Wedding! Part 2

We planned the wedding with the idea that the ceremony was for us, and the reception was the party afterwards to celebrate it, and like all good parties the focus there was on the guests. But the ceremony was ours, and it was perfect.

My friend Ryan played Truly Madly Deeply by Savage Garden for us during the ceremony, this is a video taken by my cousin of the first part of it. He did a fantastic job, Ben said he never really understood the song until Ryan sang it for us! At one point we looked at each other and went to kiss without thinking, and then remembered we couldn't yet! The priest laughed at us.

We had our ceremony in a public park, we'd reserved the Pavilion next to it but the park was open, and as it was a gorgeous day there were other people there, at least that's what I'm told. Ben says a few people walked just behind us during the ceremony, and apparently someone drove past at one point, but I didn't see any of that. I saw Ben's eyes and the pastor's eyes, and Ryan singing, but that was all. I was very present and very focused, but only on us apparently!

After our beautiful ceremony,

We were married!


We recessed to Three Dog Night's Joy to the World (queued up to 1:42) which is also my parent's ring tone on my cel phone. I love it!

We came back up the aisle and did a sort of receiving line where we spoke to everyone before they left their seats, so they could sit down while waiting. I hugged everyone then, and again when we went around to the tables at the reception, so by my count I got over 200 hugs that day! A personal record! The amount of love we got was staggering, it made us so happy to see everyone who could come out for the wedding!

Then it was picture time! Formal ones

And not so formal ones!

The ride back to the Inn was much more relaxing. We were so relieved to be married finally!


When we got back to the Inn, our guests and the rest of the wedding party went to cocktail hour on the Inn's deck, which overlooked the river, while we took more pictures. As we walked around in search of photo ops, some of my friends called down to us to see if we wanted drinks, which we definitely did! Long island Iced Tea for me and Jack and Coke for him, and they were fantastic, and also the only drinks we had time to drink that night! We made it to the very end of the cocktail hour and I snagged one appetizer, though I heard that the rest of them were delicious.

Then it was time for our grand entrance!

Uncle John brought his bagpipes, this is him practicing before the wedding, and he piped us into the reception! He has a tradition of giving each niece and nephew an engraved broad sword on their wedding day, and after we came in he piped as we walked through an arch of my father holding our sword and my brother-in-law holding theirs. It was fantastic and fun and completely surprised me, I didn't know anything about it until 5 minutes before!

And then it was time to dance! We danced our first dance to this acoustic version of Jason Mraz's I'm Yours. We didn't choreograph it like the couple in the video, but we've taken dance lessons together and know each other's style, and we twirled and jumped and sang to each other and he dips me so perfectly! My favorite memory of the night is that first dance with my brand new husband!

A very close second to that memory was dancing with my father! I am basically the female version of him, and we apparently completely shattered all the "Daddy's Little Girl" stereotypes, according to my grandmother at least, by dancing to Oingo Boingo's Weird Science! (From :10 to about 1:10) We had a blast, he loved it, it was perfect for us!

We successfully made the rounds of the tables and talked to everyone there. I didn't realize it but apparently it's a north-eastern tradition to give cards to the bride and groom personally at weddings, I carried a very pretty bag and received one from almost everyone on my side of the room, but very few on his. But then we've gotten a lot in the mail from his, and he said he had never seen that done except in mobster movies! There were a surprising amount of things that I assumed were just part of a wedding that he'd never seen, and vice versa, I had no idea weddings were so regional!

We did get time to eat, we kind of rushed through it but the food was good!

And then we danced! The dance floor was busy all night, the DJ was fantastic and played to our crowd perfectly! This is a video Jake took that's rather dark but you can see how much fun everyone had!

And this is a video with some square dancing with better lighting! This is much closer to how the reception actually looked. The little boy is the son of friends of my parents, and he had a blast dancing! I picked him up and danced with him at one point, but he looked nervous so I put him down, and he ran off. I found out later he'd run right back to his father and told him he'd danced with me, very excitedly! So cute!

We had cake!


Mmm cake :)


We had alternate tiers of sponge cake with lemon curd and buttercream and pound cake with chocolate ganache and buttercream. It was very good :)

I tossed my bouquet pretty much just because Ben wanted to toss my garter while singing Usher's OMG to me! I did not appreciate that song at all until he sang it to me, and then it was vastly improved!

