My MOH is now also my officiant. KD is now an official member of the Universalist Life Church and can perform weddings, baptisms etc. So now I can check off Officiant off of my list. I am so excited and grateful that she is going to be the person who marries me and J. Since J and I aren’t religious we felt having someone who is an important part of our lives officially marry us would give weight and meaning to our ceremony. I do believe in community, love, friendship and having KD officiate encompasses all those values.
Category: Wedding
La Belle
Whew! The wedding venue in India is finally booked and reserved. We are getting married in a old bungalow. The bungalow is called La Belle and has a nice big lawn so that we can have an outdoor reception and ceremony. Since I haven’t seen the place in person, I only have some generic pics of the place , when they were decorated for other weddings.
Photography
I have now officially hired a photographer. Although I’m not sure if hired is the right word to use when someone is doing it for free! But, I’m giddy and happy anyway because the contract is in the mail! My photographer maintains a blog that shows off some of her wonderful pictures. For an up and coming photographer I think she is really talented and likes color! I am really excited that she is doing this for us.
She also offered free bridals in her wedding package and although I was hesitant, I decided to go ahead and do them on Oct 3 anway. My reasoning behind this was that I will only wear my wedding dress once so why not have as many pics of it as possible. Plus she is agreeable to do something cool by graffiti walls and also of some around modern architecture. However, I think I’m going to let her call the shots on this one, because after all she is doing this for free and she should get stuff she wants for her portfolio too.
Anxiety
I guess more and more people are telling J and I that they are excited about the wedding in India! This is great news on one hand, but on the other it is sending my anxieties levels into space! Its hard coordinationg lodging and entertainment for a lot of people from halfway around the world. Also, I am nervous to go ahead and plan too much or book too many rooms because India is not a small endeavor and my guess is most people will back out at the last minute. Anyway, I am going to stress about it more this weekend I guess.
In other news, my parents are coming out for a visit next week which should be a lot of fun. Its going to suck that I can’t take time off work then, because my new position kicks in exactly that week 😦 but i’m sure we’ll survive. However, to prepare for that week of fun, J and I need to bust our ass this weekend. List of stuff to do :
1) Make sure our apartment is sparkling clean
2) Buy a sidetable to replace our crappy one
3) Buy a lamp to go on new side table
4) Do laundry and keep the bedroom spotless till the fam arrives
5) Make layla calm down
6) Plan menus for the 6 days they’ll be here
7) Plan activities
8) Get Car registered ….grrrrr
So, I’m not really looking forward to this weekend as much, but after last weekends incredibly eventful activities, it will be nice to be mellow and chill.
A June Wedding
Saturday, one of J’s coworkers and good friends B got married to his long time sweetheart. They had a small and simple ceremony by the side of a lake and fun reception in the clubhouse right after. The ceremony was beautiful but they were a little too prompt, and a lot of guests missed the ceremony. However, in their reception they had fun norwegian and scottish touches because the groom was half norwegian and half scottish. He wore a kilt to honor his scottish traditions and they had a norwegian cake and his dad wore a traditional Norwegian military outfit.
I had worn a black strapless dress to the wedding and I felt very sexy dancing with my friend ST, who is a really fun dancer because he does all the twirls and dips and turns. Anyway, he spun me out for this really great turn and my dress went flying up my waist. I flashed everyone at the reception, little kids, grandmas, J’s boss.
Thankfully nobody mentioned anything and the rest of the night went without incident. It was a very mellow night, with good friends, and food(smoked salmon….aaaha….) and drinks and dumb jokes about wedding nights.
Also going to a wedding at this stage of wedding planning was very calming for me! It actually helped me realize that it is all about how happy the bride and groom were that day! None of the guests cared that much about the details and we were all having fun just because our friends were having fun! This is an important lesson for me to remember!
