Owl what?

Look what I got this week:

Aren't they cute?  You probably already figured out they have nothing to do with the wedding.  Well that is only partially true.  The 30 invitations on the top of the box have nothing to do with the wedding.  They are invitations for my wonderful friend Darcie's baby shower.  Here is a closer look at the super cute owl:

sorry for the terrible quality I was having lighting issues

Can you tell I am proud of them?  I can only actually take partial credit for them.  Darcie is planning on decorating the nursery in owls, which I think is an adorable idea and I wanted to incorporate that in the invitations, but my technical abilities are limited so I have to give Nick all the credit for the owl- that design was all him!

I am only partially sharing this because I am so stinking proud of them but the real reason is because of what is under those 30 invitations...the Save the Dates! Again Nick gets all the credit for their design but I think he did a pretty good job if I do say so myself.   I am going to be mean and not share pictures of those just yet; mostly because the 5 of you that read the blog will be getting them in the mail and I don't want to ruin the fun of that.  Our goal is to get them out in the next week so hopefully they will be in your mailbox in no time! 

200

Yikes only 200 days until Wedding Day!  I really don't know where the time has gone.  Luckily I think we are in a pretty good place in terms of my to do list and there are only a few more major things to cross off and then it is just my little projects and random things that have to get done! Ask me again when we get to 100- not sure I will be as calm, cool, and collected.

And now I am going to brag for a minute about my wonderful fiance.  We had decided a while ago that we weren't going to do anything for Valentine's Day. We were out of town all weekend and both had busy Mondays so going out just didn't make sense.  We are also saving for a house and a wedding and neither of us really need anything so we decided not to buy anything for each other either.  Well then I came home from the gym last night at about 8pm to a lovely candlelit dinner.  Not a bad way to celebrate Valentine's Day or the 200 day mark!

Hotel Drama

Our first potentially catastrophic thing happened this week.

Wednesday afternoon I got a message from Nick that said "call me at work when you have a minute." I thought it was strange but wasn't too worried.  Then I found out the reason he wanted me to call him was because he had just called to hotel to follow up on an email that we had sent about a week ago and not gotten a response on.  When he called the hotel he discovered that the events coordinator we had been working with was gone and we would now be working with someone new.  I tried very hard not to panic because we had been very diligent in making sure we had everything in writing but part of me was still panicking a little bit.  As strange as our first coordinator was she had been good about letting us do what we wanted and giving us deals and I feared the new girl wouldn't be quite as accommodating.  Nick set up an appointment for Thursday evening so we could go over the questions in the email and meet the new coordinator. 

Again like I said I was trying not to panic but then he told me that she also told him they no longer allowed candles.    Insert freak out moment here!  We had decided on centerpieces and they included candles.  Not just candles but floating candles so the little flicker light tea lights just weren't going to cut it. 

We did meet with the new coordinator last night and it went well.  She is going to honor everything we have in writing (thankfully we found all our emails- I knew I was a compulsive organizer for a reason).  Some things are a little up in the air and that freaks me out a bit, but I feel more confident with the new girls memory and organizational skills than I did the last person so hopefully it will all work out.

Now it is just back to the drawing board on centerpieces....

Ring Indecision

Nick told you about the purchase of my engagement ring in this post and to refresh your memory here is a picture

It is very simple and classic so one wouldn't think it would be difficult to find a wedding band to match.  How wrong I was.

One of the reasons Nick purchased a solitaire in a simple setting was so I could change the setting if I wanted to.  So in early October Nick and I and I were killing time while Wrigley was getting groomed and stopped by the jewelry store he purchased my ring at to look at wedding bands.  When we first started looking most of the rings that jumped out at me were sets which would mean I would have to change the setting of my engagement ring.  At first I was o.k. with that idea and Nick had planned on me doing that all along so he was on board with that plan as well.  I even left the store that day with some ideas similar to this one:

The problem was the more I wore my ring the more I fell in love with it and really just couldn't imagine a different setting on my finger.  Keeping my setting, however, limited my choices in wedding bands. So I put off the decision for a while until last month I was in the store to get my ring inspected and decided to take another look around and see if any of the simple bands jumped out at me.


