A Sincere Thank You.

Well, the big day has finally come!  I just wanted to sincerely thank everyone for following along with this blog (even though my posts have been sparse in the months leading up to the wedding) and for supporting me through my journey to being Mrs. Eric Maxwell.  Today I feel a great sense of peace knowing that all the pieces of the wedding planning puzzle are falling into place, and we're going to have the most amazing day on Saturday.  From here on out, it's just fun times and smooth sailing!  I.  SAID.  SMOOTH.  SAILING.

Fear not, this blog has not come to an end!  I will still be blogging after the wedding about all the little details of the big day, and who knows?  Maybe I can still find some funny things to write about after that...

Thanks again for reading!  And for those of you who will be there on Saturday, get ready for the party of your life!!!

 

Yayyyy!

Now I'm off to get hitched!!!

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!!



~M

A Fun DIY Project (Alternatively Titled: How I Cut My Thumb Open)

Hey all!

So we are getting married two weeks from Saturday.  The clock is ticking and the countdown is on!  I have to admit that for these past four or five weeks I've felt overwhelmed with stress at the sheer amount of things we had yet to get accomplished for this wedding (and naturally the blog has suffered).  But Eric and I have worked through the list slowly but surely, and have delegated a lot of tasks to our awesome family and wedding party, and the day is coming together wonderfully.  I am at the point now where I am just so excited to say I do!  I want the day to be here NOW.

 

Get to call this handsome man my husband in 2.5 weeks!

Now that it is closer to the wedding, we are needing to get done all the tedious tasks that we have been putting off until the end stages.  One of those tasks was our corkboard seating chart.  You may recall this post where I first unveiled it.  So, Eric and I have earnestly saved every cork from every bottle of wine we have shared together, from the day we got engaged until now, with the plans of creating a seating chart made from the corks of our wine bottles of love.  Well those plans tanked pretty fast when we realized we would have to drink three bottles of wine a day in order to have enough in time.  Riiiiight.  So we came up with a new idea for the corks that they would hold our place cards at the tables!

 

Cute!

At 155 guests, we needed far less of them, so Eric went through the (embarrassingly full) bag of corks and picked out the best ones to use for this project.  Then I lured Tara and Melissa over to my place to watch the premiere of the Bachelorette with promise of wine and food, and then dropped the bomb that they would be helping me do crafts all night.  Mwahahaha...

Turns out I have the same patience for crafting as I do for shopping.  10 minutes and I'm sooooo done.  On a project that takes several hours, this was bad news bears.  But I had my lovely besties to help me through, and we ended up doing a pretty awesome job! 

 

We diiiiiiid it.

The first and most ridiculous step was actually cutting the wine cork in order to put the place card into it.  We tried a utility knife, butter knife, steak knife and bread knife, and finally settled on the bread knife, but not before my hand slipped and I dug a newly sharpened Henckels blade deep into my thumb.  After a 15 minute break to stop the bleeding we resumed, but needless to say I was off cutting duty for the rest of the night.  And, I must have nicked a nerve or something because my thumb is still numb around the cut even 10 days later.  Weird.

 

Obbbbbbviously when you craft you need a big glass o'wine.

 

The next step was getting the wine cork to actually stand up and not roll over with the place card in it.  To keep it upright, we went on a rather pitiful run to Dollarama to locate some bling to glue to the cork.  We found some big fake gems and voila!  Cork stands upright.  We used E6000 which is the same glue I use for strassing, so I know those suckers will stick.

 

Troubleshooting like a boss....

Next was glittering the ends of the corks because, let's face it, I like glitter.  I bought one purple and one black container of fine loose glitter, mixed them together in a bowl (to tone down the purpleyness of it all), and the girls brushed the ends of the cork with white glue and pushed the cork into the bowl.  Et voila!

 

Note the bandaid from the aforementioned knife incident.