The end of the night came far too quickly, as it does. Our last song was The Proclaimers I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles), and the dance floor was full of people we love! The DJ did the thing where he cut out the audio for some of the "Dadaundas" so we could shout them out, which is crazy amounts of fun! I danced and shouted and twirled and was married!

We did it! I jumped up and down in triumph after the last song, I was so excited that we did it! We planned a wedding! And it was perfect! The whole thing was absolutely perfect, not because everything we planned came out exactly as we thought, but because after it was over we were married!

Wedding! Part 1

We have been married one month today! Here are my wedding thoughts and pictures!

We had our reception at an Inn, the Inn at Lambertville Station, and our rain plan was to have the ceremony at the Inn as well, so made sense to me to stay over the night before the wedding there too. Ben stayed in the bridal suite, so he wouldn't have to move his luggage, and I planned to share a room with my little sister, who was my maid of Honor. She ended up changing her mind, though, and decided to stay home that night. It took me a long time to fall asleep that night, I was very excited and also I rarely sleep well in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar noises. I thought mostly about how that was the last night I would be spending by myself for a very long time, and how much better I sleep with him warm beside me, and how those weird noises couldn't possibly be someone breathing in the room behind me oh god oh god. (They weren't, I checked. Several times.)

Eventually I feel into a restless sleep, and woke up at what I thought was 6:45. This was too early so I tried to fall back asleep, but couldn't. Luckily when I sat up I realized it was 7:45, and a good time to wake up! The Inn delivers a continental breakfast to your room, so I sat at the little table in the room and had a very peaceful breakfast looking out over the Delaware River. This quiet time to myself was actually very refreshing and welcome before the busyness of the day.

I got a shower and as I was getting dressed the best man's wife, our groomswoman Danielle, came to see if I needed anything and if I was ready to move to the bridal suite, where we would be getting our hair and makeup done and getting dressed. She and her husband are Ben's best friends from high school, and they were incredibly awesome the whole week before the wedding, the helped us out with so many things I can't even list them all. She went to make sure Ben was out of the bridal suite and into their room where he would be getting dressed, and helped me move the dress and my luggage down.

When I got there I hung up my dress and steamed the small wrinkles out and stared at it for a while. I hadn't seen it in 3 months, since I brought it up to Jersey from Texas in March!


Then the people started arriving! The make up artist got there first and started Danielle, since she would be leaving with the guys before we did. There had been a mix-up with the hair stylist that stressed me out the day before the wedding, but it all worked out. When I contracted her, I knew the approximate time for the ceremony, 5 pm, but not what time I needed to be ready by. I assumed I could just tell her when I knew, but it turned out she had another wedding that morning and so got there a little later than I would have wanted, but in plenty of time to finish everyone.


Once that was done it was time to get dressed!

My shoes! (I got a pedicure after this pic was taken and my toenails were a pretty blue!)


At this point everyone ditched me at the same time! They all went to get dressed rather abruptly and left me alone!

But it was ok because I couldn't wait to see this guy!


He looks so awesome in a tux! It was strange, the whole day I spent thinking about him and talking about him and getting dressed hoping he would like my outfit, but not actually talking to him! He wanted to be very traditional and not see each other before the wedding.

At any rate, I was dressed! We took some bridal portraits which I will have when our professional pics come back, and then it was off to the ceremony!


We took a trolley there, which was nice because a lot of people rode with us, like my parents and aunts and uncles. It was a beautiful ride, right along the banks of the Delaware, green and breezy in the June warmth, sunshine and blue skies over shaded water. I really wanted the wedding to feel summery, like a lazy afternoon in a shady field as the grass flows in the wind, and that ride perfectly encapsulated it for me. It was warm but not hot, the breeze just pleasant on our skin. I knew as soon as he proposed I wanted a June wedding, and it was perfect.

We arrived at the ceremony site! It was perfectly set up, even better than I had ever imagined! We had 2 coordinators, one for the reception which was part of the package at the Inn at Lambertville Station, and one I contracted for the ceremony site, since I was planning everything from Texas. Both of them did fantastic jobs, but the coordinator for the ceremony was worth her weight in gold. She cost me what I was planning to pay for chair rentals, and she was absolutely fantastic. She set everything up at the ceremony site, I didn't have to do anything, and I couldn't believe how perfect everything was.

