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.