for my girl friends: when the wedding bug bites

I’m not an expert on planning a wedding, I only did it once, but I did do it with a lot of love and intention. [See the article I submitted and had published that says as much here: Wedding Graduates: Deena & Ben]

Here’s a list of my favorite wedding-y sites and why:

• A Practical Wedding: they published my article! Also, it’s where REAL women talk about real wedding issues and let you have a glimpse into their lives, messy stuff and all. The people who write, read and comment on that site are an amazingly open and supportive community of practical gals.
• Offbeat Bride, Altar Your Thinking. When you’re tired of the Wedding Industrial Complex (WIC) being shoved down your throat a you want to see busty gals in rockabilly wedding outfits, this is the your anti-David’s Bridal mental palate cleanser. You can read about anything from nerdy Star Wars themed weddings, to druids who married at RenFest, to a gay couple who had beautiful church weddings with a potluck reception. There’s some of everything that’s anywhere on the non-normative spectrum.
• Wedding Bee: follow individual brides as they go through the last 8 months of wedding planning and then do lots of wedding recaps. There are a wide range of women who blog for this site ranging from classic Southern Belles who have big white dresses and church weddings to tattooed ladies who get married on Army bases.
• Style Me Pretty: a fairly normative wedding blog that focuses on the garden chic aesthetic and has lots of crafty influences. The weddings featured here are mostly high end and too styled for my taste, but it does have lots of great inspirations.

Other than theses blogs, I recommend that you find vendors in your area who’s websites don’t annoy you and subscribe to their blog on your favorite RSS reader -I like Google Reader, it’s easy. (You don’t want to work with a vendor who annoys you before you’ve even met them!) Organize your subscriptions by LOCAL VENDOR and WEDDING BLOG and maybe a third category of REAL BRIDES for when you start finding personal blogs to follow (find them by clicking on the profile of commenters you like on the blogs listed above).

You may have noticed that I didn’t list The Knot. I think it’s designed to induce anxiety (too many to-do and check lists) and competitive cattiness (see the forums), plus who wants to look at all the homogenous weddings when you can look at creative ones!?

Did I miss anything? Please, comment and add any sites that you like(d) that I missed!

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why didn’t I find this blog BEFORE I got married?

http://hindsightbride.com/2011/10/10/open-letter-wedding-bloggers/

Awesome, and the post was written on our 1 year anniversary. Sweet! Downside: she would have our wedding fall under the “trendy” category with mountains in the distance (hello, we live here!) and my tea length dress (which kept me from feeling like one of those Barbie torsos stuck in a cupcake of dress).

I’d subscribe to it, but I’ve mostly eliminated wedding blogs from my Google Reader feed. The only ones I still have on there (and look at) are A Practical Wedding and Offbeat Bride. APW is awesome because Meg and her band of merry editors write great stuff and think that my writing is awesome enough to publish (oh, and agree with me that our photographers were baddassbitches too). OBB is awesome because there are so many unique things featured there, but lately I’ve been finding myself skimming those articles more than reading them. Don’t worry, Offbeat Empire, I still love Offbeat Home and won’t subscribe to (yet) but often read Offbeat Mama too –remember that baby bug I can’t seem to shake….

I’ve still got Weddingbee in there too, but to be honest I don’t read it anymore. 2 years ago, I wanted to badly to be a bee, but every email I’ve sent (to apply to be a bee and to get the “I was featured” badge) has dissapeared and never gotten a response. Oh well. More importantly, here are new bees (bloggers) and I don’t know them! I do subscribe to a bunch of former bees’ blogs, but they’re mostly starting to have babies or battling with grad school (more where I am).

[In case anyone is wondering, I’m on a break at work, blogging. Multitasking for the win!}

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one year anniversary

Exactly one year ago I put on this dress (with the help of my girlfriends):

Then I met Ben in the rotunda of the St. Julien Hotel and Spa:

Then we went to our Bidekin:

taking the rabbi's talit to symbolize choosing my husband

Where we signed these documents:

And stood under this chuppah:

Where we drank wine:

Where supported by our Rabbi and our friends:

And supported by our families:

Put on our wedding bands:

Then we kissed:

the "OMG, we're married!" kiss (with our beautiful ketubah in the background)

And we realized how blessed we are (and kissed some more):

Partied a little:

Lit some bananas foster on fire:

And had lots of fun at a bar:

And ended the night hanging out alone here:

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taking a photo break before yihud

I feel like this photo should be the cover of a record or something. It’s just so representative of our wedding day, to me.

What do you all think? Should this be the cover-photo for our album (which we’ve done NOTHING about yet)?

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I'm a lazy uploader

I hate uploading photos because I hate resizing them/exporting them and my web provider makes me do all the work! How lame. Anyway. I own the internets photos from my bridal show and from DJ & J’s wedding. I’ll start with DJ & J’s wedding because it was kind of epically huge. 320 people attended the reception!

Here’s the rehash I wrote for my parents, who asked what lessons I learned from DJ & J’s wedding that I might be able to apply to my own (my parents were at my youngest brother’s college graduation, instead of the wedding):

On their wedding day we got to the church 30 minutes early to take some photos with the Illinois family. We were in just a few, but we had to take 2 sets, one in front of the St. Peter the Apostle’s Catholic Church sign, and the same ones next to (but not including) the sign, to send to our shared gramma. We were also in few photographs after dinner, but I’m sure a look a little disheveled form dancing in those and I know J was exhausted because it was 10:30PM and she was quietly whining about how her feet hurt.

