Life priorities and the new honeymoon plan…

I am still super dooper busy, but thought I’d take half an hour out to give my blog some loving. Sorry I’m a such a sucky blogger lately!  We're about to enter the no internet period of moving.. but hopefully that will only be for two weeks or so!

When I last posted about our honeymoon we wanted to go for a short and cheap break. One reason for this was because we really want to take unpaid leave and do a 3 month or so trip of Europe sometime next year. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while now and, to be honest, I get a little bit jealous with all my friends buggering off to Europe all the time. I guess that’s where life priorities come in though. I may get jealous, but really, we could quite easily do our holiday if we chose to but we always think things through and make the best decision for us at that particular point in time. I think it really is a case of the grass is always greener on the other side because if we were to set our priorities differently, I know that I would be even more jealous of the people that have what we have now. Anyhow, I digress. Honeymoon….

A few months ago my Grandad called to let me know that he and Nan wouldn’t be able to make it to the wedding. They live in New Zealand and are getting very old so I never expected them to come, but I was quite surprised how much effort it sounded like they had put into looking at ways they might be able to come (Grandad can’t fly that far anymore for various reasons and Nan is blind which makes things hard). I know that my other Nana would like to come too, but is getting too old to handle the flight now.

The last time I went back to New Zealand was in 2002 and it occasionally crosses my mind that I should go back and visit… but I always end up deciding that it would be better to go somewhere else instead. We are 99% decided that for our honeymoon we will head back to NZ for 2-3 weeks and spend some of the time visiting my family (it’s awful to say, but if I don’t go back soon it may be too late) and the rest on a camping adventure.

Unfortunately this will delay Europe by another year or so because we'll use a fair bit of leave doing this because it seems silly to just go for one week. I think it would be a good decision though - we’ll see my family and I can show Justin where I grew up. I go on about how our wedding is all about celebrating with our friends and family, so why not extend that to those that can’t make it and at least let my family meet my new husband! It’s definitely one of those situations where you have to sit down and get your priorities right…. and I think that we’ve managed to get them 100% spot on this time.

Now I just need to pray that none of my family have discovered this blog because we aren’t telling them our plans until it is 100% certain….

*Sings* I'm from the harbour, the Hokianga harbour.

As quite as a mouse

I just wanted to pop by and apologise for my lack of blogging of late. I am still alive and I will be back and blogging soon. Between planning a wedding, buying land, moving rental houses (finding somewhere, packing, cleaning, moving), keeping up my gym routine, working full time and still having a life I'm finding it a bit hard to fit blogging in at the moment. I'm still trying to keep up to date with reading all your blogs though. I promise I'll be back soon!
Amy
xxx

Handicraft Mania – Lovebirds

I've been so busy rambling on about other stuff lately that I haven't had time to post any of my Etsy finds.
I love this vase oh so very very much. It's adorable! I hope someone I'm close to gets engaged soon. I think it would make an awesome engagement present.

Lovebirdies Vase from Red Hot Pottery's Etsy store.

The groom has seen the dress *gasp*…

I am so fed-up of people saying ‘it’s your wedding, do what you want’ and then giving us looks when they find out what we are doing. Sometimes I just want to yell at them a little. But I don’t. Maybe I’ll just go all passive aggressive with the non-married ones and give them ‘oh, you can’t seriously be doing that looks’ when their turn comes around. Seriously though, there’s only so much judgement I can take before I start thinking that maybe we are doing this all wrong.

In particular, I get sick and tired of the looks people give us when they ask or realise that Justin knows what my wedding dress will look like. He helped me pick out the pattern for it. He went fabric shopping me. He pinned me into the mock-up and took photos for me. He pinned me into the lining when we did a fitting for it. Hell, he even helped pin some of the lining to the interfacing. I’m sure there will be many more times he will be involved in the making of the dress too.

I just don’t understand what is so wrong with all of this. I get why the groom usually wouldn’t see the dress, but at the same time I don’t get why people can’t be open minded enough to at least consider the way we are doing things before passing judgement.

We were talking about it the other night, and we both think it’s more fun that we are both involved. It is fun going over to his Mum’s house and lend a hand where we can. We also feel that it even makes it a bit more special that he has been helping out with it.

Am I the only one that thinks that this whole groom seeing the dress thing isn’t the biggest no-no in the world of weddings?

How to get people involved?

As I mentioned in my last post, we would love to have as many of our friends and family involved in the wedding on the day as we can. We think that way it just makes the day so much more personal and special. We just don’t know how to ask.

I know that if someone asked me if I wanted to help out with their wedding I would be delighted. I don’t want to assume that everyone else would be as delighted as I would to help out though. I know we can say “If you are interested in helping out with our wedding…”, but I think 90% of people would say yes even if they didn’t actually want to help out, and that’s not the idea of getting people involved.

We came straight out and asked our Dad’s if they would drive the cars and asked the best man if he would MC. Our best man thought about it for a few days before giving us a response, which I’m very happy about because I now know he’s not just doing it out of obligation, it’s something he decided he wanted to do. I just don’t think that everyone would do that if we straight out asked them though.

