A Weighty Issue

Let me start by saying that I'm sure there will be at least one or two people that will read this post and probably want to punch me in the face...but I promise you this "problem" is not nearly as fun to have as you would think.

So I've always been a petite girl, I'm all of 5 feet tall (5'1 on a good day) and it wasn't until after I graduated from college that I weighed enough to be allowed to donate blood. I eat, trust me, I can pack it away with the best of them. That was actually one of the things that first attracted Kristian to me. I've just been blessed/cursed with a fast metabolism. However, my mother assures me this will not last forever---note she weighed 90 pounds on her wedding day.

Because of my petiteness (is that a word?) including my lack of boobage it's always been a challenge to find clothes and I knew going into it that when it came time to get a wedding dress it wouldn't be any easier.

I ordered a size 2 dress which was the smallest they had. When the dress arrived in December it actually fit quite well except in the boob part which was made for someone with at least C cups and the length was a tad long.

Well here's my problem, the last few months and last few weeks especially have been very stressful. And unfortunately I'm the type of person that when I'm stressed or anxious I lose my appetite and therefore lose weight. Between my first and second dress fitting I probably lost about 5 pounds which is a lot on someone my size. My seamstress is NOT happy. She's having a hard enough time taking the dress in and fixing the boob part. She told my mother last weekend that if I continue to lose weight I won't be able to fit into my dress, it will just fall off me. She can only take it in so much.

So this week I've been on a mission to gain weight since I have my next fitting this weekend. This has been my menu:

Monday-
Breakfast- everything bagel with cream cheese
Lunch- McD's chicken sandwich and chocolate milkshake
Dinner- pork chops and mashed potatoes

Tuesday-
Breakfast- same as Monday
Lunch- Chinese food
Dinner- Fettuccine Alfredo and Baked Ziti and 3 Mozzarella sticks

Wed.-
Breakfast- same as Monday
Lunch- Leftover pasta from Tuesday
Dinner- a Smoothie (I fell asleep early and didn't really eat dinner after we met with our DJ)

Thurs-
Breakfast- egg and cheese on Croissant

So you would think I would not only gain weight but be in heaven eating all this. WRONG. Not only do I not seem to be gaining weight but I feel totally disgusting. All I want right now is a nice healthy salad and some fruit. I feel like my insides are rotting. Ugh.

All I want to is to gain about 5-7 pounds and I'll be fine and my dress should fit well but I can't seem to keep weight on right now.

So while most brides try to lose weight right before the wedding I have the opposite problem. I know I know you hate me. But I swear I can't help it!

So I'm asking does anyone have any weight gaining tips that won't also make me completely flabby? I still want to look toned on the wedding day.

Showered with Love

I'm officially a two shower bride. When I first got engaged I didn't intend to have two separate showers but seeing as most of my girl friends live in NC it didn't seem right to have them travel to VA for my shower only to have to come back up a month later for the wedding. So that's why last month we had a smaller shower/bachelorette with just my girl friends in NC and this past weekend courtesy of my fabulous mother I had another shower locally with both mine and Kristian's female relatives.

The shower was held at the home of Cathy, one of my day of coordinators, who lives in a large beautiful house in Northern VA. With the help of Cathy and my other two DOC's my mother threw a really wonderful bridal shower for me. The food was great, the TWO cakes were DELICIOUS and the favors and decorations were adorable. She based all the decorations around our wedding colors and incorporated the black and white damask pattern that we are using throughout the wedding.

This was the first time that a lot of my family and Kristian's family had the chance to meet and everyone seemed to get along really well. It was a nice opportunity for all the women to meet prior to the wedding.

My oldest brother was there as the official shower photographer. It was so nice to not have to worry about taking pictures and just having him there floating in the background catching the festivities on camera. Plus I think he got a kick out of seeing what a bridal shower is really like...minus having to watch his baby sister open up a VS box full of lingerie. HA!

Here are some pictures of the shower. He took a ton of photos unfortunately I'm not able to post a lot of them because they include my two young nieces/flower girls and my brother and sister in law are very anti having pics of their kids on the internet.