One thing I learned that we can apply to our wedding: have someone video tape the ceremony and any toasts that people give. I’m sure I’d have be too hopped up on adrenaline to listen well and Father Dominick had a lovely sermon prepared and I’m sure they’ll want to be able to listen to it later (thanfully they did have a videographer/video stalker). He talked about how a marriage is the joining of two families and how DJ is going to have a lot to learn about joining an Italian family and how he’ll never have to pay retail again and J is marrying a Boy Scout and that she’ll have to be OK with him coming home with pockets full of stuff, holes in his pockets from too much stuff, and odd fascination with all things small/useful/lightweight, and an expectation that when he does something well that he deserves a merit badge (he somehow tied this to the bedroom in an church friendly way, but I’m not sure how). He also said something about how when he undoes his belt, his pants will drop to the floor like a dead weight because his pockets are so full of stuff that she’ll never be able to imagine why he’s carrying it or that she’d ever want to carry herself.

Their wedding was just so different from ours that I’m not sure there were many lessons to learn…..

DJ married into the Sicilian mafia and had a 2PM Saturday mass wedding. The ceremony lasted until about 3:15, then we all trekked over to her parents house for “snacks” where Janine’s mother’s friends from work made sandwiches, mixed/poured drinks, and kept plying us with cookies and cheese for almost 2 hours while Janine and DJ and their escorts took photos at the church and at the park down the street.

At the smaller ballroom of the banquet hall (with painted ceilings and marble floor) we were greeting by a HUGE seafood buffet that included focaccias, calamari (fried and in a salad), a wheel of parmesan cheese broken into bite size bits [see photos], fried polenta, shrimp cocktail, some sort of fried oyster thing with tomato sauce, fried rice/cheese/meat balls, lots of cured meats, and an open bad fully stocked with premium liquors and any mixer you could think of.

Then there was dinner! The chairs were all covered and tied with green sashes, and there were matching satin minty green napkins on the tables. Every other table had an elaborate/tall centerpiece and the others had glass pillars of varying heights with submerged flowers and floating candles on top surrounded by little candles. The table was set funny though, fork and knife together on the left and only one fork for all the courses. There was a teaspoon and a steak knife on the top, where I would put a butter knife. Dinner as a meal was quite the affair, 2 pastas, salad w/ your choice of dressing, lemon ice, veal steak with baked mashed potatoes and asparagus, then a dessert table with cake, italian pastries, and lots of fresh fruit and some chocolates, a woman scooping lemon ice and making nutella ice cream sandwiches on demand (so the cake “buns” didn’t get soggy), and coffee. After the main course servers came around with carts to collect the plates and offer you a togo box if you needed one (Ben and I gifted our steaks to DJ’s coworker us who’s wife couldn’t come because they had babysitter issues). The cake was also cut up into to go boxes as well as set out on plates on the dessert buffet table.

I’m pretty sure our budget would have just covered their bar tab, and possibly the band too, or at least the donation to the church they were married in and to the school, where Father Dominick (the drama and communications teacher from DJ’s HS) came from.

PS- I think my tummy might be all stretched out from the food baby I stuffed in there over the weekend. I was constantly hungry yesterday and today! I wish I had taken pictures of Ben and myself all dressed up but I forgot. There was a photographer there taking photos in the back of the hall, but I’m not sure if/when those photos will come in. 

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oooh, pretty ketubahs!

Autumn Tree II, Eve Rosin

Nature's Radiance, Claire Carter. This one also comes as a chuppah!

we can upload our own photo/art!

Two Trees - Promise, Claire Carter

Two Trees - Serenity, Claire Carter

Summer, Micah Parker

Tree of Life - Delight, Claire Carter

are you seeing a theme here? Trees? אני לדודי ודודי לי = Ani ledodi vedodi li? Blues and greens? Not a lot of red? For some reason too much red/orange just bothers us. I like wearing red, but Ben doesn’t. Whatever, cool tones and neutrals it is.

PS- I’m not sure what Ben means when he says they’re “cute.” Does he like them, not care to look right now, or think they’re too feminine?

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Visiting the Venue and Weather Warnings

When I first got there, on 10/9/09 around 3:45 PM, it was slightly gloomy out and there was a big white tent on the [ceremony] lawn. I wandered around taking photos for a while, called a friend and chatted on the patio for a good 30 minutes, saw a hawk (and took it’s photo), before heading home via the grocery store to prep and cook shabbos dinner.

The next day (Saturday the 10th), it snowed. That’s not quite true, it started at about 9 PM the night before. There were about 2″ total after 1.5″ overnight and flurries all day. The temperature never got above 24ºF and it was COLD. Just to remind you all, that new record low (17ºF) set that day was set on our -1 year anniversary.

BE PREPARED AND CHECK THE LONG RANGE FORECAST BEFORE PACKING TO VISIT COLORADO. It would be unfortunate if you say packed a sun dress to wear to a wedding accompanied by the first snow of the year, or if you packed something fall/winter appropriate only to find it sunny and 75ºF.

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David’s Bridal e-shopping

EW9848 via David’s Bridal – Taffeta jewel neck ball gown featuring side pockets. .

I can’t tell if I’m really digging this dress or not. I imagine it would be great short, but would I just look like a muffin with boobs from the front? OTOH, I totally dig the back, and for $399, with the opportunity to get it on sale through next week, I might find I think I might go try it on. But GEEZ to I hate David’s Bridal BARN. Ugh. It’s probably more of a swooshy monstrosity than a thing of beauty in person, right?

PS- I never did try it on

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Protected: Twirl factor = crucial

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Brides Against Breast Cancer

Denver, CO

Saturday, August 22, VIP Night 3:00 – 6:00 pm $25 Admission
Space is Limited, Order Your Tickets Here Today!

Sunday, August 23, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm Free Admission

Westin Tabor Center
1672 Lawrence St
Denver, Colorado 80202

Directions

Parking $5

Bride Pre-Registration
Volunteer Registration
Contact Brenda Chovanak for more information

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