Tara made the actual place cards using her vast and impressive supply of scrapbooking tools including a cutter, and some other thing, and these sticky things, and something called cardstock, and glittery paper.  I don't ask questions.  So here is the finished product!  And then we will stick little coloured dots to the place cards so that the wait staff know who is eating what. 

 

Whee!  A DIY success!

It's very cool to see all the smaller details of the day coming together.  Here's a couple other things that have been going on this week!

We have the favor tags for our imperial cookie favors....

 

Awe!

My brother chose the dinner wines for our wedding, and naturally Eric and I had to taste them first, and they are AWESOME...

 

Red:  Hacienda Albae 'Seleccion' Cabernet Merlot 2007, Castillo, Spain

White:  Adi Badenhorst Secateurs Chenin Blanc 2013, Swartland, South Africa

 

 

My bro is also hard at work choosing the wines for the wine tasting during cocktail hour, so I hope everyone enjoys that!


And Eric and I have also decided on our late night fare.  This is obviously really important at a wedding, because it's been 4 hours since you've last eaten, you've burned off your dinner cutting a rug on the dance floor, and you're wasted so naturally you want to stuff your face.  We decided for our wedding that although we both love a good cheese sandwich on rye with the cheese on the outside, that we wanted something a little more upscale that the usual deli-style social food.  So our guests are going to be scarfing down none other than gourmet mini sliders with aged cheddar and onion confit, and mini poutine with smoked gouda and a herb glace!

 

 

Basically small cheeseburgers....

 

 

...and small fries and gravy with cheese.  Dee-licious.

We're so excited to share this day with all our friends and family.  Can't wait!!!


Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!



~M

#postagefail

YA OKAY.  So I've been MIA on the blog the last little while.  It's tax season....back off!  Wait!  Don't go.  Please keep reading.....

The wedding is less than three months away, and while it's not too bad yet, I can feel the stress creeping up and ready to strike.  We're in the "three months before" category of our wedding checklist now and all of a sudden the number of items on the to-do list triples.  And inevitably, as soon as you feel like you've checked something off the list as done, it just reappears for you to "confirm" it again in another month or creates three more things you have to do.  Wedding planning is fun, don't get me wrong, but it can feel never ending at times!

I do have wonderful news in that we sent our wedding invitations out this past weekend.  Our stationer Ashley did such a wonderful, beautiful job, and I couldn't be happier with how they turned out.  Here's a peek!

Front...

Inside...

 

 

The whole beautiful set!

When I started addressing the invitations, I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of anxiety because first, handwriting on beautiful paper is nerve wracking because you want it to look perfect and second, I was deathly afraid we would miss someone on the list.  Thankfully my wonderful fiance put together a foolproof spreadsheet with all the addresses and guests and it was easy to double and triple check the list.  (Spreadsheet whiz....reason #6548 that I adore Eric!)

What I didn't anticipate was all the bloody problems we would have with postage!  (Seriously, who mails anything anymore.  Whatever.)  First of all, if you want to put a stamp on something and you go to a post office to buy a stamp, these are your choices:

1.  Gophers.

2.  The Queen of England.

3.  Winnipeg Jets logo.

Wow, really?  So I have to slap a rodent on our beautiful wedding invitations, fine, whatever, not a big deal.

Then Eric smartly realizes that the invitations, with their heavy cardstock, probably aren't going to be the same price as a normal letter being mailed due to their weight.  So after I've lovingly placed a gopher stamp on all the wedding invitiations, I take them to the post office and the girl working looks at me as if I'm just the dumbest human being on the planet and is like, "ya, they don't have near enough postage on them".  Wonderful.  So I go to buy 100 more gopher stamps (potentially bringing the total number of gopher stamps purchased to 200 more than I ever wanted to buy) and they are out of gophers.  What?  So now I WANT the gopher stamps and I can't even get them?!  This is what I've been reduced to?  At this point I don't even care anymore so ultimately, the invitations get sent out with the Queen of England mean-mugging three gophers on the upper right hand corner of the envelope.

