For the Love of Love: Dudes Become Gentlemen

We'll take a break from all the girly-ness that is wedding day preparations to bring you the dudes. I adore these pictures because I have memories of the rest of the day, but not these moments. While we were putting together flowers and having our hair and make-up done (more on that to come) the dudes were relaxing, having snacks, hanging out with guests and then, about an hour before the ceremony, getting dressed. Guys have it so easy!

This handsome man was moments away from becoming my husband! He only looks a little nervous! :)

These bike chain cuff-links were a Valentine's gift from me. At the time, he did not have a french cuff shirt (oops!) but he got one in time for the wedding!

Now, how do these things go on??

Mr. Aardvark purchased his suit at a small mom and pop shop. They threw in the tie for free!

Apparently, the guys were discussing the merits of different tie tying styles and what would look best with their vests....

(Prepare to hear this a lot) This is one of my favorite pictures of the day. My husband-to-be helping my little brother, his groomsman, tie his tie. It just warms my heart in the biggest fuzziest way.

This, lovely shot is of our ring book. It worked out perfectly and safely got the rings down the aisle.

Confession time, in 2009, at Christmas, I had just graduated from collage and was moving to Wisconsin. I thought Mr. Aardvark might be proposing so I got him a gift that wouldn't look silly next to a ring, this pocket watch.  I had it engraved with his initials and "Christmas 2009". Turns out I was about a year and a half ahead of myself, but he loves it and wears it every time he dresses up. It meant a lot to me that he had it for the wedding.

The guys were almost ready to go, but were the girls still on schedule?


Are your dudes all getting ready together? Does your groom have any cool accessories for the big day?

All photos by Michael Terri Studios

Miss a recap? Don't fret! Here they are!

1) For the Love of Love: Practice Makes Perfect
2) For the Love of Love: DIY Flowers

For the Love of Love: DIY Flowers

After our lovely rehearsal, I made my way back to the hotel with MOH MD. At that point, I am pretty sure she was more nervous than I was :). We had a big room with a HUGE Jacuzzi tub that I took full advantage of, before trying my hardest to fall asleep. I knew morning would come fast. 

And it sure did! If you recall, I had decided to DIY flowers somewhat at the last minute. The shop where we were buying the flowers opened at seven AM. Can you guess what time this crazy bride wanted to be there? Yes, 7:03. So like the trooper she is MOH MD woke me at about 6:40. All of the buzzing from the past week was gone. A had a serene feeling of readiness, but no jitters to speak of.  MOH MD decided we needed some tunes. 

                                      

We got about 45 seconds into Train's Marry Me when I think MOH MD realized that A) this song was way too sleepy for 6:45am and B) She is prone to tearing up during insurance commercials, if we started the day with this song, there would be no hope of dry eyes later. So, in an abrupt change of pace, we turned on the "get pumped" music, which happened to start with this:

                                     

Disney's Mulan: I'll Make a Man out of You

With a little(lot) of singing along and dancing around, I was ready to meet the rest of my half awake bridesmaids in the hotel lobby. We went to pick out our flowers and grab some coffee and breakfeasty treats. Once we had selected the blooms, we headed to my dad's bike shop. it was about 7:30, so we had plenty of time before they opened to get our flowers done. 

I have said it before and I will say it again. My Bridesmaids are AMAZING! I showed them my "test bouquets" and how a built them up and then they went to town. Mine was super easy because I knew from the start that I wanted all daffodils. 

A side note, if you also love daffodils, when they are in water the release a toxin that will kill other flowers, so keep them in their own vase.

Somebody has a case of the early-morning sillies!

In less than an hour we had 3 mom bouquets, 1 bride bouquet, 1 Marian Alter bouquet (pretty much the same as the mom ones) and 5 bridesmaid bouquets!  We were doing great and had plenty of time before our 10:00 hair and makeup.