Sendomatic – Vendor Review
For my Save the Dates , I used Sendomatic.com an online announcement sender. I chose sendomatic over others especially evite.com is because sendomatic was not cheesy and my card looked more like an e-card rather than an invitation. At evite, I found that it was really hard to upload my picture and make it look nice. Also there was no way to get rid of the response boxes. Sendomatic gave me an option of uploading my pictures, getting rid of response boxes and sendomatic’s designs in general were very pretty. For 100 ecards it cost me 12.99 and there were absolutely no advertisements on either the site or the email sent to guests. Also the 12.99 covers any other correspondence I might have with my guests, like reminders etc. Sendomatic also lets you see all the people who have viewed your invitation and guests can also send comments to you through your e-card. The only thing I didn’t like about Sendomatic was that it didn’t have an option to turn off the sound. I really did not want sound on my e-card but there was no way to change. Overall I give Sendomatic an A- and I will definitely use their services in the future.
Relief
Last weekend J and I emailed out our Save the Date . After sending it out ,I felt a huge sense of relief and excitement all at the same time. Relief , because we had one thing crossed off our list, Excitement and nervousness because now it seems like the wedding is on for sure. Other people know about it and there is no turning back now. I am happy to say we got mostly positive responses. Maybe some people were offended that it was an email rather than a card, but it made sense for us.
Sangeet
One of the traditions of Indian weddings is a Sangeet. Sangeet literally means song and dance in hindi and it is a womens only get together hosted by the Brides female friends and relatives before the wedding. The main part of a Sangeet is the putting Mehndi(Henna) on the bride and other women. The significance of Mehndi is a way to make your love stronger. Tradition says that the darker the color of your Henna the deeper your love and hence the stronger your marriage. Another fun Mehndi custom is to hide the groom’s name in the design and he has to find his name in the Mehndi design the day of the wedding or the Bride’s friends won’t let him see his bride. Usually at a Sangeet women play music, make up bawdy songs about the bride and groom and there’s lots of dancing. Also there’s jokes( some off color ones), and silly skits and of course food.
One of my mom’s friends wants to do a Sangeet the night before the wedding, but I’m not sure how likely this will be because a lot of people may not even get into town till Friday morning. Also, I’m not sure if I will be able to find someone to do Henna in Utah because the Indian population is quite small , but if I could, I think it would be something really fun to do with my bridesmaids. Its a very Indian tradition and I feel like if this happens it will add some desi flavor to the wedding festivities. Plus any chance to party is good. Right ?
Which comes first…..
I feel really frustrated about my wedding plans lately. I did go ahead and decide on a Save the Date. I guess we are going to do Send-O- Matic ones becasue even though it is a pay site, it is not very expensive. All I’m waiting for is a final list from our parents and that seems to take them forever. J and I have decided that if we dont’ get a list by Friday night, we are mailing those suckers out anyway.
Things that need to happen by this weekend:
Find a house/apartment/condo for my family while we are in UT for the wedding.
J absolutely needs to follow up , what the hell is going on with his suit
We need to come up with an events calendar for the wedding, which is hard at the moment because I don’t know how many people to plan for. Also it would be easier to plan events if we had accomodations booked because it would let us know what activities are even feasible.
Decision-o-matic
So, now that I have run out of exuses on why I can’t work on my wedding save the dates, the crucial moment is finally at hand. I wanted to do email save the dates for our wedding and my original plan was to make some sort of fancy html email. I don’t know why this would have worked b/c because neither J nor I know html. Anyway, I decided on a web based , evite type thing but now it seems there’s the options of paid or non paid. Free email (www.evite.com) invites seem really hassle free but the designs are strictly okay and there is heavy advertisements throughout the site. The paid site (www.sendomatic.com) is really cool customizable but they even charge for emails that don’t go through. Also for some reason their email seems like it has problems on some browsers and my guess is that they might be considered spam by a lot of peoples emails.
I propose that Google’s next new app should be a decision o matic site. Where you put in your options, pros , cons, etc and the site chooses for you. I think super indecisive people like me would be eternally grateful.
In other wedding news, we have had a set back on the Indian ceremony. My whole family had finally agreed upon a reception and ceremoney venue and this is no small feat in my large and crazy family where everyone is very very very opinionated. Anyway, it seems like the vendor is being a jerk and has doubled the price of the venue so we are back to the drawing board. What this means, is more opinions and more chaos.
Orange You Grape 