We had our ceremony in Washington Crossing Historic Park, next to a pavilion. There were 3 trees planted in a triangular pattern which we used as the backdrop to the ceremony, and several others providing shade to the guests. We had white wooden folding chairs for the guests, and white rose petals lining the aisle. The coordinator hung the cranes I had folded from the trees both from the trees behind the pastor and forming the aisle from the trolley, on lines with crystals that caught the light beautifully. She did everything, I just mailed her the cranes and told her what I wanted!


I watched from the trolley as Ben escorted our grandmothers to their seats, carefully walking backward so he wouldn't see me yet! He was aided by the pastor, who was also awesome. I'm not religious, but Ben is, and his family is. After much much searching, we found our pastor online. The advantage of hiring someone you don't know is you can customize the ceremony completely, you are in charge rather than having to work with someone who has a set idea of how they do things, so it worked out perfectly.

Then the music started. Ben escorted both of our mothers down the aisle to Here Comes the Sun, which was perfect in the setting. Then our bridal party started, to Walking on Sunshine! I loved the music, we put a lot of thought into it! I love looking at the pictures while listening to the songs again, too :)

Danielle and Rebecca, Ben's sister


Heather and Ed


Kyle and Stephie


Eddie and Julianna! She threw 2 handfuls of rose petals, but then was distracted by the cranes!


Then it was my turn! I expected to cry the whole way down the aisle, but I was smiling too much to cry. I walked in, holding my dad's hand, to Enigma's Return to Innocence, a song we both love and felt was perfect.


Ben did not cry either, though it was close.
I have a lot of favorite pictures of him, but this one tops them all. Listening to the song again and looking at this picture, with him so caught up in the moment and my Dad there and our guys behind him I am crying now when I didn't then!

10 days

Does that sound completely insane to anyone else or is just me? I cannot wait. I am seriously so over the moon about being married it is hard to sit still. The previous week and most of this have been a blur of

carrying stuff up way too many stairs carrying stuff down stairs folding paper folding paper folding paper printing feeding paper into the printer cutting folding gluing tying moving boxes up moving boxes down comforting the kitten sleep precious sleep purring in my ear boxes boxes everywhere why did I move decide to move in Texas in June? That wasn't very bright my mother is in the hospital again? Do we need to find one closer to the wedding? more paper mailing checks mailing boxes more boxes folding paper folding paper am I in Hawaii yet?

I will be soon!

Wedding!

We are in June! 25 days til the wedding! I seriously cannot think about anything else. I can't wait!

Wedding wedding wedding!

Camping! Kind of.

This weekend we celebrated our one-year anniversary of being engaged and me graduating school by going down to Galveston and having a cookout and camping on the beach! Well, that was the idea. Originally about 15-20 people were supposed to come, but then someone got Lasik and wasn't allowed on the beach, someone remembered they had concert tickets that night, someone else got sick, etc etc etc. So it ended up just being 5 of us. But we dug a fire pit and cooked burgers and sausage, drank lots of beer, played Vodka (there is one rule. It's "vodka." it's my new favorite game :) ) and made lots of s'mores. Mmm s'mores, molten marshmallows of deliciousness. I will post a pic at some point maybe.

So between the s'mores, beer and vodka I was perfectly comfortable going to sleep in the tent, well, until the wind picked up anyway. Just as I fell asleep the tent, which had been flappity all night long, got suddenly much more flappity. And then tent walls were touching me in ways in which I was frankly uncomfortable with. So I had to wake Ben up and tell him the tent had come unstaked, and then try to hold it down from the inside while he he restaked it! And that totally didn't work, so we emptied the tent, shoved it in the trunk, and tried to sleep in my car. Which also totally didn't work. So we woke up our friends and told them we were going home, and since their tents looked like they wouldn't last much longer they packed up too. We got home at 3:30 am, took quick showers, and crashed. Woke up the next day, made the terrible mistake of going to Cracker Barrel on Mother's Day because my hangover cure involves lots of biscuits, and came home and crashed for several more hours.

So it was a fun night except for the wind! We need to go out to New Braunfels for camping, but I'm not sure we'll have time before the wedding. The next several weekends are already booked with various birthday and graduation parties, too.