The spread of food

Some of the decorations and shower game prizes

Hugging my mama...the tiara was eventually passed on to my 3 year old niece...it looked much better on her.

Playing a shower game...cheesy but kind of fun

The Loot

My mom gave us engraved cake knife and server for the wedding

My silk "Bride" robe...I feel so Hugh Hefner in this

My FMIL made this frame holding our invitation

These cakes from Whole Foods were AMAZING!

The favors...damask candles and purse shaped cookies with my new last initial

With Kristian's mom

Me and my beautiful mother

The shower photographer aka my brother

We got some great gifts, everyone was so generous. Kristian and I are very lucky to have such amazing families.

With This Ring

We have our wedding rings!!!! Kristian's ring (which was his grandfathers) and which he had sent to his aunt (whose a goldsmith) to get re-sized arrived back to us today. Kristian spent the day wearing it around the house. I think he may be more excited about his ring than I am mine! :)

I knew that my ring, which we ordered about a month ago had come in however Kristian said we probably couldn't go pick it up until later this week. When I got home from work I opened the ring box to check out his ring and wouldn't you know, the sneaky little bastard lied to me and had already picked up my ring and put it in the box next to his ring.

I was so excited to see my wedding ring and try it on, it fits perfectly by the way. My engagement ring will now have a pretty little friend to hang out with.

Here are pics of what we'll be sporting, officially, as of May 22!

Do Me a Favor

We finally finished creating our favors this weekend. Like our invitations this was another project that we've been slowly working on since about February. I know that a lot of people think favors are a pointless waste of money. And while I agree that most people could care less about receiving a favor at a wedding, me being the greedy bitch I am, I always like getting a little something. It makes me feel like a kid again going home with a goody bag at the end of a party and who didn't like goody bags? So despite the fact that it would mean shelling out even more money on our already limited budget I knew that I wanted to give our guests some kind of favor to thank them for coming to the wedding...you know...in addition to the free food and booze.

After going to a good number of weddings in my lifetime one of my favorites of all the favors I've gotten is the personalized mixed CD. It's always fun to see what kind of music a couple will pick and sometimes you even end up introduced to a song you weren't familiar with before.

Kristian and I both agreed right away that we wanted to give personalized CD's to our guests with songs that have been meaningful to us and our relationship. It was a lot of fun picking out the songs together and deciding on the order of the playlist. Though admittedly we both had to make a few compromises since we our taste in music is not exactly identical. Ultimately we are both really excited about the song choices and I think a good majority of our guests will really like it.

While looking for some ideas online I came across this picture via google images to use for inspiration.

It seemed easy enough to re-create on our own. So I found the CD cases via Bliss Wedding Market. Then I purchased some fuchsia ribbon online and finally I was able to buy some personalized damask labels via a seller on Ebay. With some help from the boy we came up with these CD holders.


As for the inside we decided to include a thank you note in the right side pocket and then the actual labeled CD inside the left pocket.

*click on the photo to make larger and see the song list*

It's been a fairly easy, yet tedious project but I have to give Kristian props on this one because he's done a lot of work on these including burning all 100 CD's and creating and affixing the CD labels which I just did not have the patience for. It was also a relatively inexpensive project, overall it broke down to around $2 per favor which isn't bad. I think it's a fun, little gift to give our guests as thanks for celebrating with us and I hope that everyone enjoys our song selection.

30 Days

If you check out my little countdown over -----------------> it now reads 30 days! 30 days! Only ONE MONTH until my wedding! Holy Mutha F@*&er! Where the hell did the past 14 months go???

I'm not gonna lie I woke up in a little panic this morning realizing all the stuff that still needs to get done in the next 30 days such as:

-Meet with our DJ to finalize playlist
-Have my final fittings for my dress
-Finish the favors
-Finalize the ceremony wording
-Print and Assemble the Programs
-Print the Escort cards
-Print the Table Numbers/Names
-Pick up our Marriage license (kind of a biggie)
-Have my second hair trial and first makeup trial
-Buy gifts for the groomsmen, readers and coordinators
-Renew my Drivers License...not wedding related but still needs to be done by May 12th
-Pack for the honeymoon

And probably about a million other things I'm forgetting. AHHHH! Thankfully the next few weekends are pretty much being devoted entirely to wedding stuff and my goal is to have basically everything done by the weekend of the 15th. Wish me Luck!

