Wedding Planning Wednesday Update

Alrighty, so it has been a while since I did one of these posts...and I just have a lot on my mind that I wanted to share!

To start with, our wedding is just over a month away!  How crazy is that? It's insane to think that we have been engaged for well over a year now. I have no idea how people can plan a wedding on short timelines. I am impressed with their mad skills.

The best decision I have made regarding wedding planning since my last wedding related blog post (or really the best decision in the whole process) was to hire a Day of Coordinator.  If you are getting married in the Orlando area, contact Rebekkah at Runway Events.  Even though she is technically just our Day Of Coordinator, she has gone above and beyond to provide recommendations for all the vendors I have not booked yet and from the very first consultation I had with her she made me feel like this whole thing was going to work out just fine.

On the downside of things, I am still waiting to hear from one bridesmaid about whether or not she will actually be attending the wedding.  So that is fun.

On the other downside, the friend who was going to be our officiant let me know yesterday that she wasn't going to be able to make it due to a lot of scheduling conflicts, so I am now scrambling to find a new officiant with only a little over a month to go...and my wedding is at one of the busiest times of the year. Luckily I really have the very best DOC so I at least had an idea of where to start!

Back to the upside of things, next week is going to be a ton of fun.  I have an appointment for my hair and makeup trial (in the morning before work so I am going to look fabulous for my shift haha) on Wednesday then our venue visit back out to Birdsong Barn with Rebekkah to make a solid plan for how things will go on the wedding day!

It is finally starting to feel just a little more real!

Question: If you are married, did you use an officiant that you did not personally know? I am freaking out a little so tell me happy stories ;)

Wedding Wednesday: Engagement Pictures!

I am so far beyond excited that we decided to get professional engagement pictures taken! They turned out amazing and I am very thankful that we got a chance to work with our photographer, Deanna Meredith, before the big day.  She was wonderful and super helpful when it came to getting us posed just right!  I was a little bit terrified that I would be making absurd faces in pretty much all of the pictures and that I would see something about myself that I didn't like in every single picture.  When we got the gallery I just kept clicking through and falling in love with all the pictures! Picking out a few to share and narrowing down the one to use for our Save the Dates was not as easy as I thought it would be.

Having just moved down here we were totally unfamiliar with the area. Deanna picked the most amazing location with everything I could have hoped for. I mean really I wanted water and spanish moss which is, I suppose, fairly easy to do in central Florida...but check out the col white statue thing! It was so cool. And massive.

Moral of the story - I am so glad we did engagement pictures with our wedding photographer! If you are planning a wedding and wondering if it is worth it, the answer is that it absolutely is!

Wedding Planning Wednesday 2.0

So I have a confession on this planning thing, I am so backwards already it's rather comical.  We have no venue, no colors, and (barely) have a halfway solid attempt at a guest list.  But I have a dress!

Every planner I have read says that this is the wrong way to do things and that the dress should be purchased much later in the process. But really, I never listen.

It all started because the designer I was totally in love with was having a trunk show just up the road (ok, two hours away) and they had the one dress that I was OMG so convinced was the one.  So my ever so patient best friend went with me to go dress perusing.  I got to try on the dress and I didn't hate it, but wasn't convinced I loved it.  The perk of having a lot of time left to plan was that I knew I didn't have to make up my mind right that moment.  Thank goodness for not pushy sales people. 

I went home for Christmas and knew it would probably be my only opportunity to try on dresses with my mom and gramma which was a big, important thing to me.  So we went to this teeny tiny shop in my hometown and had a blast!  Seriously, if you are in Central WA, check out Unforgettable in Yakima.  They rocked and had a crazy huge selection. I didn't think my mom would be that into it, but she was having a blast pulling out dresses faster than I could try them on.  Of course there was one that she pulled out that stayed on the end of the rack for quite some time because it just didn't match any pictures I had in my head of what my dress was going to look like.  I finally tried it on, admittedly mostly to humor her.  And it was perfect.  It was that amazing moment of know that I found the perfect dress.  And if I can just keep bragging about this perfect moment, it was a sample sale dress and it fits perfectly.  I might need to get it hemmed, but that and a bustle are the only alterations it needs! I was so beyond thrilled.

No I didn't cry and mom didn't cry, but it was as close as either of us were ever going to get to happy crying over a dress.

Of course I am not sharing a dress picture, but here I am with the bag it is living in!


To get to the deeper bit behind this post...because if I am going to get all gushy about a bunch of white fabric I want to share the life lesson too.  I went into this process terrified because it meant all eyes on me and being open to people criticizing the way things looked on me.  It also meant seeing all the bits of myself that I didn't like and having others see them too.  I tried on so many dresses where I was totally hung up on the illusion of a pooch or the fabric bulging and making me look heavier than I am.  As a fitness minded person I know I am too conscious of my body and I know I can be too hard on the way I look.  Running, and being so grateful for what my body is able to do is really what got me through the process.

So there you have it, the deeper meaning behind wedding dress shopping! Tomorrow I promise to get back to the fitness stuff :)

Wedding Planning Wednesday!

I pinkie promise this is not going to turn into a wedding blog.  While I used to think it would be fun to research and write that kind of thing, actually planning a wedding makes my head hurt.  Writing things out does help me wrap my mind around them though, so once a week I am going to interrupt my regular ramblings to ramble about big dresses and djs.  Or cake…because I really like cake!

Right now we are planning to get hitched on the 12^th of March so I will only subject the general population to these posts for a little over a year.  Sorry.

I am considering wearing my running shoes with my dress though, so that counts as a running tie-in right?

For the real kicker, I am fairly certain I want to try for the Dopey Challenge next year.  Of course this would mean a whole lot of training and hours spent running while trying to plan a wedding for a couple months later.  It’s either the best or worst plan ever.  On one hand, running is a great stress reliever for me and I can already guess it will be a good way to get my mind off of planning for a while.  It also pretty much guarantees I will stay in shape J On the other hand, it will put a lot of pressure on me time-wise.  So there’s that.  It’s an ongoing decision making process with a lot of factors, but I am leaning towards doing it because, wait for it, I’m a little Dopey.  I know, I’m not funny.

In other news, if you are a runner and not participating in #BibChat on Twitter on Tuesday nights you are missing out in a big way.  Last night we started planning a #bibchatbachelorette virtual run/party.  Basically the greatest people ever so check it out. (No I am not sponsored by BibRave, just really love it!)

Tomorrow I am back to talking about running things and fitness things. See you then J