How would you get/have you got people involved?

What we want our wedding day to be…

Over the weekend we filled in a questionnaire for our photographer. One of the questions was regarding what we wanted out of our wedding day and what we were doing to make our wedding special to us. I thought that I might share with you what we wrote because I have realised that I have got so caught up in the details that I have never shared our overall ‘vision’. (Not that we have much vision.)

"The aim of our wedding, other than to get married of course, is to celebrate our love and our marriage with our family and friends. To us a celebration should be fun and this is what we want for our wedding. We really just want people to come along and have a really good time. If everyone isn’t up and dancing at the reception, whether they know how to or not, we will be very disappointed! It’s going to be a fairly intimate wedding with only about 50 people at the reception -we aren’t the type of people that have 200 close friends.

Our wedding will be a fairly casual affair. The ceremony will take place in a garden, Amy will wear a ¾ length dress (it’s easier to dance in!) and Justin will be going for the suit jacket unbuttoned, no tie look. We haven’t written our ceremony yet, but it will probably be a fairly simple ceremony. We aren’t the most romantic people, least of all in front of a crowd, so we won’t be writing our own vows or anything like that. We have already picked out some our ceremony music. We have picked songs that we love, not traditional weddingy songs. Hopefully this will add to the fun of that day. Either that or it will give the parents and grandparents a heart attack.

We want our family and friends to be involved in our wedding where possible. We think that this makes it so much more personal and special. Justin’s Mum is making Amy’s dress, our Dad’s will be driving our wedding cars (if we can sort out hiring cars) and the best man will be MC at the reception. Hopefully we can get more people involved along the way.

To give you an idea of the way we want to make our wedding special to us, we’ve decided that the traditional guest book just doesn’t suit our style. Amy reads a lot of blogs and has found a lot about photo booths. We have decided we’d like to set one up, with our camera on a tripod, a simple backdrop and lots of props and blackboards so that people can have fun posing and at the same time leave their own personalised message to us. This will be our guest book. We’ve also got a digital photo frame so throughout the night we can load the photos from the camera onto the frame. That way people can see what others have done and also we can keep the frame afterwards to be our guestbook. We can see the messages people wrote every day, instead of only every 10 years when we think to drag out the guest book.

At the start, we mentioned that we wanted to celebrate with our family and friends. This is also one of the reasons that we have chosen to do a first look. You can’t celebrate with everyone if you are too busy off getting photos taken!"

This also seems like a semi-appropriate time to share a photo of us. I decided that if I was going to post a picture of us on the internet, I may as well make it a terrible one. So here we are, during the making of our save the dates, in all our weird glory (obviously this isn't the photo we used on the save the dates);

A weekend of achievement: florist booked!

This is my final ‘weekend of achievement’ post. I think we did pretty well getting so much done in two days!

We decided that we were going to take the advice of one commenter on my last florist post and ask the lady that we got a really cheap quote from to do us up a sample bouquet. This was the decision… until I got cold feet. We decided that I could just send an email off to another couple of florists to get a quote. We knew exactly what we wanted so we could just do it via email and thus wouldn’t take any extra time. The first lady was booked out for that day already.  The second lady called that afternoon and asked us if we could make an appointment to come and meet with her. Damn. I was in a rush on my way to an appointment so my brain wasn’t working fast enough to come up with an excuse. We locked in a date and time for the appointment. On the way home I called my fiancé to let him know and to apologise for my lack of quick thinking.

So last weekend was our appointment. We rocked up at her studio and I immediately liked her. She was my kind of lady. We showed her what we wanted and she said they were hothouse chrysanthemums – not news to us given how many florists we’ve seen. We discussed how many bouquets we needed. We said that we wanted the groom’s buttonhole to be the same flower. These flowers were huge so that wasn’t going to work. She said she could still do it though. Easy, she’d just pull a flower apart so we’d essentially end up with a ‘man-made’ buttonhole. She could also use the concept to make the groomsmen buttonholes and to do a few flowers for my hair.

The photo we showed her had black ribbon binding it. ‘Don’t worry about that’, I said, ‘white ribbon or something is fine’. Then she asked what colour the bridesmaids’ dresses were. We hadn’t officially picked them at that point but I told her that the ones that were currently a possibility were light pink and navy blue. She went and grabbed some of her ribbons and came back and described how she could wrap them to incorporate the colours. I could begin to see us actually having a colour scheme where everything tied in together. I kept telling myself to not get too excited because we didn’t know how much she was going to quote us.

Once all the details were written down she provided us with a quote - $367. $200 more than our cheap florist... but... this lady had ideas and opinions. Justin and I gave each other the look of ‘hell yes’. This was our florist. Yes, she is more expensive but with this lady doing our flowers I know I won’t worry about the flowers again (and the good news for you guys is that you won’t have to hear about our flowers again)!