Sharp Dressed Man

While I was out of town this past weekend Kristian and one of his groomsmen went to get fitted for their tuxes. Kristian and I had gone to Men's Warehouse back in February to pick out what all the boys would wear and then we told everyone would have to come in by April 20th to get fitted and pay their deposits.

We decided to rent the tuxes from Men's Warehouse for a few reasons-

1. There is one right up the street from where we live
2. There are locations all over the country and you can go into any of them to get fitted and place your order. You don't have to go to the store the groom signed up at.
3. Because of the number of rentals K's tux is free (finally something free in this wedding!)
4. They had a pretty decent selection

The only thing that I was disappointed about when we went to pick out the tuxes was that they didn't have any for K to actually try on. I was hoping for a tuxedo fashion show but all we could do is look through their catalog to pick what we wanted and see swatches of the material for the vests/ties.

Ultimately this wasn't a huge deal since both K and I pretty much knew and agreed on what the boys should wear. We decided on black tuxes with a 3 button jacket. Kristian will have a light silver vest and tie and the rest of the guys will have black vests and ties. Initially Kristian wanted a bow tie but personally I hate bow ties. I think they only look good on older men or if you are going to a really fancy schmancy black tie event at the White House. So that idea got vetoed pretty quick.

Here are pictures of more or less what the boys will be wearing at the wedding.

Kristian's ensemble

The groomsmen/ushers outfits

I can't wait to see Kristian in his tux, I know he will look super hot. Yesterday he texted me a picture of himself wearing a suit before his job interview and it just made me even more excited to see him all dressed up on the wedding day. My baby cleans up well!

Babies, Ninjas, Guacamole...ingredients for a great weekend

My weekend trip to Charlotte for K.Law's baby shower was a blast! My abs got an amazing workout from laughing all weekend. Who needs Jillian Michaels when you have friends like mine! I can honestly say that Kristen is even more beautiful in person than in her pregnancy pictures, she's truly glowing.

In addition to seeing some of my favorite AOII girls I got to meet Tiffany who has two of the cutest kids I've ever seen. Everyone was fighting over the chance to hold her little man who is 9 months old and never fussed once during lunch.

I also finally got to meet the fabulous Summer who is even more beautiful and sweet in person than on her blog. It was amazing how seamlessly she was able to fit in with a group of girls that have been friends for a decade. You would think she had known us all for years.

The shower itself was awesome, it was held at a beautiful country club, the food was amazing and Baby Lawlor got some great goodies. That night we went out to dinner to a kickass Mexican restaurant that has the best guacamole I've ever tasted. We finished the night with a Snuggie Danceoff and multiple viewings of this video:



And now onto some pictures of the Baby L celebration-

The diaper cake and picture frame "guest book"

Check out his hat, seriously can you get any cuter than that?!

The glowing mom-to-be

Me and Summer B.

You can't have a baby shower with mustaches

Isn't she a natural?

Pirate Booties

More Pirate Gear...Arrrrgh!

The weekend wouldn't be complete without a boob shot

We're a good looking group!

You can't keep a pregnant lady from guacamole

You can't keep Summer away from Margarita's

Krummer!

Posing with Spanky's husband....I decided to take the mustache craze up a notch

The Snuggie Dance-off...it was a tie.

It was a fantastic weekend and I can't wait to see my girls again!

Staying Positive

So despite the shit show that this week has been things are slowly looking up. I hate when people write obscure posts about something major going on and not giving details so I apologize for doing that yesterday, I was just too upset to write it all out. Basically, without going into all the detail and drama behind it, Kristian is no longer employed. So a month before our wedding we are now down to a one person income. Basically my stress level has gone from a 10 to about a 26 overnight. Anyways it is what it is and I'm just trying my best to stay positive about the whole thing.