Around 9:00 two of my three flower girls arrived. I had made them tutu style skirts, but never trimmed the length because little girls  are prone to growth spurts at the last second. by leaving it until the morning of the wedding, I felt pretty safe that we would no sudden growth issues. The  two littlest flower girls are roughly the same height so, even though they were not all present we got everyone trimmed up. 

It was lots of fun (kinda like cutting hair) and the girls LOVED them. Once they left, all of my pre-wedding tasks were done. The only thing left to do was become a bride....

And now some shameless glamour shots of the flowers thanks to Micheal Terri Studios. (All other photos are personal)

My bouquet, just, you know, hanging out in a fence.... (Isn't that where you kept your flowers when you weren't carrying them?)

The Bridesmaid and Mom flowers. I adore this picture, the colors are so vivid, just like they were in real life. The flowers looked so happy and celebratory! I am so glad I had something to focus my energy on before the ceremony. I think I would have been a ball of nerves if I just woke up and had to wait until 2:00 to roll around!

Did/will you have any very last minute tasks to do the day of your wedding? How did it go?

Missed a recap?  Don't fret! Catch up here!

1) For the Love of Love: Practice Makes Perfect.

For the Love of Love: Practice Makes Perfect

The week before the wedding was buzzing with excitement and things to do. In fact, things seemed to get exponentially more busy until the moments before I walked down the aisle. One of the last large items to check off the list was "Rehearse". 

I am not really sure what I expected at the rehearsal, but I figured for a Catholic wedding with a full mass, there would be a lot of choreography to figure out. I thought there would be lots of instruction (like when do you pass of the bouquet?) but there was not. We practiced coming in and lining up and walking out. And then we did it a few more times. And then we were done. Or rather, then we went to our rehearsal dinner (aka "first reception" aka pre-ception"), where 80+ of our guests were there to help us practice eating, chatting and posing for pictures all at once. 

Speaking of posing for pictures....

I never got a chance to tell you about my rehearsal dress, I scored it on a  "extra 50% off  Clearance" sale at Ann Taylor. I can't help but brag about the good deal I got! Original price: $569.99 (YIKES!) I paid $79.99!!!! (YAY!) It is covered with super heavy beading and feels like a dream on. I can't wait to wear it to a New Year's Eve party!

With my Bridesmoms, Mama Aardvark on the left, Step Mama Aardvark on the right.

Chillin' with MOH MD. My feet were already killing me but according to MOH MD's little brother (and usher) I looked like a super-hero bride. I think it was just the blue tights, but I'll take it!

So....this time tomorrow we will be married!

The rehearsal dinner was amazing. There was so much going on that we never got a chance to make a speech or thank our bridal party in front of everyone. But there was tons of love, wine and homemade ravioli! It was a great way to spend my last night as a single lady. 

Have you ever been a part of a rehearsal that seemed easier than it should have? Married bees, were you nervous the night before your wedding?

The Power of Customer Service.

Hive! How I have missed you! I am very excited to start my re-caps, but before I do, I wanted to share a little story with you. A story about (as the title suggests) the power of customer service.

As I was organizing my wedding photos for recaps, I figured, "Hey, now would be a great time to put together our wedding album." I had already filtered out the best group shots, and my very most favorite of the 435,233,425,823,542,752 other shots taken by our photographers and guests. I had everything in neat folders on our computer, and I knew which service I wanted to use for our DIY wedding album. I used Picaboo to make our guest book of engagement pictures and was very happy with the results. The program was easy to use, and the finished product was nice without costing an arm and a leg. Putting together an album should be EASY AS PIE!

Wrong. I knew I shouldn't have been so smug, I knew things often do not go as planned, but I was young and foolish! This was weeks ago! I have learned so much since then.

