You may or may not have noticed that my wedding posts have gone missing in the last, oh, seven months or so. I do have an explanation for this, many little reasons really. A lot has happened since my last Wedding Wednesday post, and I think it's time for a good old fashioned recap.
Previous Wedding Posts
Up until this point, I've posted about our engagement, asking my bridesmaids to join in the wedding, our engagement party (more on that later...), selecting our venue and date, committing to a workout regime, and starting our wedding registry. I last left with the news that we would be meeting with our caterer to go over the menu and do some food tasting. Then I went silent for a while...
Vay-cay
The first [awesome] delay in wedding planning and blog posting was an amazing trip to ClubMed Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic last June. I have already started a post about this trip, but still haven't finished it yet. But I will. Hopefully I'll get it up here before the one year anniversary.
Cold Feet
It's not what you think. Neither of us were thinking about bailing out on getting married. We were considering bailing out on the wedding and just eloping instead. For real. I'm wondering if this is something every couple goes through? It happened right after we met with our caterer. Don't get me wrong. Our caterer is great. The food was wonderful and we picked out some really yummy dinner food for everyone. It was the sticker shock that got to Blake and me. We went to our food tasting meeting thinking it would cost a certain amount for the food, drinks and service... and we left there with that number roughly tripled. Granted, this number included the tables, chairs, wait staff, bartender, taxes, gratuity, etcetera but still. Blake and I felt like crap. I even cried. Yes, I had a wedding cry. Again, I'm hoping this is just something everyone does at some point while planning a wedding. But the guilt of asking my parents to pay this absorbent amount of money on a party...
So, we considered scrapping the whole thing and just eloping at the historic Santa Ana city hall. This idea got pretty far. We even set a date for our secret elopement. October 1st. It would have been our three year dating anniversary, and we had scheduled our engagement photos for that day so we knew our wedding photographers were available. We'd just have to switch it from an engagement shoot to an elopement shoot. We even started contacting our wedding party to see if they could spontaneously "meet up" with us on that date. It would have been on a Wednesday, by the way. Not exactly a traditional weekend day to throw a party. But we just wanted to get hitched with about a dozen of our closest friends and family as witness. Then we'd throw a backyard barbecue somewhere at a later date to celebrate with the whole family.
Gallbladder
Aaaaand then our Plan B came crashing down. I was having a terrible back pain that was waking me up in the night and lasting for hours with absolutely no relief. I've had a back problem for years, but this felt different and was in a completely different location. It seemed to also be happening on nights where I had eaten a large, fatty meal for dinner. I immediately diagnosed myself as having gallbladder attacks because I'm an ameteur diagnostician in my spare time. But I said it jokingly and ignored my problem for months and just continued taking ibuprofen and muscle relaxers every time I had a flare up. I casually mentioned the pain to my primary care doctor during a routine physical and quickly found myself in a room getting an ultrasound. What felt like minutes later, (it was actually about a week) I was at the hospital about to have one of my organs pulled out of my body through my belly button by use of a robot. I know, it was some really sci-fi shit. Oh, and this happened on October 1st. That's right. Our three year anniversary. The date of our tentative elopement, I had what turned out to be a pretty major, urgent surgery.
Back on Track
The surgery itself went really well, although my gallbladder bile duct was misshapen so the surgeon had to dig around and "explore" inside of me longer than originally planned. I don't know if this contributed to the pain I experienced after I woke up, but wow. I was not expecting it to hurt as bad as it did. I'm not a wuss or weakling when it comes to pain, but this was something else. Also, I had an adverse reaction to the pain meds they gave me for the pain and ended up in the ER the next day, because I could not stop throwing up. Maybe this is TMI but if you can imagine having an abdominal surgery and then violently throwing up immediately after, you can see how it's worth mentioning.
So, you can imagine how this put me off track from wedding planning for a while. Not to mention before the surgery we were ready to throw in the wedding towel completely. After my surgery, though, we sort of took it as a sign that we shouldn't elope. Both of us really wanted a "real" wedding, and felt like we deserved it. Everyone deserves to have the wedding of their dreams.
Still, quite a few months went by, actually, with no planning whatsoever. I had to heal and I didn't feel like rescheduling our engagement photos right away, nor did I want to go dress shopping. I was barely leaving the house for about a month. It took three months before I started working out again or really feeling like myself. Now, I feel better than I've ever felt in my life, and I suggest everyone removes their evil gallbladders immediately if not sooner, but I digress.
After four or five months I knew it was time to get back in the swing of things. Nothing like a major surgery to throw your wedding planning off track. So, I rescheduled our engagement photo session because I needed those pictures to use for our Save the Date cards which were grossly overdue already. And I knew it was time for the shopping event I had been dreading since the day he got down on one knee....
THE DRESS
For most women, the very first thing they want to do the day after they get engaged is go wedding dress shopping. Well, I've never been like most women. I pretty much hate dress shopping. I'm shaped like a racehorse, not a dainty little flower. I'm short and stocky and muscular and curvy and meaty. I'm not tall and lean. I never will be. Therefore, finding flattering clothing has and always will be more difficult for me than for some other women. Nevertheless, I still want to look beautiful on my wedding day. Therein lies the conundrum. So you can see how shopping for a wedding dress seemed like a certain form of hell for me. I was certain that I would end up in tears, going home dressless and feeling like a complete troll after dress shopping day one.