So they all finally get mailed, and I start receiving text messages from our guests letting me know how nice they think the invitations are, and I start breathing a sigh of relief that my postage woes are over and everything has ended up where it should have.

 

Success.

Then Canada Post decides it's not quite through with me yet, and rears its ugly head again in the form of my reply cards.  Yes, reply cards.  You'd think with my views on mail as an old, antiquated form of exchanging information in this digital age, that we would have just went with email replies.  If not for one thing - I love getting mail.  And when the time came to make the decision to do mail replies, I just imagined myself sprinting to the mailbox like:

 

WE'VE GOT MAAAAAAAIL!!!!

So we include a return envelope stamped with a gopher with every invitation, and we find out that March 31, the price of stamps is going up from 63 to 85 cents.  WTF.  I don't know what bride checks to see if the price of stamps is going up anytime soon before she mails her invitations, but I sure as hell didn't.  So according to the dragon nice lady I spoke to at Canada Post, because our reply cards don't have a return address on them, if they don't have enough postage they won't be delivered and will be destroyed.  Destroyed!  Not even just, put into a pile somewhere at some mail processing center where I have a hope of actually recovering them.  Just straight up put in the shredder.  They open the envelopes, and if they don't have money in them, into the fire they go.  Greeeeeat.

So if you have received our invitation and you don't drop your reply card in the mail before Monday, I'm sorry to have to make you spend the extra 22 cents to send it.  I hate inconveniencing people so if you want to send us the news by Facebook, email or in person that's okay too! 

Oh and Canada Post?

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!



~M

Change of A Dress

....I have a confession to make.

I wasn't really going to blog about this at all, because really who would know?  But in the spirit of being open about my bridal perspective on this grand adventure, here it goes.

I changed my dress. 

*collective gasp*

I know, I KNOW.  After I posted on the blog about how much I loved the one I chose, and then I posted AGAIN about how I didn't have any dress regret, I go and do this?  But before you start questioning my sanity, allow me to explain.

 

"This one?  Or this one?  Or thisoneorthisoneorthisoneorthisone...."

The original dress I chose was be-ea-au-tiful.  I loved it, I really did.  It had everything I wanted in a dress (which I would love to describe to you in excrutiating detail but I really want the whole thing to be a big surprise for my future husband!) and I was absolutely ready to commit.  In my mind, I already had committed.  I was in a common-law relationship with that dress, in the eyes of the wedding gods we were already bound, and buying it was simply a formality.

So when I returned to the store in early September to officially order and buy the dress, I put it back on to indulge in one last round of swishing and swaying before my dress search experience was over for good.  At first I was giddy as a schoolgirl, and then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and there was one brief fleeting moment where I wondered aloud if the dress was perfectly flattering in all the right places.  After I said it out loud, and the bridal consultants and my MOB started looking at me critically and trying to assure me it was a good pick, my doubt grew a little.  Before I could try to even start discerning if I really was shying away from committing or if I just had a case of cold feet, the consultant said those taboo words, the words you NEVER say to a bride once she's picked a dress.  "Well we have a dress that just came in, from the designer's new line, if you'd like to see it."

 

"UM YEAH I WANNA SEE IT"

 

 

So then I broke the cardinal rule of wedding dress shopping, and tried on a dress after I had already made my choice.  And damn.  Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.  New Dress blew Old Dress out of the water.  New Dress made Old Dress look like a stinking pile of garbage.  New Dress hugged me in all the right places.  Old Dress felt like wearing a potato sack.  Okay I might be exaggerating.  But it certainly wasn't that I didn't love Old Dress, it's just that I love New Dress more!  If possible, it was even more perfect and more gorgeous than the old one.  And then there was the whole "you're the first bride to ever try the dress on, I just took it out of the box yesterday, you'd be the first bride in Winnipeg to order this dress as we have exclusive rights to the line" thing that got me. 

 

 

 

"It's not you...it's me...."

