so special to us to have people we love doing it. So we decided to ask Joe (one of the million favors he is doing for us this day) and Derek, who is basically family now and has been the lead singer of the band for a number of years to do the ceremony music.

So for the songs we wanted to choose timeless songs that obviously we like but that also are kind of related to the events. Most people might be in shock that I dont want to walk down the aisle to the Bridal March or to Canon in D, but to be honest, I feel like the Calvary should be coming down the aisle not the bride to some of those songs. At the same time, I can understand why brides want to go down the aisle to those songs because they are grand songs and make you feel like a star, so I get it, but they wouldn't be a reflection of me or what I want this wedding to be, which is: Romantic, Intimate (as intimate as you can get with 200 people that is), Simple, Elegant.

So here is what we are working with now: The bridal party will come down to In My Life by the Beatles (you'll notice a pattern here). I think this is just a very appropriate song for the people who mean so much to you to walk down the aisle to especially if you look at the lyrics. Then ta da me and dad and going to walk down to Something by the Beatles (note the pattern). I honestly just love this song, I love the way it makes me feel and I love everything about it. Its a good speed for a walk down the aisle song as well.

During the signing of stuff, dad is going to join in with the boys and the three or however many of them will be doing a version of Hallelujah. They do this as a band and it is literally breathtaking how beautiful their rendition is so I'm very excited for this.

And then lastly for when we are officially married and walking back down the aisle we are coming back down to Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles. No I did not plan for three out of the four songs to be by the Beatles it just so happens that they all worked so much better than our other ideas. Here Comes The Sun is a song that is filled with so much joy so I think it is beyond appropriate for that matter.

There she be!