Wedding Wednesday: Some Very Special People

I've been waiting to post about these very special people for a while now.  When Nick and I were deciding on our wedding party I had a very hard time choosing bridesmaids.  I have been blessed beyond words with many many amazing women in my life and it was very hard for me to limit the list to just a few. I wanted to honor all their roles in my life in a special way.  As I mentioned in last week's post a friend of mine asked many of her closest friends to be her "Something Blue" and stand up with her in spirit for her wedding.  I loved this idea but wanted to do a little different take on it.  After much brainstorming with my aunt and sister I decided to ask these special women to light the candles for the ceremony.  Using the the lighgt as a symbol of the light each of these woman have been in my life.  I even came across this poem which perfectly illustrated what each of them meant to me:

I've seen the light

And it's in you,

In everything you are

And in everything you do

It's a perfect light

That shines for all to see

It radiates from you

And has pierced the heart of me.

The light is from a friend.

It's a light that keeps me warm.

It lets me know how loved I am,

And keeps me safe from harm.

To you my friend I am thankful,

In each and every way.

For you lift my spirits up,

With every passing day.

To know that you are there for me

It makes me feel alive

Because it is your friendship's light

Upon which my love thrives.

It is your light of friendship

That gives my world its glow.

I sent each woman a card with that poem asking them to light the candles for our wedding.  Unfortunately for lots of reasons not all of them were able to make it to St. Louis for the wedding.  The lovely ladies that were able to make it did a beautiful job setting the stage for the ceremony.  Here are some pictures of the beautiful women: 

Today is going to be another 2 for 1 Wednesday with another post coming this afternoon!

Wedding Week: The state of our poor house

For a while now our house has started to be a bit of a disaster.  We are accumulating things for the wedding as well as wedding gifts and have quickly run out of places to put things.  Not to mention the craft supplies and projects in mid stage that have taken over the dining room table, really the house is a disaster.  Which as most of you know is not normal for us.  Both of us are generally very clean and organized people so the state of the house has been causing a bit of anxiety I think for both of us.  I think the only saving grace is that rather than putting things away eventually we are moving so we can just leave it all in boxes and find a new home for it at the new house.  If you promise not to judge I will show you some pictures if for no other reason than to prove to those of you out there who have made reference to my OCD cleanliness that it does happen even to us:

dining room

storage room filled with wedding gifts and wedding stuff
as well as the lovely tower of empty boxes

guest room

There really is wedding stuff everywhere and sadly I don't see my life getting back in order anytime soon.  I guess I will just have to find a way to live with the chaos.

Wedding Week!

Wedding week has officially begun!  

We kicked it off Saturday night with some bachelor party fun for Nick and a second round of bachlorette party fun for me (I will share pics soon).  My St. Louis friends who couldn't make it to Indiana for the first bachlorette party decided we needed to have a little fun in StL.  We had a great night of dinner dancing and fun- thanks ladies!  

Going out "dressed" in bachlorette garb was definitely a conversation starter and inevitably the "when is the wedding?" question came up  When I would answer "next weekend"  a flood of other questions such as "Wow, are you ready?" or "Are you excited?" or "Are you nervous?" would follow.  I was never really quite sure how to answer any of the questions and while I knew logically the wedding was 7 short days away I don't think it had really sunk in yet.  That was until I woke up Sunday morning and realized that the next time I wake up on a Sunday I will be MARRIED!  

5 more days....

ps if you would like to follow the wedding week fun on twitter or facebook the official hash-tag is #mcwedding

It's Official...

we can officially get married!

Yesterday we took at trip to this lovely building:

to get our Marriage License.  It was a very weird experience and made the whole thing very real.  The first weird thing that struck me was just the bureaucratic-ness of the whole thing.  As I am sure most of you have been in a government office building and would agree they don't really evoke the same thoughts/feelings/emotions about marriage as well, weddings do.  For the most part they are very drab and very purpose driven (which isn't a bad thing) and as we sat answering questions the dichotomy of this place vs. the beautiful church we are actually getting married in struck me.  I was also struck by the fact that someone we have never met before, who knows nothing about us other than what our driver's licenses tell her has the power to declare that we can get married and in the State of Missouri without that declaration next week is nothing more than a fancy party.  But despite all that weirdness it is official we can now get married!

Some Call it Flowers Others Call it a Weapon

I decided instead of having our flower girl throw petals we would have her carry a floral pomander instead.  I thought it would compliment the tutus well and would just be less mess to deal with.  Here were some of the photos I used for inspiration:

I showed these to my sister/mother of our 3 year old flower girl and her first reaction was that Emily would probably end up throwing it at someone, more than likely her baby sister.  Unfortunately I was already set on the idea so I guess we will just have to hope for the best and buy Payton some protective armor.

This week I decided it was time to get cracking on making the ball.  I just bought some ribbon, a foam ball and some fake flowers.  The hardest part was getting the ribbon all the way through the ball but with some force, creativity and a wooden spoon it was finally all the way through.  Then I just hot glued the flowers to the ball.  Here is the ball about half way done:

And here it is completely finished:

The whole project probably took me less than an hour and was very easy.  It turned out to be a little larger than I thought it would be but hopefully it won't be too big next to Emily and hopefully she doesn't decide to use it as a weapon.

You're Invited...