I set out one Saturday to hammer out the album. I spent about seven hours glued to the computer screen arranging little photo boxes and picking just the right images to tell our story. I was almost done. Everything was in place and I was SO happy with how it looked. I went to the print preview, one final step before completion, and that is where things started to go wrong. Two of the photos were missing. I went back to the "edit" page and there they were. Back to print preview, gone. Edit, there. Print preview, gone. (I am a little slow so I did this a few times just to make sure I wasn't seeing things.) If it hadn't been incredibly late at night, I would have used the "Live Chat" Picaboo offers for struggling customers, however it was after hours so I sent an e-mail and decided to worry about it in the morning.

When clicked save the screen went blank. No error message, no please hang up and try again, just a white screen with a "!" in the center. My mouth went dry. I shakily got up and went to the kitchen hoping I would come back to find my photo album. Instead I found "!". Panic began to spread through my body as I realized it might all be gone. I began frantically clicking and opening windows in hopes that I would be able to find the album. The more I clicked the more hopeless it became. I could not navigate off the "!" pages without "losing your changes" and if I opened I new window it would not let me log into my account. I was trying to keep it together and think through what was happening, but my bedtime had long since passed and logic was slipping away with it.  Mr. Aardvark came in to check on my progress and that is when I lost it it.

Hive, I sobbed. I cried harder than I have since Mr. A moved here, big ugly tears. Not just for the lost work, but for the beautiful day I had spent indoors, ignoring my husband. There were also angry tears too. Why was it just a white screen with an exclamation point?? How could it all just vanish?? Instead of looking at me like a total nut job, Mr. Aardvark gave me a big hug and told me it was time for bed. We could both worry about it more in the morning. (I love this man.)

The next day, with the friendly help of someone on the "Live Chat" I had part of my album back. By part, I mean I had the format I had arranged and seven (out of 46) pages of photos. I had also loaded the desktop version of the program because I thought it would be better about protecting my work. Then I stepped away from the project to cool off a bit.

The following weekend I set to work replacing the photos. It did not take ALL DAY this time but a good four hours. I had save compulsively throughout the process so I figured I would be ok. One final save! But then when I tried to navigate away from the main page it told me it was not done uploading. It was at this point I noticed the upload tracker. It.was.crawling. So I left it alone. Every half hour or so I would check in and see it was inching slowly across the screen. After THREE HOURS (disclaimer, we have cheapo internet with crappy upload speeds so this was bad, but not unexpected)  it was this close to being done. I was about to relax and enjoy my victory over technology,  when for a  second time disaster struck.

This time there was an error message. There had been an issue with the upload. When I re-opened the program all of my work from the second time around was gone. At this point I was not sad at all. Only angry. Really, rage-fully angry. I felt like I had been duped into wasting more time on this and vowed to find a different vendor. I sent customer service and e-mail detailing my disappointment and frustration (by some act of God I refrained from filling it with curse words) and I walked away from the project entirely.

Over the last week I corresponded (via e-mail) with one, very helpful customer service rep. The fact that I was not bounced around between anonymous "service technicians meant a lot to me. She explained that the crashes were due to the fact that some of the images I was using were over 10MB. She was also able to recover all but a few pages of my second book and showed me how to save them on my actual desktop (not the same thing as uploading). She was friendly and apologetic. These things went a long way to ease my mind. She managed to restore my faith in the company and offered me a great deal to make up for my frustration. Her assistance and Mr. Aardvark's support are the only two things that kept me from plunging headlong into insanity.

The moral of the story is, service is everything. The whole ship was turned around and the problem was not only solved, it was explained. Knowing how to avoid these troubles in the future proves they value not only their own time, but mine as well. I felt confident placing my order last night and I cannot wait to see the final product.

Have you ever had an experience saved by great service? Did you hit any speed bumps with technology during your planning (or post wedding) process?

Last Minute Touches

The week leading up to the wedding was crazy. There were so many little things popping up. As we got closer to Saturday, it seemed that more and more things needed to be done. In fact, the craziness just kept expanding at an exponential rate until, at about 1:50 on Saturday afternoon. MOH MD and hid out in the choir loft for the last ten minutes pre-ceremony as all the finishing flourishes of chaos took place just a flight of stairs away. More about that later though! I want to share a few project with you!