So I prepared. I had looked up some dresses online and pinned them to my Pinterest board. I had flipped through some bridal magazines. I had screenshot-ed dresses from websites of dress shops that I would make appointments at. I was overly prepared for many, many options. I figured the more options I had, the less disappointed I would be when things didn't look good on me. Which they inevitably wouldn't. I expected for every ten train wrecks I had, maybe there'd be one somewhat decent option. But I still figured it would be 50 or so dresses before I settled on one. No joke.
How wrong I was.
Maybe it was the gallbladder surgery or my slight efforts at eating better, but I felt absolutely amazing in the very first dress I tried on. In fact, it's the one I got. Yep, I'm that person who bought the very first dress I tried on. It really does happen in real life. No spoilers on what the dress looks like, but here's how it went:
I somewhat spontaneously made an appointment at David's Bridal in Huntington Beach. Before we went there (we being me, my mom, three of my "maids" and my flower girl), I scoured their website and found some dresses that I liked and wanted to try on. When we walked in the store I was showing my mom the dresses I liked on my phone, and she pointed at a dress on a mannequin and said "like that one?" Done. That was it. I said, "yes, that one is even better. I want to try that one!" and the rest was history. It wasn't even on their website yet because they had just gotten it in stock. I tried it on and loved it. I tried on two more that I had like online but just wanted to try the first one on again and decided that I don't like playing dress up anyway and pulled the trigger. And I love it. It's perfect for me. It's flattering and suits our venue and style of our wedding and it fit pretty darn perfectly. What more could I ever want? Easy peasy.
I'm so incredibly thankful that dress shopping didn't go poorly, as I had imagined, because it really may have broken me. Also, it was even more meant to be that we sort of spontaneously went that day because my matron of honor, Natalie, went into labor and had her baby the very next day. So, if I had waited any longer to go dress shopping, she wouldn't have been able to be there!
Natalie's daughter, Brenna, is my flower girl and she also took to the task like a fish to water, putting a basket over her arm immediately. I died from the cuteness.
Needless to say, this really jump started me back into wedding planning. I felt so relieved that everything else from this point on would be just a breeze.
Wedding Expo
The other wonderful thing that helped get things going is that our wedding venue hosted a bridal expo! Booths on booths of wedding vendors that had worked with our venue before, knew the location and staff and were ready to sign on and help us. We found our officiant (who is an absolute perfect fit), our DJ (which I think I'll have to do a short post about that, too), booked Fo' Cheesy Photo Booth for the reception (because how fun is that?!), found a good hotel for the wedding night, and may have even found a potential florist. Check, check, checking things off the list felt great, and I think we've been making great vendor choices so far.
Engagement Photos
Getting our engagement photos done really made a big difference to me in the momentum of the wedding planning, too. It was the big thing that I wanted done months ago that I had to cancel because of my gallbladder surgery, and I couldn't send out our Save the Dates until I got a nice photo of us from that photo shoot.
I could make an entire post about all the details of our shoot, how wonderful our photographers are. D'Avello D'Avello D'Avello!!! but I'm trying to be brief here and they gave us a blog preview of our engagement shoot that you can go visit separately anyway. Oh, have mentioned we're having a travel-inspired wedding? Because we are. Spoiler alert! ;) Maps, vintage suitcases, planes, trains and automobiles... Because of that, we had our engagement shoot at the Santa Ana train station so that I would have a perfect photo to use for our Save the Dates! I'm not going to show you which one I used, although if you're my friend on Facebook you probably already know.
A little behind the scenes info about the shoot, I did my hair to the best of my ability, got my makeup professionally done at the MAC store, and bought a new outfit.
Blake had little to no prep to do other than giving his head a fresh buzz, but I was running around like a chicken with it's head cut off all day. Of course it was totally worth it, though! Here were some of our absolute favorite shots from that day:
Bridesmaid Dresses
The other super fun thing we checked off was picking out bridesmaid dresses! Like the wedding dress I'm not going to show the whole thing because there needs to be some surprises left for people at the wedding, but I will say they are SO flattering and look absolutely amazing on all four girls. I'll give a little teaser, too and say they're bright blue and short, so here's a pic of the bottom half:
I know, the color is crazy pretty. But that's all I'm going to say about that. Everyone seemed to agree that this one was the most comfortable and flattering on everyone, too, which is important to me. We don't want dresses that pinch in weird places, or would be too hot, or need a million alterations to fit right. And these seemed to fit like gloves on everyone.
Save the Date
Lastly, to fully catch up on everything from the last few months, today Blake and I mailed our Save the Dates. I'm going to do a whole post next week about this whole long, tedious and agonizing process next week after I'm confident all my recipients have received their mail. But until then all I'll leave you with is that I had no idea how difficult it would be to collect addresses. No one is allowed to move between now and when we send our invitations, because I can't handle any more changes to the address list! haha
But, most importantly and the bottom line that I need to make sure gets through... is that I am finally, after all this, excited about all this wedding planning and actually having some fun now! I feel like the majority of the stress is gone. I still have so much to do, but I'm enjoying it all now. I can't believe how fast things are moving and how time is flying by! It's time to turn it up into hyper drive, so, until next time...
[ j. ]