 

 

So after trying on the new dress, it was pretty much a no-brainer.  I had to have it.  And I am happy to say that really, truly, honestly this time I've said Yes To The Dress and I'm 100% over the moon with my choice.  The dress is ordered, bought and paid for and just came in this past weekend, and it is every bit as gorgeous as I imagined!  I tried it on with the shoes and a lovely cathedral length veil and it was the perfect look.  So happy!!!

 

 

 

For real this time.

 

 

And that's that!

 

Eric and I met with our stationer a couple weeks ago and the invitations are picked and being finalized as I blog.  I will say, my fiance has great taste.  Anytime he gives his opinion on anything wedding related I always glow a little because he chooses so well!  And that's not even bride-speak for "he consistently chooses what I want him to choose", he really does give great input which is awesome.  :)

 

So to end this post here's a little sneak peek at what's cookin' over at Sweetness Stationery ....

 

 

 

AHHHHH I'M SO EXCITED!!!

 

 

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!

 

 

 

~M

 

 

 

Put A Ring On It

What's up!  It's diamond time!  Obviously when it came to shopping for wedding bands I was giddy as a schoolgirl.  I love jewellery, sparkly things and spending time with Eric, so this was such a fun day. 

Eric and I went to go see our jeweller John at Roger Watson Jewellers, in Osborne Village.  I really love how knowledgeable and passionate John is about jewellery, and the fact that this is a family owned local business that has passed through generations.  They have such beautiful jewellery in their display cases, and John is also incredibly talented at custom jewellery, which is what we were looking for!

 

I AM fooled by the rocks that you got...

We walked into the store expecting that Eric would choose a ring from the display case and I would need a custom set put together.  Because of the knife edge of my original engagement ring, we were having no luck finding a band that would fit flush against it.  We started with Eric, and as he looked at the tungsten rings, the fact that tungsten is not resizable became more and more of a problem for him.  When I asked him why, he said it was because if he ever needed a different size ring, he wouldn't be able to adjust the original one, and he would have to get a completely new one.  And he's not okay with that, because he wants to wear the original ring that we exchange on our wedding day for the rest of his life.  All together now....

 

 

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwe!

Love that boy more every day. 

So he looked through many rings in the store and settled on a couple that were in white gold and platinum with interesting designs on the band.  He couldn't quite commit to one, so that was when John suggested a custom ring.  He was able to choose the design, style, metal, and thickness of his ring and John took all the details to make a model for Eric to approve before he starts making it.  So as soon as Eric is back from Liberia, he will be able to go down and see what his custom ring will look like!

 

OMG! 

 

 

As for me, I was working with another jeweller at the store while John was with Eric, and I was just trying on rings for fun.  I already knew exactly what I wanted, so I described it to John in extreme detail when he was done putting Eric's ring order together.  To my surprise, he went to his workstation and pulled out an engagement ring he was working on that had no center stone, along with a matching wedding band.  It was absolutely perfect and exactly what I had in mind, with the small, dainty stones on each side of the engagement ring matching the wedding band.  So within 8 seconds I was sold.  The set is absolutely beautiful! 

 

 

 

Without the center stone...



I was very very sad to part with my engagement ring so that they could work on resetting the diamond into the new ring.  But they promised to have it back to me within a week, and even delivered on their promise two days early!  I have the wedding band safely tucked away for the day of the wedding, and now I'm happily wearing my engagement ring again.  :D

 

Yayyyyy I love it so much!!!  I'm so spoiled ;)

 

 

After picking up my rings and having another look at the wedding band in its box, I got very reflective and emotional about our upcoming wedding.  Sure, I am very excited about our big day and very wrapped up in the flurry of activity that is wedding planning, but what I am truly looking forward to are the adventures ahead.  Moving out of the condo and into our first house, continuing to travel the world together, building a life and a family.  I am stupidly excited about all the little things too - for example, I can't wait to use the word "husband" when talking about Eric, or to hear him refer to me as "my wife".  I can't wait to sign my name Mickaela Maxwell (my NAME is changing in 5 months, that is so crazy).  I can't wait for when we can pull out our wedding album and look back on the day, instead of looking forward to it.

