Sit Where You Please?

I'm currently in a debate with myself about how we're going to seat guests at our wedding.
Option 1: Assign seating with place cards and table numbers (the more traditional route.)
Option 2: Let everyone sit whilly-nilly as they please.

There seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to seating people at weddings (from what I've seen on the numerous wedding blogs I've read.) One says that by telling people where to sit, it allows for families and friends to mingle and mix, something they may not do on their own. This might be the only time that this group of people is together, so you might as well make them interact and get to know each other.

The other side says that by allowing people to sit where they want, friends get to sit with friends (which is nice after college when everyone is scattered around and may not get to see each other often,) families can mix and mingle as they want instead of being pushed together, and its one less thing for the bride to worry about. 

The way I see it: 

Option 1: Assign seating with place cards and table numbers (the more traditional route.)

Pros:

• this ensures that there will be enough places for everyone to sit. 
• it deters people with a large party or family from taking over an entire table and leaving a random space or two
• woohoo more DIY projects (table numbers and place cards)

Cons:

• I have to actually figure out a seating chart
• I don't want to make people sit with someone they don't know. Maybe it's just me, but I like to meet people on my own terms instead of having to sit with them awkwardly at dinner. 

Option 2: Let everyone sit whilly-nilly as they please.

Pros:

• People get to pick who they spend the majority of the night with
• Friends and families can re-connect over dinner
• I don't have to worry about making a seating chart
• I can still dress up the tables with other DIY projects that don't include table numbers. 

Cons:

• The biggest thing I'm worried about is that a large family or group of friends will sit together and take up the majority of the table leaving only one or two spots left. This could deter people from sitting there and couples or families may have to split up to find spots to sit. 

When Keegan and I originally talked about seating, we decided to allow people to sit wherever they wanted. We didn't care about assigned seating and we wanted our guests to be comfortable so we just decided to let people take care of themselves. I think I'm still leaning towards the sit-where-you-please route, I'm just worried that it's going to cause some awkward seating problems.

Anyone have any opinions? Did one way work over another for you? I mean, I figured that assigned seating has been used for so long that there must be some rhyme and reason for it, right? 

100 Days!

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There are officially 100 days until our wedding. I can't believe it!  I would be lying if I said I wasn't counting down (see the counter at the top right?) but the 100 days mark still seemed to sneak up on me. Every time I think about it, I get a flutter of nerves and excitement in my stomach.

100 days until I marry my bestest best friend.

97 days until I'm in Columbia with my friends and family

102 days until we leave for our honeymoon in Canada where I get to see all of my extended family and Keegan gets to meet them for the first time.

May is going to be a busy month. We're going up for my sister's graduation (woot woot!) and we have our tasting at Hy-Vee the same weekend. Hopefully our bridesmaid's dresses will continue coming in (2 our of 4 are in,) we'll settle on a menu, finish some more DIY projects and I'm hoping my dress will come in by June like it was promised.

June we have a wedding at the beginning and end of the month which I'm excited about. I've been to a total of 2 weddings, one when I was 11, the other about 2 years ago. During both of these weddings, I wasn't really "scoping out" ideas for my own wedding, so I'm excited to see if I can pick up any ideas from these weddings. Also, the wedding at the end of the month will be Keegan's cousin's, so I'll be able to meet a lot of his dad's side of the family I haven't met yet.

July brings a potential bridal shower at the beginning of the month and my birthday about a week before the wedding. I'm sure I'll be a big bigger ball of nerves by then!

I'm so excited to start counting down in the double didgits. I can't wait to marry my best friend surrounded by the love of friends and family.

Rehearsal Dinner vs. Family Gathering

Otherwise titled "I should have listened to Keegan's mother in the first place"

When we first started discussing what we'd do for our rehearsal dinner, Keegan's mom, Ann, wanted to invite all of our out of town guests. When I first heard this idea, red flags went up in my head and I was totally against the idea. Why? I don't honestly know. I guess I had visions of an intimate dinner with just our families and wedding party. I'd give out the wedding parties' gifts, someone would make a toast and we'd be on our way. I really wanted to hold the rehearsal dinner at Shakespeare's, Columbia's best pizza joint. I wanted something laid back and not stressful, especially since it would be the night before the wedding.