Onto the brigher side of things, we finally got back our $500 deposit from our old photographer who we cancelled our contract with. We then met last night with our new photographers who I love. I think they have a great personality and their photos are pretty kickass. Check out their website. They've been freelance for a while but finally decided to officially start their own company. They've given us a great deal too which is much appreciated!

On an even brighter note I'm going down to Charlotte, NC this weekend to celebrate a VERY joyous event....the baby shower of one of my favorite people K.Law. Not only do I get to see Kristen but also another one of my favs Spanky. And to put the cherry on top of this already kickass sundae I get to meet in person two of my bloggie crushes Summer B. and Tiffany. As well as some of my lovely AOII girls. This weekend couldn't have come at a better time. Some girl time, laughs and probably a few adult beverages is just what I need right now!

F.M.L.

That seems to be the theme of this week and I suspect the next few upcoming weeks. This week has turned into a full on, complete and utter Pile O Poo with the biggest hit coming last night. I can't really discuss right now but let's just say it's NOT good, not even a little. I'm not a positive, optimistic person by nature and in this particular case I'm having an especially hard time being optimistic. I'm pissed, upset, anxious and depressed. Sorry I can't get into more detail now, maybe in a few days. But any happy, good vibes you all can send my way would be great right about now.

Ceremony Stuff

One of the big things on my to-do list is to go over our vows and what we want said during the ceremony, after all that is the most important part of the day when you really get down to it.

As I've mentioned before Kristian and I feel that we would rather go with the more traditional vows i.e. for better for worse, in sickness and in health etc. etc. rather than write our own. We want to do this for several reasons- 1. We both like the idea of using the same vows that millions of other couples have been using for centuries. It just seems romantic and sweet and a nice tie that binds us to other married couples. 2. Neither of us want the added pressure of coming up with our own "perfect" vows.

However we definitely have very strong personal feelings that we would like to express to each other in a more private way so we talked about perhaps taking some time alone together after the rehearsal to say our own personal vows to each other in private.

In addition to the vows and prayers we will be including two readings during the ceremony.

The first reading will be done by Kristian's Uncle Stanley who he is very close to. We plan to have him read:

"I Love You",
by Roy Croft
I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you, not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you, for the part of me that you bring out. I love you, for putting your hand into my heaped-up heart, and passing over all the foolish, weak things that you can't help dimly seeing there, and for drawing out, into the light, all the beautiful belongings that no one else had looked quite far enough to find. I love you, because you are helping me to make of the lumber of my life, not a tavern, but a temple. Out of the works of my every day, not a reproach, but a song. I love you, because you have done more than any creed could have done to make me good, and more than any fate could have done to make me happy. You have done it without a touch, without a word, without a sign. You have done it by being yourself. Perhaps that is what being a friend means, after all.

The second reading will be done by my friend Spanky aka Ashley. It's actually the same reading I did in her wedding.

"Blessing of the Hands"

These are the hands of your best friend, young and strong and full of love for you, that are holding yours on your wedding day, as you promise to love each other today, tomorrow, and forever. These are the hands that will work alongside yours, as together you build your future. These are the hands that will passionately love you and cherish you through the years, and with the slightest touch, will comfort you like no other. These are the hands that will hold you when fear or grief fills your mind. These are the hands that will countless times wipe the tears from your eyes; tears of sorrow, and tears of joy. These are the hands that will tenderly hold your children. These are the hands that will help you to hold your family as one. These are the hands that will give you strength when you need it. And lastly, these are the hands that even when wrinkled and aged, will still be reaching for yours, still giving you the same unspoken tenderness with just a touch.

I think both of these readings really express our feelings for each other and will help to make the ceremony a bit more personal.

Test Results

Prior to our invitation debacle from the weekend which I'm still pretty upset and bitter over (seriously I should have just sent out a damn e-vite!) we had our second pre-marital counseling session with Pastor Steve. We finally found out how we scored on our Relationship Inventory. I must admit I was nervous going into it. Not that I really thought we did poorly but you just never know with these things.

