I need a growth spurt, stat!

The dress is here, the dress is here!



Well, it's not here exactly. Although I fully intended to bring it here. Do you think I could've just tossed it on the backseat of my car? These are things I actually thought about :)

When I called the dress shop, they didn't seem particularly interested in altering my dress, which got me stressed so I looked elsewhere. I did find a really nice woman in the area who would probably have done a great job with the alterations. It's too bad I ended up not using her.

But when we went to the store in person, they seemed much more willing to work with me. They actually seemed surprised we weren't ready to plan the alterations right then and there! (They had told me absolutely not over the phone!)

So the alterations appointment is scheduled and now I'm supposed to find some tall, nice shoes to wear. If I could just grow a couple more inches, we wouldn't need to adjust the hem at all.



The shoes need to be taller than these! If I fall flat on my face while attempting to walk down the aisle, now you know why ... lol

Put The Skull Next To The Roses...

If you look at the flowers in my bouquet and think "Why did she use white hydrangeas? She definitely should have used green" ... my fault, lol.

I'm not artistic at all. I feel so clueless in these meetings with the florist. But the florist herself seems really good, so I have total faith everything will look pretty despite my contributions. :)

While we were meeting with her on Saturday, she showed my mom and I some albums from other clients. We couldn't help but pause at the image of a bride and her wedding party in a graveyard, each of them peering around a headstone.

"Oh," said the florist, "she was quite a character. She wanted a skull and bones in her bouquet."

My bouquet will be (as of this moment) cala lilies, roses, hydrangea, and a few other random flowers whose names I already forget. No skull and bones, I promise.

My Ring is Ready!

Good news: Kay Jeweler's called to say my ring is ready. Thank goodness. Now I just have to get over there, pick it up, and make sure it fits. Please, please, please let it fit.

"We probably should have gotten the wedding band sized at the same time," said Ryan.

Probably. But we only intended to get a ring guard, not all this resizing stuff. I think I will just get a ring guard on the wedding band for now. It's too stressful to worry about whether these rings will arrive in time for the wedding!

"You don't want the ring to fall off your hand into the Potomac," our pastor reminded us, when the topic came up during our meeting.

Oh goodness. Something else to worry about :P

***

Honeymoon thoughts ... Ireland? Yes? No? ... I'm not sure we can afford air fare with gas prices like this! :P

The Dress!

Strawberry shortcake won't fall down! :)

Eventually it occurred to me that we really, really need a cake. We've been taste testing (see previous blog post,) but we haven't actually signed on the dotted line.

Oh my goodness, what if we're too late and they say they can't make a cake for us???

I emailed the bakery, which wasn't particularly helpful, and then finally called to set up another meeting.

We picked strawberry shortcake and yellow cake with buttercream frosting as the flavors. But there has been some disagreement on the flavors, so I did have to clarify.

"Ryan is concerned the strawberry shortcake is too soft and the cake will fall over," I said.

"Well," said the baker guy, "he'd better catch it!"

Then he said they use supports for each tier of the cake, so the whole cake will not be resting on soft strawberry shortcake. Phew!

Now I just need to figure out what the cake will look like!

What happens when your rental car explodes?

Honeymoon destination - Ireland

No wait...

Honeymoon destination - Scotland

No wait...

Honeymoon destination - Vancouver

No wait...

Honeymoon destination - Ireland

"So we're back to Ireland, now?" says Ryan.

(He is also the one who suggested Vancouver! Although not necessarily in this order...)

We found a trip where you rent a car, drive around Ireland, and stay at fancy hotels each night. The hotels are booked in advance, but otherwise you have the freedom to just drive around and go wherever you want to go.

My mother says driving in Ireland seems lovely and the next time she goes, that's what she's doing. My aunt said she knew a guy who ended up hospitalized just from the anxiety of driving in Ireland. Yikes.

So I looked up the perils of driving in Ireland and found the real thing to be somewhere in the middle:

The website did point out that not only do they drive on the "wrong" side of the road, but everything in the car itself is the mirror opposite. How am I going to remember which mirror to look through or, oh my god, the difference between the gas and the brake pedals??

And the roads, while not exactly our highways, apparently tend to be winding and overlook cliffs.

