Gifts from Afar

We got our first wedding present this week! Our beloved Katie Imbeau, stolen by China for an additional year (I’m pretty sure comments like that got this blog banned behind the great firewall of China), won’t be able to attend the wedding. Even more heartbreaking, we have just a couple weeks of her at home and then we won’t see her at all until next summer.

During a girly night at her house that involved too much sugar and cheese, she presented her wedding presents for Gavin and me - all authentically Chinese and wonderful.

• Beautiful red silk tablecloth with flowers on it (perfect for the holidays since we don't have a color scheme in mind yet)
• Traditional red table runner
• “Tapestry” for the wall with a black and white picture of a gnarly mountain Katie climbed
• Specifically for Gavin – a CD of Jackie Chan singing country music. This features a cover image of Jackie Chan in a cowboy hat looking way too happy to pull off being a cowboy. We have to dig in and see if there’s a DVD too. It looks like it, but we can’t exactly read ANYTHING on the packaging other than “Jackie Chan.”

Katie’s cardboard cutout definitely gets priority positioning by the cheese table at our reception.

A San Francisco Treat

We’re ditching tradition.

Limos left behind.
Hummers? Ho-hum.
A Rolls requires that you’re rolling in the dough.
And a beautiful Bentley begs the same.

On April 14, a trolley will roll through the hills of Glen Ellyn as part of our wedding. We haven’t made a down payment yet, but the one we want is available. If references check out, it's ours.

Ding ding!

Details, Details

We had a “wedding meeting” last weekend to try to get the ball rolling on several details. To our surprise, most of the wedding vendors we called weren’t working or weren’t picking up their phones. We even called early to avoid catching people while they were working. The unfortunate response was… nothing. We got zero return calls this week about transportation, hotel rooms, couples retreats, etc.

This led me to call a couple places again today. I connected with one in particular, but this time asked for references since the call-less week leaves me nervous. The last thing we need to worry about is if the transportation we hired to actually get us to the church is going to show up!

On Blogging

Interesting article on gender differences in blogging. I'm failing my fellow women, it seems. This makes sense though, considering Gavin has posted twice... and both times under my nagging requests.

Too Many Options Isn't Necessarily Good

I tried on a lot of dresses and have narrowed it down to two that I'm in love with. Possibly equally in love with because they're so different that they both have qualities I want! At least I know I'll love my dress.

On the other hand, I picked where I want to honeymoon right away when Gavin gave me the options... I think. More on that to come from him since honeymooning is the man's job.

This thing is baloney

My baloney has a first name, it's T-H-I-S-B-L-O-G. So I had just written a rather entertaining opening paragraph to my first post in a very long time, when I decided I wished to spell check this entry. I am not one of those who believes we should move onto a phonetic spelling of the English language, and I figured you'd appreciate a post without glaring errors. Instead, stupid Blogger erased my whole post. It's actually somewhat coincidental that I had just finished writing a sarcastic line regarding a vicious virus that had been preventing me from posting to the blog. Who needs a virus when you have this site?
Anyways enough venting and onto storytelling, yay!!!!
Recently, we have received numerous save the date, shower, and wedding invitation cards in the mail. My general response to these is "Oh that looks nice". That's about all you are going to get from me when it comes to stationary. This makes me worry because evidently women know exactly what type of invitations they prefer. As if there is some camp where they start with telling you what complexion you have... "Oh I'm a Spring of course!" and continue on to develop a sense of identity with numerous other things, ending in "Well I'm definitely a 'two-tone, tri-fold, glossy matte invitation' kind of girl." Our friend Todd recently tried to be the helpful groom and sit down and look through a book of invitations for his lovely bride-to-be. After two hours, Todd had highlighted a handful of designs that he thought would be worthy of inviting their guests to their wedding. He was then informed that his selections did not match the style that she really wanted. Final decision? You guessed it, we received the matted invitation with a cute little pink bow holding the invitation and reply envelope together. If you've seen Todd, you can probably guess that this wasn't his first choice. But it's a beautiful invitation and the wedding is sure to be a great time.
This is what I have to look forward to as one of the next steps in our wedding. I will offer my two cents and then retreat to the car where I will wait until the final decision on invitations is made. Until then, I will be busy trying to keep Laura from buying more wedding publications.

When a Magazine Junkie Gets Married

I can't get enough of the bridal magazines. I'm almost sad when we make a decision about something because it means there's one less section that applies.

We should have budgeted for the crazy things in the grandiose wedding budget we pulled together. They cost about $5 a pop and they last me all of one hour on average because I absolutely devour them the second I get my sparkling (thanks to some recent bling...) fingers on them. They're fantastic!

Luckily, I have friends in the magazine business. Jess loves me enough to have sent me the new InStyle Weddings. One less purchase on my wearing debit card.

Whoever gets engaged next is getting a serious inheritance of bridal information. There will be holes in the trove, however, since I hungrily rip out ANY ideas, images, wordings, etc that I like. If I take a similar liking to home magazines after the wedding I may need to beg for my Meredith internship back just to save us some money.

Won’t you be my…

I wonder if Mr. Rogers wore the sweater at his wedding. Was Mr. Rogers even married? If so, were King Friday and Lady Aberline there?

We’re thisclose to officially asking our whole wedding party to be in our wedding. We can’t divulge the cast of (awesome) characters yet, but we’ve sure had fun doing the asking and have realized how blessed we are to have such a big group of awesome family and friends that this was a much harder decision than we thought it would be.

I believe the groom will be posting for the first time since his sun God (crazy) spiel, so he may cover the same topic.

As the only giveaway, we basically have a small army standing up for our wedding. If you’re getting married on April 14 and unknowingly pick the same picture site as us… watch out. We’re taking Glen Ellyn and Wheaton by force. Hooah!

Aaaand We’re Back!

Sorry for the blatant disregard for our (apparent) wedding fan base. Just like Britney, we love you all and thank you for your support. We couldn’t do it without our fans. Unlike Britney, we won't cry all over national television. Just an alter in about nine months.

Until people started griping about the lack of recent posts, we had no idea so many people were actually checking this thing! If you don’t post, we don’t you’re out there (MOM… she refuses to post but checks every day. And now I guarantee I’ve embarrassed her. :)).

Anywho, we’ll try to be more diligent moving forward. What are you all going to when we’re actually married… I guess we could still post about thank you notes afterward.