Well basically...we KICKED ass! Yep we got really high scores in all but one of the sections. There are 6 sections of the inventory and we scored 100% on the Social/Friends section, 90% on two other sections I think Communication and Sex (Bow Chicka Bow Wow), 80% on two sections which I think were Finances and Parenting/Family Relations and then the one section we scored the lowest on, 69%, was the Religion/Spirituality section. That doesn't surprise me since neither K nor I are overly religious. We both believe in God, Baby Jesus and Christmas but when you get into the nitty gritty details of things we don't talk too much about that stuff. Eventually we'll probably hit up a church or two and get our religion on.

Since we did so well we didn't really need to go over too much. There were a few questions in each section that we had differing answers on so we went over those and discussed why we answered differently. There was one question in the Sex portion that Pastor Steve said I was the only person he ever saw answer that particular question honestly. haha. Umm hello God is watching, I'm not gonna lie! It actually was really helpful going over some of this stuff and I think we both really benefitted from it.

Steve seems to think that we're in a good place with our relationship and expectations and that we actually remind him a lot of him and his wife!

After we finished with the questions he gave us some material to read over regarding the actual ceremony and the vows and whatnot. We just need to go thru that and decide what we want him to say and let him know. For the most part we plan to go the pretty traditional route so it shouldn't take too long to do.

Disappointed

Well it turns out that my oh so pretty invitations that I loved and was so proud of didn't necessairly deliver as nicely as they were sent out. Kristian and I stopped by my mom's house today to pick up some stuff and I saw her invitation on the counter so I grabbed it and when I opened it I almost started to cry. It literally looked like it had been run over by a truck! So much of the black from the outter part of the pocket invitation had offset and transferred onto the inside white part of the invitation. There literally looked like a tire mark was going down the center of the main invitation. My mom was like "oh I wasn't going to tell you about that" Umm what?!

So now I'm convinced they all delivered that way and all the people who told me they were beautiful are lying to make me feel good. I sent a text to two of my friends explaning about how my mom's looked and asked about theirs, they insisted theirs looked fine. I called my brother and forced him to finally go check his mail and tell me how his looked. He said he had a little bit of the same issue but not nearly as bad as my mom's. I then called Kristian's mom who had told me hers was beautiful and asked her. She said there was one small black line that had offset on hers but it wasn't that noticeable and she still thought it was beautiful. Ummm there shouldn't be ANY black lines on it!

It was all I could do to keep from crying/throwing a fit. My brother said I should take them back to Michael's and ask for a refund but I don't care about the money. I care about all the time and energy I put into these which was apparently for nothing and I'm embarrassed thinking about our guests getting awful looking invites. I realize that they won't think I sent them out looking like that (at least I hope) but it still sucks. So much for saving money and going the DIY route.

Obviously I haven't talked to everyone so I'm hoping that a large majority of these ended up being fine but I'm just pissed about those that aren't. I guess for my next wedding I WON'T be using the invitations from Michael's.....kidding (about the next wedding part at least).

I'm Yours

One of the items we've had the hardest time deciding on was our first dance song. I had no idea that Kristian would have such a strong opinion about what song we used during our first dance as a married couple. I feel like most guys don't care so much about that. We started talking about it a few months ago and I threw out a few song choices that I liked just to be promptly shot down. He also made a few selections that I wasn't a big fan of. It doesn't help that for the most part he and I have very different taste in music. He's all about Classic Rock and I prefer to listen to music from this century.

One of his requests was that the song have some kind of meaning to us and our relationship. Well once he said that it seemed like a pretty obvious choice.

Let me back up a bit....when he and I first started dating I was obsessed with the song 'I'm Yours' by Jason Mraz which had recently come out. He too really liked Jason Mraz and even had his CD which he burned a copy of for me. For his birthday in 2008 I found out that Jason Mraz was playing in concert the week of Kristian's birthday (great timing right?) so I bought us tickets as his birthday present. Then on the night he proposed 'I'm Yours' was the song playing when he asked me to marry him. In fact it was the lyrics in that song that convinced him to go ahead and propose that night which he hadn't originally planned on.