Monday I sent out the last of my wedding invites! I am so excited! I've gotten one rsvp back so far, though it was a no and it was hand-delivered by someone I work with, so it only mostly counts. 45 days til the wedding! I'm pretty proud of the invites, too. I ordered blank pocketfolds and we designed and printed the invites ourselves. We got additional paper from Staples and I cut and printed the inserts, and then I hand-addressed them. I hated to mess up my lovely invites with my 5-year-old boy handwriting (it's gotten worse over the years, I never hand-write anything!), so I got a spiffy calligraphy pen and did my best attempt at calligraphifing them. I'm soo glad they're done and I hope people like them!

Obligatory pics:

Eee!

I just finished my last presentation, I now have a Masters degree in Physics! I am so excited! And now I can put all of my energy into wedding planning, yay! I am doing pretty well on that too, I just need a spiffy pen so I can scrawl my terrible handwriting all over my lovely invitations and send them out this week! 54 days, it's getting so close! I am very ready, I can't wait for it to be here. I hope it will be a great wedding, but as long as we end up married I will be happy!

More engagement pics because I like looking at them! I love my expression here:


And his here:


He's so cute!

Shower weekend!

This weekend Ben and I went up to New Jersey to do a million and one things for the wedding! We ended up getting them all done, which was awesome.

We flew up Thursday night and hung out in the airport in Philly for 3 hours waiting for Ben's best friend and our best man Kyle to get in, and so got to my parents' at about 11:30. Ben's mom had flown in from Nebraska a few days before, so it was nice to see everyone, and it felt like a sleepover party!

Friday morning my sisters and I got our hair and makeup trials, and both Emily and Kristen did awesome jobs! We all looked gorgeous, which was good, because Ben and I were getting our engagement pictures done that afternoon, as soon as he got back from driving an hour and a half each way to the tux shop his cousin recommended.

We took the train into Philly and Kyle and Ben's mom walked around while Ben and I met our photographer, Isabel March. She was actually one of the first vendors we picked, recommended to us by the coordinator at the Lambertville Inn, Melle, and we both fell in love with her pictures on her blog. Having awesome pictures of the wedding is really important to us, I want to look at them for the rest of our lives!

Here are a few from this weekend. This is Ben being pensive, though I love his little smile:


Ben said he set that one as his background and has gotten lots of compliments on it already!


So awesome! They make me smile every time I see them :) I can't wait to see the whole set!

My hair amuses me. I'll have to get the pics we took right after the trial from my mom, I started out with lots of curls but after I got changed and walked around in windy Philly, all the curls coalesced into a 2 or 3 megacurls.

So after canoodling around Philly, we ate delicious cupcakes from Reading Terminal Market, which had icing piped into the middle of them umm so good, picked up Kyle and Ben's mama Polly and went back to my parents' house just in time for my Grandmother and niece's joint birthday party! Family parties are fun, it was nice to be able to see everyone and introduce Polly and Kyle to them, so they'll have met them before the wedding.

Saturday was the wedding shower! It was at a beautiful golf course and everyone seemed to have a nice time. We got very nice and generous gifts and wore silly ribbon hats and managed to talk to everyone there twice. I can understand better now why people seem a bit dazed on their wedding days, I get nervous being the center of attention after not long at all, and there was less than a third of the people who will be at the wedding there! I'll have to get some pics from my mom of this too, although there were some on facebook by the time we got home :)

We napped that afternoon, then had cheesesteaks and panzarottis for dinner. We went and got water ice and ate it in the car with the heat on, since it was about 40 degrees out! I love that there was still a line for it though. Then we went to a birthday party for a friend of mine and drank YuengLing, the beer of choice in Jersey.

Sunday we got up early yet again and drove up to Lambertville and tasted the food for the reception and the cake. We made good choices, I think :)

We were home again Sunday night. The Kitten watched the Discovery channel with us, she is so odd. She ignores the tv most of the time, but for some reason Life caught her attention. I told her I would record the Fish episode of it for her, but it was bedtime for Kittens and Mandas.

