Wedding Wednesday: The Boys Strike a Pose

After the boys got ready they took lots of pictures both at the hotel and the church.  I wasn't there so I don't have much commentary to provide so I will just let the pictures tell the story:

Cowboy boots

The Boys with the Jersey

Our awesome florist Jenny Zeman from Floraljaz 

Nick and the Groomsmen

Nick, Groomsmen and Ushers

One of my favorite pictures of Nick from the day

Sorry for the lack of stories- maybe I can convince Nick to add some to his blog!  Next up the girls meet at the church.  

We are Famous....

ok so maybe not really famous but our wedding was featured in the local St. Louis Bride and Groom magazine and I thought it was worthy of a second wedding post this week.  Here is a link to the online version of the publication:  St. Louis Bride and Groom Wedding Album.

Thanks again to our great photographers, John and Susan Lawing!

Wedding Wednesday: The Day Begins

**These next couple of posts are going to be pretty picture heavy so I broke them into a couple of posts.

Our wedding day started with my sister and I getting up bright and early.  We left my house and met my mom and aunt at the hotel.  We left my brother-in-law and my niece at the house to get ready before they headed to the hotel for some swimming.  On our way to the hotel we stopped to get breakfast at Einsteins.  As we were leaving Einsteins my sister realized we had my brother-in-law's keys.  Luckily we realized before we got too far from the house and that crisis was averted.  Once we picked up my mom and aunt we headed to Dominic Michael in Chesterfield to get my hair and make-up done.  My aunt did a great job making sure we had some pictures from the salon:

My mom finishing a tutu while she waited

Makeup

The wonderful Crissy beginning the very long task of curling ALL of my hair

My sister's favorite look from the morning!

Almost finished.

The finished look

While we were at the salon the boys were putting the finishing touches on the ballroom and getting ready at the hotel.  Next week's post I will share some of those pictures.  

Hey Mr. DJ

Our DJ came as part of our contract with the hotel so we have had them booked for quite some time.  The requested that we fill out an online form with our requests and preferences in music and we have been putting it off for a while, but I think the time has come for us to finally sit down and fill out the form.  Which is where all of you lovelies come in.  Nick and I have been adding songs to a list as we hear them and def. added some good songs to the list at the wedding this weekend.  Nick has some strong opinions but as most of you know I am pretty go with the flow when it comes to music and we want this to be a party that all enjoy.  Cause let's be honest the best mixed CDs I own came from most of you :) So, if you have any songs that you would like played or any music that is a definite no play leave us a comment and let us know!

Good News Tuesday!

Today is the 4 month mark till wedding day and as if that wasn't exciting enough, this afternoon I got a fabulous phone call about a month before I expected it.  Bridal and Formal called to tell me my dress was in!  If this wasn't exciting enough they said they would ship me my dress for free.  If you recall I ended up buying my dress from Ohio near where my aunt and uncle live and the plan was to schedule a weekend trip once it was in to pick it up, but unfortunately our weekends have disappeared (I don't think we have a free one from now until the wedding!).  So while I am definitely bummed we no longer have an excuse to make the trek to Ohio before the wedding it is a relief to have one less thing to try and squeeze in.  Now on to my next tasks of figuring out where to put the dress and finding some one to do alterations!

Let Them Eat Cake!

I have a confession to make: I don't really like cake!  Shocking, I know.  As a kid I used to eat the frosting and leave what I referred to as "the fuzzy part" (really appetizing I know) on my plate.  As my palette matured I really stopped even caring for the frosting all that much too so if I have to choose a dessert cake is probably always going to be my last choice.  So really picking the wedding cake was not high on my priority list. I am, however, open to the fact that other people enjoy cake and would be disappointed to show up at a wedding and not get cake, Nick included.  So have no fear we will have cake!  Our contract with our reception site actually includes a contract with a local baker for our cake so we didn't get to spend weekend after weekend in a sugar comma going to every bakery in town to choose one, which again I was a-ok with! I had a small collection of inspiration photos (Just because I don't like to eat it doesn't mean I don't think they are pretty).  Nick and I sat down Friday night to go through my stack of ideas and decided we wanted something like one of these below:

So Saturday afternoon we took our inspiration to Wedding Wonderland.  We walked into a showroom full of decorated Styrofoam cakes.  They were pretty busy but we finally found someone to help us.  She told us that our contract with the Holiday Inn included any of the cakes on the showroom floor.  If we wanted something other than one of the cakes on the floor it would cost us on top of the contract.  Honestly, my heart sunk just a little bit at that moment.  While I didn't really care about the cake in the grand scheme of things, I know what I like and didn't want someone to tell me I only had a few options to pick from.  However, not caring enough to pay extra we started wandering the showroom.  We immediately found a few cakes that actually weren't so bad and I could like.  We quickly narrowed down the 60-some cakes down to 4:

And the one we picked:

Ha- totally kidding!  Not sure I can imagine any occasion where that is the cake I would pick.