So as you can see it seemed the obvious choice for our first dance was 'I'm Yours'. Well we both veered away from that choice at first simply because the song is SOOO played out now and I didn't want something our guests would groan or roll their eyes out from hearing for the millionth time.

Then the lightbulb went off in my head and I remembered how at my friend Spanky's wedding she actually walked down the aisle to a really pretty acoustic version of the same song. So I found it on ITunes and we decided THAT was our song.

This way we get the sentimentality of using a song that is meaningful to us but we're able to use a version that not many people have heard and that I think is just beautiful. I can't wait! Check out our song choice below....

You're Invited

As of this past Monday our invitations are officially in the mail and we've already gotten some great feedback from our guests. I have to say that so far doing our invitations was the hardest most tedious part of wedding planning.

In order to save some dough we decided to print and assemble the invitations ourselves using one of the invitation sets from Michael's. We bought our invitations back in December and I noticed when I was there this past weekend they've added a lot more designs that are all really cute. I definitely recommend checking them out for an affordable DIY option. Not to sound bias (though I totally am) but I think ours look way more expensive than they were.

It definitely wasn't an easy process. I started working on these at the beginning of February and finally finished at the end of March. Granted I worked on these a little bit at a time so as to not cause physical harm to my printer which seemed to enjoy eating my labels. It took me a while to get our wording to fit into the template and print everything off so that it was lined up properly.

I also decided to make it much harder on myself by foregoing the pre-tied black ribbons that came with the invites and instead buy and tie pink ribbons to give a pop of color. If I never tie another ribbon in my life I will be thrilled. I became a bit OCD about it and needed them to be "perfect" and drove myself crazy in the process.

I should mention that I was also able to save money on these due one of my very generous vendors at work who offered to buy all our stamps as a wedding gift to us and therefore saved us around $60. I decided to make life a bit easier by just using the wedding stamps offered by the post office rather than the fancy personalized stamps via Zazzle. After all people don't really pay much attention to the stamps right? Right.

Anyway, here are pictures of our invitations which I'm really proud of. Please pardon my black squiggles, I didn't want the crazies from the Internet stalking my guests or crashing my wedding.

I decided to purchase white outer envelopes so that the inner black envelope wouldn't get destroyed during the delivery process. I had wanted to print the addresses directly onto the envelopes but couldn't get my printer to cooperate so I went with the labels. Not my first choice but I think it looks okay. These weighed over 1 ounce so I had to use the $.61 stamp. **Always weigh your invites before you stamp and mail.

Here is the inner black pocket envelope. I decided to write out everyone's name by hand with a silver pen. I don't have the best handwriting but I think it added a nice personal touch.


The black pocket envelope sealed.


Ta-Da! I think the pink bow really makes it! On the left side are two pockets holding our guest information card, RSVP card and return envelope.

Here is our response card and return envelope. If you click on the picture you can see the wording. One tip I read about online was to number the back of each response card and have the numbers match up to a master guest list. That way if a guest sends back the response card without their name written in you can still know who it's from by checking the number on the back against your master list. We also wrote in the number of seats reserved for each particular invite. Hopefully this will prevent people from bringing everyone they know.


Here's the response card tucked in the return envelope. **This particular RSVP card isn't the one that goes with the black pocket invite shown above since that person is allowed to bring a guest and therefore has 2 seats reserved for them.

This is our guest information card. I'm hoping people will take advantage of our wedding website to get any information they need rather than emailing/calling me non-stop. Unfortunately our names are too long to fit on one line :(

Here's the card without the ribbon. If you click on the picture you can see the wording better. I found the wording from a few different websites and blogs and combined a few options together. I really love the wording since we are the ones hosting the wedding and I wanted to convey how important our guests are to us.

So that's it. After many many many hours these are finally done and I couldn't be more thrilled with the results. Now we just have to wait for the RSVP's to start rolling in.