After politely telling this to Keegan's mom, (well having Keegan break the news to his mom,) Ann went and called a bunch of restaurants, including Shakespeare's, to see if they could hold our 25 person wedding party. Unfortunately Shakespeare's wasn't willing to hold their party room on a Friday night for us and all of the other restaurants Ann spoke to didn't have a big enough room to hold us all. This drawback made me re-think what our rehearsal dinner should be.

Another thing that made me re-think our rehearsal dinner was actually our guests. A lot of our guests (I'd say about 90%) are going to be coming from out of town. The majority of Keegan's father's family is from Kansas City; his mom's side is scattered all over the place. All of my extended family (aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents) live in Canada. Almost all of our friends have moved away after college. At first I didn't think anyone would come, especially my family from Canada. I just couldn't see them driving or flying down for just a weekend. However, after we sent out our save the dates, word got back to us that a lot of our friends and family are hoping to make it down.

After hearing this news, I all of a sudden wanted to spend more time with our guests, especially the ones who took so much time out of their lives to come to our wedding. I threw out the idea of having a get together with our guests after the rehearsal dinner, but Keegan reminded me that we're doing our bachelor/bachelorette parties afterwards. I really wanted to hang out with our friends and families for more than just a few hours during the weekend so I threw out the idea of having a large family gathering instead of a more intimate rehearsal dinner.

Keegan looked at me and said, "You know that's what my mom wanted to do in the first place, right?"

Yeah. I know. I explained that I didn't know why I was against it in the first place, but I've slowly come around to the idea. Keegan called his mom (again) and basically told her that his fiancee is crazy and that we should go back to trying to plan a family gathering.

We threw out ideas of trying to get our (almost) caterer to bring food over to the hotel our guests will be staying in, but Ann told us that they didn't have a room big enough to hold a party our size. All of a sudden a light bulb came on over my head. Idea! Why don't we rent out our reception venue for Friday night and have the gathering there? It's large enough to hold all of our guests (hopefully,) it has a play place for the kids, and having our guests come there the night before will ensure they know where the venue is. The current food idea is to bring in hotdogs, burgers and other foods and basically have a pot luck.

Renting the venue out for Friday will also allow us to do some preliminary set up for the big day on Saturday. Before, we would have had to get the keys at 8 a.m. on Saturday, set everything up (while making sure Keegan doesn't see me,) get ready and then be back at the venue by 4 to do pictures. It would have been do-able, but stressful; something I don't want to be on my wedding day.

Ann still has to call and make sure the venue is open on Friday (if it's not, I'm not sure what we're going to do,) but I'm excited again. After trying to figure out the logistics of having a 25 person wedding party and who would pay for what, our rehearsal dinner was becoming one big headache. Now I'm excited to spend some more time with our friends and families who are going to take time out of their busy schedules to be with us on one of the most important days of our lives. 

I guess the old saying is right. "Momma (or your soon-to-be husband's momma) knows best."

Wedding Dreams Part 2

Remember this post where I recounted all of my crazy wedding dreams?

Well my subconscious has been at it again. Except instead of crazy wedding dreams, my nights have been filled with dreams of my ex-boyfriends and high school crushes.

Take last night for example.

I dreamed that my ex-boyfriend who I lived with before/while seeing Keegan (don't ask, it's a long story,) tried to kill me. He put me in a car and tried to run the car into a brick building.

Dream two was about my high school crush. For some reason, my dad and two sisters had tickets to see Dropkick Murphys and The Dubliners (note, Dropkick is one of my favorite bands, however I haven't listened to the Dubliners much at all. Where my subconscious got this idea, I don't know.) I don't think my dad or my sisters listen to this music so why we were going to a concert, I don't know.