The invitations went out over a month ago and I have yet to post about them (and even worse I started this post 2 weeks ago and just realized I never finished it...sorry for being such a terrible blogger).  We decided to create our own invitations rather than purchasing something.  Nick did most of the hard work and gets the credit for how fabulous they turned out.  Here is the whole package together including the invitation to the rehearsal dinner:

I love how colorful they are and how they are uniquely us.  Here are each of the individual pieces:

Invitation

front of reception invitation

Back of Reception Invitation/Directions and Accommodations

Reply Card

Back of reply card

We decided to do post cards for the reply card as a way to save on postage and on the added paper of another envelope.  Since we had some extra space on the post card we decided to make a request.  The left side of the card says " Don't waste all this space share your memories, wishes, wisdom, or advice with us"  This has made getting the reply cards back in the mail that much more fun and hopefully soon I will do a post with some of our favorite responses.  

The last part of the invitation package that not everyone got to see was the rehearsal dinner invitation.  The rehearsal dinner is going to be our way of including our love of baseball into the weekend and Nick's parents have come up with some great ways to make the dinner baseball themed.  We wanted to introduce the night with so here is the invitation that we designed:

So there is the whole package.  I know I am a little biased but I think they turned out pretty darn good!  

Tulle and Tutus

Long before I was ever engaged I was perusing a photographer's website and saw pictures from a fabulous wedding.  The whole wedding was beautiful, but there was one thing that caught my eye and I have been in love with ever since.

Flower girl Tutus!  Seriously how darling are those girls? 

So when we got engaged the flower girl attire was a simple decision- she would be sporting a Tutu.

This weekend while my mom and sister were in town for the wedding I took advantage of having them around and pushed through the "wedding wall" and we started making these:

That is Emily's American Girl doll and her very own tutu. In our family we have a tradition of our special dolls sporting matching outfits like Emily and Baby Doll at Christmas:

We also decided that Payton should get a tutu as well so we spent part of the weekend making 3 tutus.  I don't have any pics of Payton and her tutu but this weekend was her 1 month birthday so I thought you might like a picture of her adorableness!

Wedding Wall

Two weekends ago Nick and I drove to Indiana for my 5 year college reunion.  As part of the festivities the girls I lived with in college decided it was a good time to have a bachlorette party for me.  It was a great time and wonderful to see some friends that I hadn't seen for a while. After that weekend I spent last week seeing lots of people I don't see all that often which of course led to lots of wedding questions and I found myself not having lots of answers.  (I will post pictures from the weekend soon-but today is a different topic!)  We are at a point where all that is really left are detail type things.  For months I have been saying I would get around to those once school was out.  Well school has been out for almost a month and I have done nothing, nor have I found the energy to get started on anything.  Now I find myself saying- I will get to that in July.  Then I realized- yikes- that only gives me 2 months maybe I should start now.  I think part of my problem is just not knowing where to start as well as having so many different inspiration pics for the wedding details that I just can't decide what to do.  Anyway maybe I have hit a Wedding Wall- maybe I just really don't care as much about little details as I did 10 months ago or maybe I will wake up tomorrow and be super motivated to get stuff done. Like one wise friend of mine said last week- "at the end of the day it won't matter if you have those things- the wedding will still happen and you will still be married"  But really I suppose I should get my butt in gear and finish things like the flower girl dress, so the poor kid doesn't have to walk down the aisle in a paper sack. 

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!

What Could Have Been?

I was sitting at work today and realized that when we first started talking about wedding dates we had discussed April.  Now that I am here and still more than 4 months out from the actual wedding date all I can do is wonder "What were we thinking?"

First, while we do have most of the big things taken care of (found the boys suits this weekend- another thing off the list!) we do still have lots of little things to get done.  I feel like I have been a pretty low stress, low maintenance bride-to-be (I hope you all agree!) but I am not sure if I would have been able to be so mellow with such a short planning time line.  

And second, we have had a pretty weird April weather wise. Not that we could have controlled that or can even control what the weather does in Sept, but it makes me happy that I didn't have to stress about the fridged nasty weather we have had this month.

So while there may be days when I wish it was just September already so I can be done with wedding planning this was a nice realization that maybe September being 4ish months away from now  isn't such a bad thing.

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!

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....

Making Progress...

We have been steadily crossing things off our list the last couple of weeks.  We had our first meeting with a florist, my bridesmaids have all tried on some dresses, and we have started working on the save the dates.  More details on all those soon but one thing has been completely finished and crossed off.  Our wedding website is finished!

Check it out: www.mywedding.com/leadermcgeehon

ps. Sorry for the short/boring post- I promise more detailed posts soon.

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. 

I know I said outside of the box...

When I said I was intrigued by bridesmaid's dresses that were a little different and possibly outside of the box this is not what I had in mind:

nor was this:

and definitely not this...

While there are some cute dresses on Tony's site, I am really not sure any of them are the look I am going for. 

Next up...Bridesmaid's dresses

Now that I've ordered my dress, I suppose it is time to move on to the other necessary dresses for the day.  

In the midst of wedding dress shopping my sister mentioned that I needed to get on asking my other bridesmaids so they could all start looking at dresses, especially since she is pregnant and will be showing soon.  Which I agreed it will be difficult to picture what a dress would look like minus the baby bump.  So while we waited at Clarice's my mom and Nick's mom were looking at a couple of bridesmaid dress catalogues and spotted a couple they liked.  After I finished trying on dresses, my consultant had a few extra minutes so we decided to make Sarah try on a few dresses.  The first dress she tried on was this cute number:

It obviously would not be in those colors and we would probably ditch the bow but I thought it was cute.

I honestly don't remember what the second dress she tried on looked like, clearly it didn't do it for me.  The third dress she tried on was something different that I wasn't sure that I would like until I saw it on her and now I think I may have a hard time going back to something simple like the one above.  The third dress looked a little something like this:

I am not 100% sold on this yet.  I really want all my bridesmaids to really like the dress and feel comfortable in it and even in a perfect world be able to wear it again so I will wait until we can all decide together before making a final decision, but the idea of something a little outside the box with a print is really growing on me!