 

I came across a tip in a bridal magazine to read a lovely book called Wedding Cake For Breakfast: Essays On The Unforgettable First Year of Marriage.  I bought it off Kobo this weekend and could not put it (well, my iPad) down.  The book is filled with funny and poignant stories from women writers about their first year of marriage, and I would highly recommend it.  Not only did I laugh, but I also cried a river of tears, but that could just be because my fiancé is in Liberia right now and I miss him terribly.  Whether you're right in the thick of your first 365 days, or you're coming up to your big day (like me), or if you're neither of those things but you just want a really good read, you should pick up this book!  It was a soothing reminder that the wedding day isn't the end of the journey or the light at the end of the long tunnel of wedding planning, but it's the first day of a whole new life filled with events - planned, unexpected, heartbreaking, ordinary, and joyous. 

 

 

 

Awe, look at me.  All sappy.

 

 

 

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!

 

 

~M

 





Winner Winner! Ham Sandwich Dinner!

Greetings everyone!  It's time for another installment of Social Prize Extravaganza!  If you want a chance to win one of these fabulous prizes, make sure you message Eric or I for tickets ASAP!  It's shaping up to be a super fun night, we are very excited.  :)


Fit For A Disney Princess

First up, a 7 day, 7 night stay in a beautiful 2 bedroom suite in a Central Florida resort!  This beautiful, family-oriented resort is just 5 km from Walt Disney World and minutes away from other popular Florida attractions.  The suite sleeps 6 and has a fully equipped kitchen, whirlpool in the master bedroom, and patio!  Resort amenities include a swimming pool, hot tub, playground and on-site washer and dryer.  Take the kiddies to the happiest place on earth!

 

That's why you have kids.  So you can go to Disneyworld and not look like a creep.

 

 

Caffeine Dream

 

 

This awesome automatic coffee maker (a Nescafe Dolce Gusto) will please even the jitteriest of caffeine addicts!  Comes complete with coffee mugs and three boxes of capsules to get you going on those sleepy Monday mornings!

 



 

Sadly this is a sight I've seen at the office many a time...

 

 

 

Go Bombers!  (Alternatively titled: Come On Guys, They're Trying.)

 

 

 

 

This package features a signed and framed Milt Stegall jersey, along with a football signed by the 2013 team.  Haters, go hate somewhere else - this is only for our True Blue fans!  Also comes with some Bomber swag and a 2013 Cheer Team Calendar signed by the whole cheer team!  You may even see a few of our beautiful cheer team members at the social... ;)

 

 

Gimme Gimme Cake Gimme Cake Gimme Gimme Cake

 

For those of you who don't know the omnipotent MOB, in addition to being an awesome mom and Grandma, she makes the best cakes ever.  Hardly to be called a "hobby", considering how unbelievably amazing she is at it, my mom whips out these gorgeous, creative confections that make people swoon with delight.  Not only do they look incredible, they taste divine!  (I speak from experience.  Lots of it.  Probably too much.)  She doesn't do it for any profit at all, it's just for fun, and she has agreed to donate a cake of the winner's choice worth $250!  Just look at some of these photos:

 

 

 

Retirement cake...

 

 

 

Birthday cake...

 

 

 

Beer cake....

 

 

 

My Little Pony cake...

 

 

 

Race car cake...

 

 

 

White chocolate raspberry Kit Kat cake (DROOL)...

 

 

 

Toopy and Binoo cake...

 

 

 

Canadian cake...

 

 

 

Popcorn cupcakes...

 

 

 

Winnie The Pooh cake...

 

 

 

Look at these freakin' barnyard animals.  They are so cute I can't even stand it!

 

 

Suck it, Buddy Valastro.  I could go on, there are a million more photos of amazing work that she has done.  Just go check it out here!