Anyways, all of  sudden high school crush came into the picture and said he wanted to go to the concert with me. I told him that I didn't think my youngest sister wanted to go so I'd try to steal her ticket for him. We were in the car driving to the venue and in my dream I got those butterflies-in-my-stomach-I-think-you're-cute feelings that I had for this boy most of my high school years.

With my other wedding dreams, I figured my subconscious was trying to tell me that I was stressed about the wedding and not getting all of the details finished in time. With the latest bunch of dreams, I wondered at first if my subconscious was trying to tell me that deep down inside I'm not 100% sure about marring Keegan. After about a nanosecond of thinking that, I realized that I am 100% sure about marrying Keegan. Ex-boyfriends and high school crushes are a thing of the past for a reason. We weren't compatible in one way or another, but I needed to be with these boys so that I could understand what a good thing I have with Keegan. The bad that came out of those ex-romances has shown me all of the good that I have with Keegan.

I'm thinking these dreams are my subconscious' "fling before the ring." She's re-living the fun of being with a new person before being tied down with having to dream about babies, kitchen gadgets and other wifey things. I'll let her have her fun for a little while longer, but deep down inside I know that I've made the right decision. She just needs to get on the right page.

Any engaged or married women out there have dreams about their exs before tying the knot or do I just have an active imagination?

Ceremony & Reception Music Part I

Finding music for our wedding has honestly been one of the hardest things we've had to do. Don't get me wrong, we both love music of all genres, (remember this post?) but the kind of music we love and that have memories attached to them don't go over well for weddings. I'm all for non-traditional music for weddings, but I don't think this, this or this will work.

We've been playing with the idea of this song for our first dance. We both love Gaelic Storm and have fond memories attached to any and all of their music. The one thing that's holding us up? I'm not a brown-eyed girl. I don't want our family and friends thinking that Keegan is really in love with a brown-eyed girl.

I have a feeling we'll use this song anyways and we have a DJ who said he's willing to get the song for us so we're pretty much set on that front.

As for the ceremony music, that's a different story. I know that I don't want to walk down the aisle to "traditional" ceremony music. There will be no Cannon in D at my wedding. We're having one of our friends and his brother play the cello and viola respectively so we can have live music during the ceremony. With that said, any ceremony music we pick out has to be able to be translated to the cello and viola.

I've recently fallen in love with this song, but unfortunately our friend said it won't translate well since so much of the emotion is in the vocals.

By the way, what has he done with his hair? 

We told our friend to start learning this song for the processional, another one that I've fallen in love with.

I really like the lyrics to this song so I'm thinking I'll print them out in our programs so people will know them who aren't familiar with the song.

So now we have what we're walking down the aisle to, what about the rest of the music?

I have no idea.

Stay tuned for parts 2-whoknowshowmany to see what we decide!

Rocket Science

I'm taking a break from the wedding stuff (which I'm sure some of you appreciate) to tell you about the awesome weekend we had.

For Valentine's day I surprised Keegan with two tickets to see one of his favorite bands, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones at the Germantown Performing Arts Center in Germantown, Tennessee. This band is such an awesome mix of different styles of music.

Wikipedia says, "Frontman Béla Fleck plays acoustic and electric banjos, mixing a bluegrass and folk sound into a modern improvisational style. Fleck has received Grammy nominations for performances in the jazz, bluegrass, pop, spoken word, contemporary Christian, gospel, classical, and country categories—more categories than any other musician."

We got to see the original line up of the Flecktones: Béla Fleck, brothers Victor Wooten and Roy "Future Man" Wooten, and Howard Levy. Casey (I don't know his last name,) their fiddler and merch man also came out for a few songs.

 Béla played the banjo, Victor played the bass, Future Man played the drumitar, Howard played the piano and harmonica and Casey played the fiddle.

All I can say is I was amazed by the show. All of the musicians are masters of their instruments (Future Man even invented his,) and it really showed. Howard played the harmonica like a horn, Victor played the bass like a piano and the things that Future Man does with his drumitar are amazing.