And, finally, the best for last... Be careful where you park, warned the website. In some areas, specifically northern Ireland, if you park illegally, they have the right to blow up your car.

"Now that," said Ryan, "would be quite a vacation."

(We are now looking into how much it costs to have a chauffeur! lol)

Give Me Your Leather... Take From Me... My Lace...

We had our first meeting with the pastor 2 Sundays ago.

Here are the things I was worried about:

1) She'd tell us we shouldn't get married. (We'd still get married anyway, but it'd be rather disconcerting!)

2) She'd say the time allotted for the ceremony wasn't long enough.

3) She'd need to meet on a weekday (since weekends are probably pretty busy times for her, what with church and all) and only weekends are good for us.

As usual, my worrying was for naught, lol.

She said we have plenty of time scheduled for the ceremony, she's the one who suggested 2 pm on Sundays for meetings, and she, so far, hasn't told us we shouldn't get married.

She did ask us what sort of music we wanted for the ceremony and she didn't think I was tooooo crazy when I explained that the only hymns I really like like like are funeral hymns. Apparently someone once told her they wanted to walk down the aisle to Leather and Lace. At least I'm thinking hymns, not Stevie Nicks! "On Eagles Wings gets played at a lot of funerals," she conceded, "but it isn't completely a funeral song." It's close enough - no On Eagles Wings.

I suggested a unity candle and she seemed okay with that. She mentioned that a lot of couples these days are using sand instead - each couple has a bowl with a different color sand and they mix it together "and then you have it as a keepsake forever until your cat knocks it over." I think I want to stick with a candle, though. Candles just seem more meaningful to me.

Then Ryan fixed her copy machine, because he's really good at stuff like that :) See, we're earning our keep!

Afterward, she said she was going to give us homework. She wanted us to put together a genealogy, going back to our grandparents. She said many couples have a hard time with this - they actually don't know much about their families. Well, as it turns out, we're not one of those couples! lol

"I could print one off ancestry.com for you right now," I offered.

"I didn't know you were interested in genealogy," she said. Then she told Ryan he'd be stuck with all the work doing his family's, then.

"She's done mine too," he said.

So far, we get an A in this class... lol.

Invitations Addressed!

The invitations have been addressed!

Invitations, I have decided, are one of the most stressful parts of getting married. Wouldn't life be easier if we could just use evites? lol. Choosing the invitations, choosing the envelopes, placing the order, waiting for the arrival, keeping the cats from eating them, figuring out how to address them, actually addressing them, and mailing them out... yikes.

And my cousin tells me all her invitations were returned due to lack of sufficient postage. I would have a heart attack right there at the mailbox. (I'm not even sure all those invitations would FIT in my mailbox...)

So 2 Saturdays ago (yes, I'm behind,) Ryan and I took the plunge.

We both have awful handwriting and the only person we know who knows calligraphy is in Florida, thus we decided to print the addresses ourselves. I was absolutely 100% the computer was going to tear up every single one of my beautiful envelopes... absolutely sure. Ryan thought the print wouldn't set and would smear. (He is more optimistic than me.) "How much would it cost to go to Kinkos?" I kept asking. "A lot... I think," he'd say back.

He set up all the addresses so they would print one after another on the envelopes. As soon as he had it all set up, I remembered I'd left people on the list whose addresses we didn't have yet, which means he had to start over. Oops.

Eventually, though, it was all set to go... and we tried one... and then another... and then another...

It was quite a task. The printer rejected quite a few envelopes, to our great chagrin. Ryan threatened it sternly and yet it didn't seem to listen. The cats tried to come investigate. (Thank goodness for random toys which move on their own - who cares about invitations when there's a large ball rolling around on its own? Not my cats, that's for sure!)

All in all, it was quite an adventure :) But, for the most part, it's all done. I have a few left to do when I get their addresses or some changes I'd like to make, but otherwise they're ready to go out. I no longer have to fight with the computer to post the 0 in New Jersey zip codes (which start with 0) !!!!

And hey, at least we don't have to do invitations like this anymore:



(from my genealogy collection)

On Church and Cake :)

Meeting with pastor - scheduled
Meeting with bakery - scheduled

See, I am getting stuff done... slowly, but surely!