Here are a few that I was leaning towards:

in yellow gold

 I liked that this one provided a bit of interest but ultimately decided I didn't think it would work well with my engagement ring so this one was crossed off. 

 Then I was leaning towards one of the two following rings:

 Both of these rings looked beautiful with my engagement ring I just wasn't excited about them.

In the midst of all this shopping I saw this ring on one of the blogs I follow:

My first thought when I saw this ring was that it was really pretty but not really for me. However,  I found myself coming back to it over and over again.  I was drawn to the little bit of color and the overall simplicity of the band but still wasn't sold.  A couple of weeks went by and I couldn't stop thinking about this ring so I showed it to Nick thinking he would hate it.  To my surprise he didn't and suggested changing the turquoise for a different stone, possibly emeralds.  That was it - I was sold!  So I went back to the store to see if they had anything similar and this was the best they could do: 

Really not going to work.  I didn't like the square look or the embellishments on the outside of the setting and the other problem was my only option for stone were blue or pink sapphires.  As most of you know I hate pink so that was out and as beautiful I think blue sapphires are I was in love with the idea of a green stone.

So now I was a bit discouraged and tried to fall in love with other rings, but everytime I looked I just kept coming back to the turquoise ring.  So what is a girl to do?  Well it turns out my cousin is a jeweler who specializes in custom jewelry.  Im not sure why I hadn't thought of him sooner.  We had already talked to him about taking Nick's grandfather's wedding ring and making it into a ring for him so why not see if he could make one for me too? I think for some reason I was hung up on the idea that my wedding band had to come from the same place as my engagement ring and as wonderful a business as that is everything there just felt like I would be settling and since I will be wearing this ring for the rest of my life settling just didn't seem right.  I needed to have this ring so I emailed my cousin to get his opinion and he said he could do it!  We are still working out all the details, but it feels good to have one more thing just a bit closer to finished.

Pretty Pretty Linens

First- I apologize.  I promised more blog posts and I failed. I don't even have a good excuse.  We have had a ridiculous amount of snow days lately which would have been perfect for blogging but I failed and didn't get it done :(  The good news; however, is I got lots of wedding stuff accomplished on my snow days which means fun blog posts (as long as I actually write them!)

Before Nick and I left for Christmas we stopped by our linen vendor to pick out some linens.  The hotel is providing some but their prices on chair covers were really just insane and I couldn't stomach paying them that much.  I found a dealer that would give them to us for 1/3 of the price the hotel was and even cheaper if we put them on ourselves-SCORE!  Nick being the trooper he is came with and when we walked in I was a little overwhelmed by our choices.  It probably didn't help that there was an adorable miniture brown poodle bouncing around the store, yeah I have no idea either.  He was awful cute but full of energy and a bit distracting.  Luckily once we told the saleswoman what we wanted our choices were narrowed significantly and we decided on white chair covers with blue sashes.  The room will look something like this:

 Our sashes are more organza looking like the one below, but I wanted to provide a sense of what a room full will look like. 

Ok so I know that was a pretty boring post which is why I didn't post about it 2 months ago when I crossed that off my list.  The real reason for this post is because subconsciously I have apparently become obsessed with linens.  I have had multiple dreams about the lines not being correct.  In one dream we arrived to the reception mid cocktail hour only to discover the chair covers and table clothes were in a pile in the corner of the room and the tables were just set on the ugly wood table top. I of course did the classy thing and kicked everyone out of the room so I could put all the linens on the table before dinner.

In another dream our reception was in a high school gym for some reason and I stopped by before the wedding to check on the progress and found tables set up in a U shape (you know typical college discussion setup) and several church ladies (from my childhood) putting table clothes on the tables.  The real problem was not the set up of the tables; however bizarre that was it was, it was that the tablecloths they were using were not floor length.  I started to have a panic attack when one very sweet church lady said "Oh, honey it will be ok. I have this box of afghans that we will put under each tablecloth so you wont be able to see people's feet"  Very sweet of her, but these were very ugly mismatched afghans and well they were afghans....not going to work!

Not really sure what my obsession with linens is really about but I think it is a bit strange...