Nope, that's not a horn playing, that's a harmonica!

The best part of all of this? We got to meet the band! We *thought* the might do a signing after the show but there was no mention of it at the end of the concert. We ran into the director of GPAC and asked her if the band was signing autographs. She said they were supposed to but since they played such a long show (they played for almost 3 hours!) they were too tired. We walked outside and were about to head to the car when the director ran out to catch us. She said the band decided to sign autographs but we needed to get inside quickly before they finished. We ran back inside with our CD and got everyone's autograph! The director told Howard that we had driven from our small town in Missisippi all the way to Germantown (basically Memphis) just for the show (about 3 hours) and he was sincerely thankful that we had come out for them.

(I had to piece together two pictures so the part by Béla's shoulder looks kinda weird, but you get the idea) We're going to get it framed and put it up on the walls of our office where all of our other signed band things are.

I totally got this shirt. Who doesn't want a hippo in a beret? I decided not to get it signed by the band because sharpie doesn't hold up well through the wash.

I'm so glad that Keegan and I went to see them. It was another instance where Keegan showed me a whole genre of music that I didn't know about! 

Before the show, we went to the Melting Pot. I had never tried fondue before but really wanted to, so we decided to splurge a little. For about $35 we got a swiss cheese fondue with bread, veggies and apples as well as a chocolate and peanut butter fondue with Rice Crispy Treats, red velvet cake, cheese cake, strawberries and bananas. I wasn't a huge fan of the cheese fondue we got because the base of it was white wine and I'm not a wine fan at all. I'm also not a huge fan of swiss so next time we go, I think we'll get the cheddar cheese fondue. The chocolate fondue was to.die.for. Seriously it was amazing. 

It was really nice to be able to have a date night with Keegan. At dinner it felt like we were at the beginning stages of our relationship where things were all new and exciting. I'm so glad that we got to go to the concert and eat awesome food even though we didn't get much sleep (we got in at 3 a.m. on Saturday morning.) It was totally worth it and I'd do it again in a heart beat.

Flower Power

When we first started wedding planning, I racked my brain for what we were going to do for a flower girl and ring bearer. Both of my sisters are older (15 and 18,) so they would be my maid of honor and one of bridesmaids. Keegan's brother is 25 so he wouldn't work for a ring bearer.  I have 4 young-ish girl cousins that could have worked, but that would mean they would have to come down from Canada, a two day drive or numerous hour flight. I didn't want to put that pressure on them and their families so I didn't even bother asking. I figured we just wouldn't have a flower girl or ring bearer until Keegan suggested his cousin, A's two little girls. I hadn't met this cousin or her girls, but Keegan and A are really close and he wanted her as part of the wedding party so of course I said yes.

Asking A and her girls to be part of the wedding has been one of the best things we've done (I know I've said this before and I'll say it again and again.) A has been such a big help with the wedding from just checking in and seeing how things are going to offering to do my hair/makeup and well as the rest of my girls'. An added bonus? Her girls are absolutely adorable and will be perfect flower girls.

After asking both A and her girls to be part of our wedding, we came across another challenge. The venue we picked told us that our flower girls could only toss real flower petals. After some research, I realized that real flower petals are expensive! Also, we aren't having real flowers anywhere else, so I couldn't get them at a discount with my bouquet or something like that.

I looked around the internet and came up with the idea of rice paper. It would dissolve in the rain and I had the idea of punching out clover and leaf shapes, an overarching theme to our wedding. After second thought, I realized punching shapes out of rice paper would be similar to punching shapes out of tissue paper and would be a huge pain in the butt.  

More research showed me EcoFetti, a business that sells biodegradable wedding confetti as well as other wedding products. We ran the idea by our venue and they gave us the a-ok. The only problem I had with the ecofetti was their colors. They had a green and an orange, but they were really pastel, not something we were looking for. I stashed the idea in the back of my brain as an option and went on planning other things.