 

 

We Have Too Much Wine, Said No One Ever

 

 

This 24 bottle dual zone wine fridge is awesome, and I want it for myself, like most of these prizes.  But it will find a new home with another lucky winner at the social!  Eric and I have two wine fridges, and they are the best ever.  Become an oenophile in no time with this fridge and a gift card to buy some wine to start off your collection!


Two Words:  ROAD TRIP

Who wants to go to Chicaggggggoooooooooooo?  This package comes with a Garmin GPS to get you there, a $50 Petro Canada gift card, a couple travel mugs for your road rockets, and one night's stay at the luxurious Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza!  Da Bears!



So if all these prizes (plus the ones listed here), and a cupcake bar with over 20 flavors, and cheap drinks, and cheese cubes, and cheerleaders, and dancing to sweet tunes late into the night isn't your cup of tea, I don't know what is.  Get your tickets now, before they are all gone!



Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!



~M

Details, Details

So I've been dealing a lot with wedding vendors lately.  I've had countless emails, phone calls, and meetings with all sorts of people regarding our wedding.  It's been hectic dealing with all the vendors, trying to ensure every aspect of the wedding is covered, trying to ensure it all fits in the budget, and making sure everything coordinates together.  I am not even going to lie about my feelings.

I LOVE IT.

Faaaaaabuloussssss!

 

 

I posted a FB status the other day about how my favorite part of wedding planning is meeting with vendors.  For who else can you sit there and talk about the smallest details of your wedding, your vision, your overall theme, how you want ostrich feathers in your bouquet because you feel their uniqueness, texture and movement matches with the soft yet fashion forward quality of your dress, how your 3 year old niece is going to wear a pair of Swarovski crystal-encrusted shoes, and how you prefer pintuck to plain and eggplant to indigo.  And they don't judge you.  They don't try to change the subject.  They don't think any of your ideas are bad or disagree that you should actually send out Save the Date cards because their friend Cindy from work didn't and she regretted it.  They sit and listen as you babble on about your day nonstop, only interrupting to excitedly agree with everything that you've planned and tell you how perfect it is.  I know that they're probably hiding any negative opinions they may have and their primary goal is to get my business and my money, and I don't care.  They are a captive audience and I.  Love.  It.

 

To be truthful, I can tell which vendors love their work and which vendors are going through the motions to make a buck.  I think it takes a special type of person to be involved in the business of weddings, where cash is king and women are crazy.  I have such a respect for vendors that love what they do so much, that putting up with bridezillas week in and week out is worth it to them.  So when looking for people that are going to be in charge of HUGE parts of our special day, personality matters as much as price.

 

 

 

 

"Yes Mickaela, I agree, the vintage trend is SOOOO overdone..."

 

 

So in talking a lot about all these little details, I've come across several (and I mean several) opportunities to spend just a little bit more here, and a little bit more there, to get these extra things, and upgrade to that, etc.  It becomes a little overwhelming to dissect a quote and figure out what's going to mean enough to you to spend the extra cash and what you can do without.  When I'm not sure about those details, I usually use the Google machine to see what other brides have said about it.  In doing so, I found a very interesting article about the top 5 biggest money wasters in wedding planning.  So I thought I'd share that today with some of my thoughts!

 

 

5.  Meaningless and Expensive Wedding Favors.  "Your guests' presence is a present, indeed, but you don't have to pay them back with custom-printed tchotchkes that you might end up lugging home or tossing in the trash."

 

I do agree with this one.  When Eric and I were first looking at favors, we really wanted them to be representative of us and our shared love of wine, and something that our guests would actually use.  But at $6 to $10 a pop, an engraved corkscrew for every guest was putting our budget in the stratosphere.  So we looked at bottle stoppers, glasses, all sorts of things.  But when we finally decided on the cookies that you can read about in this post, it was the perfect fit.  They are Eric's favorite, people love to eat, and with how delicious they are there is less of a chance they will end up left on the table at the end of the night.  But if they are, it's okay because we didn't break the bank.  And fine, maybe we will find a good home for them.  ;)

 

 

 

LOL.  Cookie Monster DOES do that...