Sick argh and weddingness

I hate being sick argh argh argh. I got an H1N1 flu shot Monday morning and started feeling yucky, by Tuesday my head was congested and pounding and my joints were achy and then I managed to twist my back in a weird way and pulled something I think. Stayed home from work Tuesday, which sucks because I don't get nearly as many sick days as I think I should have now, and tried to come in yesterday but ended up leaving at noon and going home and crashing.

I feel betterish today, but I hate complaining about my back hurting and being sick so instead I shall complain about weddingness!

I want to be done with the wedding planning already! I've planned so much why is there still more! We have the reception place, the ceremony place, the officiant finally, the photographer the DJ the hair and makeup people, my dress is in my closet with my shoes, my brideswomen have ordered their dresses, and I even just got some slinky things to wear on the honeymoon that look even better on than I was expecting. I am ready to be done! But there are still flowers and invitations and transport and the tuxes to go.

It's been kind of surprising actually, finding out what I really care about for the wedding and what I'm like, meh whatevs it will be fine. The cake, for example, I love to bake and I love desserts, I thought I'd be more interested in the cake. It comes with our reception package, though, and the place we're having it at has awesome food and awesome desserts, so I'm pretty happy to leave it up to them. We'll pick flavors when we do our whirlwind visit in March, and probably a shape and some sort of decoration, but I'm really not thinking about it too much. I think Ben actually cares more about it than me, which is fine.

The flowers are boring me to tears. I don't care about them, I don't want to look at pictures of centerpieces, I don't want to decide anything about them. I just want white roses and blue hydrangea to magically appear there and be pretty and casually elegant and not look overdone.

But then we ordered our wedding rings this weekend. I was not expecting to feel so emotional about them, but just knowing that soon we will be able to see them and hold them and wear them sends shivers down my spine. Soon I will have the ring that has the other half of our pattern on it, and he will have the ring with the perfect mirror image of it, that complements mine perfectly and that no one else will ever match. Our rings are gorgeous and I love them. They're one of the only things I'd picked out before we actually got engaged.

We also need our plane tickets to Hawaii for the honeymoon, actually. I should look into that too.

Morning of Terror

It happened again. How could it happen again? Is it spring already? It can't be! I thought I had til May!

Last night I stayed up too late, there was just always one more thing I wanted to do. So I was tired this morning, and coming in to work on things that will never go anywhere while I wait to find out if I'll have a job and what it will be just isn't that compelling. It was after 8 when I decided I really had to acknowledge the morning and get up. Got my shower without really opening my eyes, as I do. Put in my contacts and looked into the mirror, and THERE, right behind me, on the wall where it had obviously just watched me shower, was a HUGE, full-grown, minion of hell! Terror and loathing filled me and I instantly ceded it the bathroom. They have wings here! Who knows what it was planning!

I did the only thing I could do, other than curl into a ball, whimper, and figure out how to teleport to the surface of the sun where I could be clean of this abomination. I called Ben at work and sobbed incoherently. Luckily this is a prearranged signal between us, and he correctly interpreted it as, "Please come save me from the hideous freak of nature that is attacking me!" (By attacking me I mean existing in sight of me. It's a mental attack.)

He is most wonderful person on earth, and the only one I know who would leave work to come rescue me from a cockroach, and that is one of the many reasons I am marrying him. But he hasn't yet learned how to teleport to me immediately, despite my clear wishes on the subject, and so it took him ten minutes to get there.

So I waited. I couldn't allow the mentally-scarring beast to be unchaperoned, because the only thing worse than knowing a huge cockroach is right there is knowing a huge cockroach WAS just right there and now COULD BE ANYWHERE OH GOD OH GOD. Before I called it had been still, apparently hoping its huge, dark, disgusting body would go unnoticed on my cream-colored walls, but after a few seconds, and I am nauseous as I attempt to describe this, it began.. it began to move. Slowly, with gag-inducing motions, it extended its terrible legs and crept around my wall. MY wall! The wall I live in! Or next to, you know, near!

Its ghastly antenna flexing, it crept towards the shower. My shower! Where I had just been, completely vulnerable to it! I could tell it wanted to wash its own evil essence away, perhaps using my nice shampoo! I had to do something!

Acting quickly, I reached out and turned off the light. It froze, but only momentarily. It was emboldened by the return of the shadows! Perhaps its dastardly plan involved darkness somehow, shutting out the sun so it could more easily work its evil here. I couldn't allow that! I turned the light back on. Again it froze, but again only for a moment. Its long dark legs were still moving, still writhing terribly against my innocent wall.