Seriously here is what we decided on:

Ours will only be 4 tiers instead of 5.  The black tier will be royal blue and the swirls will be green. 

We also got to decide on what flavors we wanted our cake to be.

We sampled 6 different flavors:
yellow with strawberry filling
chocolate with fudge filling
white with raspberry filling
banana with no filling
carrot with cream cheese filling
strawberry with no filling

We decided on 3...can you guess which 3??  I will give you a hint- 1 of the 3 doesn't have any filling.

Pretty Things: Our Flowers

When I started posting the weekly pretty things posts I mentioned that we were in a bit of a planning lull.  Well I lied! Not really lied I guess but forgot that there were several things that I never posted about, one being deciding on our flowers and booking a florist.  It seemed fitting to make this a "Pretty Things" post because what is prettier than flowers.

When we first started planning I had decided that I thought we could just buy flowers from a wholesaler and arrange them ourselves to save money.  Nick convinced me that maybe we should at least meet with a couple of florist to make sure it was really worth it.  Thank goodness he did because we found a very reasonable florist who has been amazing to work with and is really flexible and willing to put up with my millions of changes and our budget restrictions. I think it will greatly reduce my stress level the week before the wedding and be worth every penny.  I am really excited to work with Jenny at Floral Jaz.  We first met with Jenny in January.  We came with just a couple of pictures and she sat with us for about an hour and talked through everything and had great ideas of what might work for the look we were going for.  Here is the original inspiration photo we brought with us:

My bouquet will look similar to that with roses, hydrangeas, spider mums, berries and we are adding some blue cornflowers:

 

The bridesmaids bouquets will be a similar structure including the grass loops but will be a mix of daisies and buttom mums.  It will look similar to this bouquet but the daisies will be smaller and have green centers. The bouquet will also be a tighter fit like mine. (It also wont have the weird bling in the picture):

The rest of the flowers will be a mix of those above in shades of white, green and blue.  So there are our flowers!

Boots and Baseball

I believe at this point most of you have received your Save the Date or have seen the post on Nick's blog (yes be finally blogged for the first time since early January!), but just in case you missed it I won't keep you waiting any longer.  Here it is:

We decided to design them ourselves and are pretty proud of how they turned out!  Nick does a pretty good job on his post explaining the meaning and the process so I will refer you there for more detail. So for now- see you on 9-3-2011!

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...

Location, Location, Location

I just realized we never blogged about finally making our reception site official.  This has probably been the hardest decision to date (or at least a close second to the dress indecision!).  We started this search almost immediately after we got engaged because venues in St. Louis get booked very quickly.  I had some idea what to expect from helping my good friend Darcie shop around for reception venues for her wedding but somehow was still shocked by the cost.  I had dreams of locations like this:

a beautiful barn or maybe a cool warehouse look like this:

Unfortunately St. Louis doesn't have many cool barn venues and the warehouse esque locations we found were extremely expensive. I emailed tons of different locations from banquet halls, to restaurants, to hotels and we kept running into 2 problems.  Problem number 1: the locations were just insanely expensive.  Problem 2 was that most locations had a 200 person minimum. I found this to be rather frustrating.  The amount of money we would be paying per person was already more than I could fathom, but then they were telling us we had to pay for approximately 50 more people than were actually going to be at the wedding.  We both got frustrated several times and would just give up the search for a couple of weeks. 

We finally found a location that was within our budget and didn't require crazy minimums.  It also had several other perks including it was a hotel so much more convenient for our guests.  We found this location in September but despite the price and the perks I wasn't quite ready to commit.  A hotel ballroom really wasn't what I had envisioned and I just wasn't in love with the idea.  Then one day I had a realization-  as amazing as the farm or the warehouse locations look in the end the location really doesn't matter all that much.  In the end the important thing is that we will be with people we love and that everyone is enjoying themselves and if we have those things where ever the reception is, is the perfect location!  So, with this realization we decided to book The Holiday Inn Viking.

I haven't had a chance to take any pictures myself, but here are a couple I found online:

We obviously aren't having our ceremony there, but this is the space outside of the ballroom

and here is the ballroom:

So another decision crossed off the to do list. 

Engagement Pictures

I just realized I promised to post these pictures long ago and never did!  We had a great time with our photographer taking them.  We decided to hit up some downtown locations so we wouldn't have to make the trek all the way downtown on wedding day.  So we started at Busch Stadium.  Even though it isn't my favorite place (I much prefer Wrigley Field!) I do think it reflects an important part of "us"- our love of baseball! I also wore my Cubs jersey so it made it just a little better.  After pictures at the stadium we headed to the Arch for pictures with the Arch and for pictures with the fall trees on the Arch grounds.  Some might say the Arch is a little cliche but how many cities have one?  All in all I think it was a pretty good combination of locations.  Here are a couple of pictures for your viewing pleasure:

You can check out all of the pictures here.   
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