 

 

 

4.  The Dress.  "On one hand, it's a once in a lifetime occasion. On the other, it's just that -- once -- that you'll only be wearing your wedding dress, so do you really want to spend a couple of mortgage payments on it?"

Um, YEAH.  Next.

But seriously though, I do understand some people's stance on this.  Yes, you only wear it once.  But while I don't believe that your wedding day is the happiest day of your life (at least I hope it's not!), I DO believe that your wedding dress is the most important garment you will ever wear.  It is also a day where ALL EYES are on you.  So an ill-fitted Kijiji purchased satin disaster will not suffice.  I don't think this is a place to skimp.  A bride should look and feel her best, so I don't think spending a little more is a "waste".  To a point, of course.  When you're just paying for the designer label then yes, it's a waste.  Like this Pnina Tornai monstrosity, which was $34,000..............

 

Mother of God.

 

 

 

3.  Huge Wedding Cakes.  "Some couples only invite 50 guests, but they still order a cake that serves 300. With cakes going for $2-$15 a slice, that extra size adds up quickly."

 

I don't have this problem because my MOB is a Cake Boss and is making us a glorious wedding cake made of dummies, with a real tier on top just for us two.  But even if she wasn't, I still don't think we would be having real cake.  Nobody loves wedding cake.  Nobody walks away from a wedding going, "Damn, that cake was the best damn thing I've ever had in my mouth.  I would get a room with that cake.  I would show that cake a good time."  And now, with most meals served at weddings that include some kind of fancy dessert, there is no need to double-dessert and also serve wedding cake.  So agree.  Big waste of cash.

 

 

 

Am I actually seeing this?

 

 

 

2.  Printed Programs and Menus.  "Everyone there is there for your wedding, and if they don't know who the bride and groom are then they shouldn't be there.  Spend less money telling them what they're going to eat and more money on the actual food!"

 

Okay hold on.  I'm all for cutting costs, but this is going a little far.  Yes everyone that is going to the wedding should have some working knowledge of the bride and groom.  But what about all the other people standing up there?  Hey, who are those chicks in dresses?  How do they know the bride?  Why is there a guy standing on the girls side?  Which one of them is Eric's brother again?  Who is that lady marrying them?  She seems to know them.  Does she know them?  I know Eric's parents, what are Mickaela's parents names?  Wait, who is this MC guy?  How does he know the couple?  If ONLY there were some way of figuring all this out!  Our programs are like $1.75 each or something.  Not a huge price to pay to introduce our guests to all the people that are most important to our day.

 

And menus, well, I like to know what I'm going to eat.  And same thing, they are not that expensive.  I would hardly say this is the #2 money waster!  Unless the menus are being printed on $100 bills.

 

 

 

Come on, this is freakin' cute!  And fun!

 

 

 

1.  Endless Mementos.  "The wedding industry loves to sell you on keepsakes.  Does your wedding album need to be preserved in a 50 pound, leather bound book with a glass cover?  Do you really need a personalized pen to sign the guest book? Is preserving your dress and bouquet worth the money and the space in your home? And does every toasting glass, picture frame, and photo album need to be monogrammed with your wedding date?"

 

I can totally see this one.  Wedding albums especially.  When we were meeting with photographers, they would bring out the big kahuna album to show off all their best prints, and while the album was beautiful and looking at the pictures through my misty bride eyes affected my judgement ($3,000 for a book of pictures of the wedding?  Seems reasonable.) I have to admit that I feel like this is a place where couples get absolutely gouged.  I do want a nice album of our wedding photos and some framed photos of us and some special items to remember the day, but I don't think it needs to go into overdrive with preserving the dress and making your home a shrine to your wedding.  As I said before, I don't think your wedding day should be the happiest day of your life!  It should be all the days after!  I'd rather spend money on more happy days with my boo!

 

 

 

He's going to be horrified that I called him my boo.

 

 

 

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!

 

 

~M