One of the most fun/important wedding prep tasks was the practice flowers. If I had not practiced putting everything together before hand, I would not have had any  confidence  things would go smoothly the day of!

If you are planning to DIY flowers, I HIGHLY recommend a trial.

This sign was a HUGE time suck, and sadly was set up at the back door, not the front door but I was still super cute and I am glad we made it.

At the 11th hour, we decided not to do a seating chart. However, we had this great, huge frame that MIL Aardvark had gotten for us on the cheap. I didn't want it to go to waste so we decided to use it to explain our lack of seating chart. Mama Aardvark, Bridesmaid Sis and I worked very long and hard coming up with the following poem:

Seating Instructions for you:

Any Ol' Chair will do.

Pick where you sit.

Have fun with it!

We're so glad we invited you!

We wrapped the mass produced art that came in the frame in wrapping paper, then Mama Aardvark and I stayed up WAY too late cutting out the paper letters for the poem. It was worth it though. The finished product was cute as can be. Sadly, I am still looking for a photo of it! (You get the idea from what you see above). Also, I must say, glue dots rock! I had never used them until this project and they saved us HOURS with a glue stick. 

The glue dots also came in handy when we made signs that informed guests of the candy bar. We used a cute little poem that we found right here on the bee, printed it and stuck it to wrapping paper in the frame. (Clearly I was slacking in my blogger duty and did not get pictures of these either.)

The final last minute project was the "backdrop" for our DJ. Ages ago I purchased a whole bunch of navy blue and green fabric. I decided to go with the "Strips of fabric curtain" thing that I have recently seen used in all different ways for weddings. To give credit where credit is due, bridesmaid Sis and I cut all of the fabric and tied about half of it. Step-dad and Mr. Aardvark tied the rest. It was a very easy project, but also very time consuming.  You can see though, it did a good job covering the window at Arcadia so that only those at the wedding could laugh at our dancing. 

Papa Aardvark and I. Photo by Micheal Terri Studios

If you are not married yet, and you are planning a lot of DIY, please,  leave more time than you think you need. Way more. And as many other bees have said, do things early. I thought I was SUPER on the ball, but I still was rushed at the end. I think the rush at the end will happen no matter what, but the more you prepare, the better it will be. 

Married brides, did you have a last minute rush? How did you plan for it?

Mooning with My Honey

Before my professional pictures arrive (any day now!) I figured I better tell you all about our honeymoon! If I know myself, as soon as we get that CD, I will be in full on re-cap mode and I don't want this to get pushed off the radar!

Our honeymoon was amazing. If you recall, we went to Sun River Oregon. We did a lot of sight seeing and got a lot of rest. We for sure were not sick while we were there. We may have been coughing, and had runny noses, and sore throats, but we weren't sick. Who is sick on their honeymoon?

Not these kids! That picture was actually the last day. We drove down to Crater Lake. It was pretty amazing.

We lucked out. The early spring weather was a bit chilly and rainy and quite a few of our "maybe we should do this" type things were closed for "winter". How is that lucky? It gave our non-sick selves a great excuse to say in, order pizza, sit by the fire and watch bad TV, which was exactly what we needed, to relax and un-wind.

We didn't spend the whole time in our condo though, we did get out quite a bit and saw some pretty cool things. We spent most of our first day there at the High Desert Museum. It was really cool! We learned a lot about Oregon history and all sorts of native and non-native animals. The coolest part by far though, were the otters. I may have been a little obsessed. I think we stood there and watched them swim laps for about 20 minutes.... And I may have taken about 100 pictures. But I will only show you one.

Ok! I will show you two....

They were SO CUTE! Speaking of really cute things, we also saw this heart shaped puddle. And being the cheese ball that I am, I had to take a picture of our reflection in it....