The Kitten had since woken up and was attempting to console my obvious terror by rolling on the floor and waving her paws at me, but it was little help. There was too much evil emanating from the bathroom.

I called Ben again to inform him of the status of the hideous creature. "Ben, it's moving! Hurry!" He was two blocks away. I turned the light back off, hoping to confuse it just a little longer. Was its plan succeeding or not? How could it tell? It was clearly wondering if it could reach the shower faucet and enjoy the rest of my hot water.

Finally he was there! Looking adorable and capable in his bomber jacket, he came in and I pointed, attempting to stop gibbering in fear, towards the dark bathroom. He turned the light on and even he was taken aback by the size of the savage fiend lurking there. He closed the doors to prevent its escape, and then I heard it. The THUMP of victory. It was following closely by the toilet flush of safety and then the sound-of-hand-washing of peace.

Its reign of terror was over. I celebrated by only crying a little on Ben, and then letting him go back to work. Luckily his boss thought it was very sweet of him to overthrow the infestation for me.

Christmas Vacation

Most of our vacation was spent not dying in a blizzard, this is harder than it may appear. Houston got a very rare half-inch of snow before we left, which shut the whole city down. About an hour after we landed in NJ, it began snowing there, and stopped a day later after dropping 20 inches of fluffy snow, which is about a 10-year occurrence there, not exactly common. It continued to snow in Omaha, NE, they got more snow on top of the 2.5 feet they already had lying around. So I am now COMPLETELY SICK of the cold and snow and boots and hats and gloves and coats and my hair exploding from static and dryness!

I HATE the cold anyway, it makes me sad and lonely to be cold, there is a reason I moved to Florida and then Texas! I have never been so happy to come back to Houston, it was glorious to see blue skies and palm trees and a complete lack of 3 foot snow drifts about. Of course the Houstonian lack of awareness that other people do in fact exist is made much more obvious after being in places where people actually realize that you are a human being and treat you as such, but you know.

Christmas loot lists seem to be the thing to do, so here is mine! First is a framed photo of B. and me from his cousin's wedding we went to last year, taken sneakily by his parents, and vying for my favorite present ever. That smile on his face makes me want to cry and sing and laugh and dance all at once, and when I am too blinded by it I look at his hands, holding me close, and oh I am going to marry him so hard!


Love love love.

The only possible contender is a letter written by my sister. This year she wrote each person in our family letters telling us how thankful she is know us, she made us all cry, especially my mom.

I got so much love for Christmas, it was more awesome than I can say.

I also got stuff though! More stuff than I can remember, actually, we shipped most of it so I get a second (actually like 14th by now) Christmas when it gets here.

But including:
Lots of pretty socks! I love socks.
A really pretty glass candle holder, like a hurricane lamp almost, with birch trees on it and a metal base in the shape of leaves.
Pottery from North Carolina, from my sister who lives there
A wedding frame for our wedding pictures, awww
Books about knitting!
A hand-made dice bag from my mom, it's really cool looking, I'll post pics
A signed copy of Storm Front, the Dresden Files book by Jim Butcher, signed with my name and a exclamation point! From our best man and his wife, who got it when Jim Butcher did a signing in Omaha. So cool!

And speaking of socks (I was, really!) I turned the heel on my knitted sock somewhere over Virginia, and picked up stitches for the gusset at my parents' house! It was surprisingly not as hard as I expected, I watched the sock videos on KnittingHelp about 10 times before I left, which really helped. The bottom of the sock is now 6 inches long, and I am almost to the toe! It fits on me now, though it's tight, and I will take pics but I need a pedi first :) It's soooo pretty, I love the yarn, I love the sock, and I am blown away that I fiddled with string for a while and now I can keep my heel warm with it!

I'm planning to get a pedicure and a haircut with Christmas monies, I think it's been about a year since I got a haircut. My hair is really long, longer than it's been since high school, but the ends need to be trimmed and evened out. I'm not sure how long I want it for the wedding, so I'll keep the length until I decide.

Overall it was an awesome vacation, though we were both glad to be back in our own homes and beds and once again be in charge of what we do and when. Travel is nice, not least when you come back.