The next couple days we did quite a bit of hiking. The highlight were Tumalo falls and Smith Rock State Park. We also saw some really cool lava fields but I am not sure if they had a name or not. And now, pretty pictures!

Lava up close and a whole field of it!

Pretty!

Because it was "winter" the road to Tumalo Falls was closed. So we had to hike the 2.5 mile in to see it. On the way we discussed the difference between a Butte and a Butt:

Sorry, sometimes I am a child. And like a child, I was getting tired of hiking about a mile in, "Can we just say these are the falls?"

But, we kept walking and it was SO worth it! 100 feet of falling water. Totally beautiful!

And then we hiked up to the top and looked down:

So powerful! I would highly recommend checking it out if you are ever in central Oregon. However, if you only have time to do ONE thing in central Oregon, I would HIGHLY recommend Smith Rock State Park. I was SO blown away. it was totally breath taking. It made me want to get back into rock climbing and be more in touch with nature and sing like Pocahontas (colors of the wind anyone?). Words do not do it justice, so check these out. 

This is where we stopped for lunch (romantic no?):

At the summit

Monkey Face

Needless to say the whole trip was amazing. This (very long) post is just a quick snap shot of  our incredible week. I am so glad we took the time to get away right after the wedding! We surely needed it! With the help of the hive and a few friends for Oregon, we managed to find amazing restaurants as well! The whole trip was very "us". It was perfect.

As amazing as it was, I was happy when we got on the plane home.

We had been away for 14 days, the whole week before the wedding and then the honeymoon. While many people are sad when it is all over, and the thought of "real life" is a drag, we both agreed, we were ready. I was ready to be done planning, I was ready to just enjoy day to day life with my husband and I was ready to be home.

How did you feel after your honeymoon?  Did you use it as a chance to unwind or go on adventures or both?

Final Fitting

I am so glad I wrote notes when I picked up my dress! Between the final fitting and the wedding, Mama Aardvark and Grandma Aardvark came to visit me and take my dress back to Michigan. When I tried on the dress for them I had some panicky thoughts and worried about weather my dress was bridey enough. I started seeing flaws were there had been none before. In short, I freaked right on out.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I had dress regret, but I had dress, "I'm not sure-and-IT'S-ONLY-TWO-WEEKS-TO-THE-WEDDING-WHAT-AM-I-GOING-TO-DO!?!?!??!"

Luckily I got over it. And by the wedding day, had fallen back in love with my dress.

Now here are my thoughts following the final fitting, along with Bridesmaid OT's cell phone pictures:

"I have my dress now. I am so excited only 21 day to go! I am beginning to wonder is I should have had her put a bustle in. I don't think so. If I decide I am going to keep the long skirt on for some reason, I can pin one in.  I love it. It is SO soft and light and comfortable. Natural fiber FTW."

Somehow, in the week that lapsed between these pictures and my mom's visit, doubt had crept into my mind.  At first, when I put on the dress for Mama and Grandma Aardvark, everything seemed OK.

I showed off how it converted. Mama and Grandma were very impressed. When I put the big skirt back on, everything didn't tuck quite right and that really started the panic (I thought I'd be a wrinkled mess on my wedding day!)

In fact, I am pretty sure this picture (and that lovely face I am making) was was the result of me taking off the  big skirt in a in a hurry because I was worried it would ruin the little dress!

Already on edge about the whole dress (and possibly suffering from Pre-wedding crazies aka Bride Brain), my freakout was complete when I saw this picture:

Aside from the dopey smile, you can totally see my BRA! After seeing this I was SO ready for Mama Aardvark to take that dress far far away. There was no time to get anything else. I would have to wear it. I tried not to think about it. When I couldn't push it out of my mind, I tried to hope that everything worked out....

Needless to say on the wedding day, I loved my dress. I loved getting married in it. I loved getting pictures taken in it. And, I really loved dancing in it!

Did you have any dress related panic right before your wedding? Did everything work out in the end?