Well, we're officially....110 days away from the wedding (holy crap!) and I decided I needed to make a decision about what the flower girls will be tossing. I went back to the ecofetti, but I still wasn't feeling their colors. I Google searched for biodegradable wedding confetti and came across Save-On-Crafts.com. They have some biodegradable confetti, but only in white. I searched around their website for some more ideas and came across these:

Freeze dried natural flower petals. At $7.50/package or 3 for $21, I thought they were a little pricy, but do-able. I noticed that these were their "premium" selection but they had a "lesser" selection specifically for aisle tossing.

These are their aisle tossing flowers. A little less "perfect" than their premium blend, but hey, people are going to be walking on them so I don't care that much. At $5.50/bag or three bags for $15 my wallet also liked them more.

We got 3 bags for $15 plus $9 for shipping to total $23. Much better than the $50/"cup" I had seen for fresh flower petals. If we want them a little softer, we just re-hydrate them in a steamy room for about 30 minutes. Since they are freeze dried, we can order them now and (hopefully!) remember to bring them up to Missouri the week of the wedding. We don't need to worry about a florist bringing them the day of.

I got their flower girl baskets from Michael's on sale around Christmas for $8/each.

I'm in the process of taking off the bows and random stitching and adding ribbon in our colors. I think our flower girls will look wonderful with their baskets and their flowers! I can't wait!

And if you're wondering, we're not going to have a ring bearer. Neither one of us has a young boy in our families that we'd feel comfortable asking them to commit to coming to the wedding so we're just going to have Keegan's best man bring them down in his sporran (that's another post entirely!)

Topper For Our Cake?

A cake topper is a pretty traditional part of a wedding from the blogs and websites I've been frequenting lately. What does one do when you're not having a large cake to feed all of your guests but cupcakes instead? I've blogged previously about our cake sticks that will adorn the cupcakes given to our guests, but Keegan and I were planning on having a large cupcake or a small personal cake for us to cut and potentially smash in each other's faces (I really hope he doesn't do this to me, personal reminder to talk to him about this later.)

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Anyways, the question I've been throwing around in my mind is, do we need a cake topper for our personal mini cake / huge cupcake?

In my search, I've found...

traditional cake toppers,

Some more...interesting cake toppers,

Initial / Monogram Cake Toppers

and some...funny toppers.

All images from here. 

Unfortunately I didn't find anything that screamed "us." If I was thinking more seriously about getting a cake topper, I'd probably look for one with Keegan's baby, something to do with Missouri (our home state,) or something else that better described us and our relationship.

Thankfully, a cake topper isn't too high on my to-do list. I honestly don't think we need one for our personal cake. I don't want to have to cut around plastic and unless I find something that's really "us" I doubt we'd keep it forever. Not getting one is just one more way to keep our wedding under budget which is something I love!

The Internet Saga: Part 1

Well guys, I was really really really hoping I was going to write this post from my own house, but we still don't have internet.


I know I've mentioned our frustrations with getting internet before, but now it's time to tell the full story.

We moved into our house on February 4. When we moved, we never realized that trying to get the internet would be such a problem. We turned first to Cable One, the main internet and cable provider in our neck of the woods. At first Cable One couldn't find our house. This I understood because our house is brand new on a brand new street. After a few days they finally "found our house" A $50 deposit and a promise that Cable One would be out to house sometime between the hours of 8 and 5 meant that I had to stay home from work for the installers. Well, they never came. We called and were told that the ground was too wet to dig up our backyard and install the cable lines. We were frustrated, but ultimately understood. We had been getting a lot of rain and our yards looked like the swamp. We just wished that they had called and told us they weren't going to be coming out so that I could have gone to work. This would become a theme with Cable One.

So we rescheduled. And rescheduled. And rescheduled. Each time they wouldn't call and tell us that they weren't coming out. We were told over and over again that our yard was too wet. We would go for a week letting our yards dry out and then it would rain right before our next appointment. Then we would reschedule, one of us would take work off and the guys just wouldn't show up. This happened about 3 times in a row before Keegan called and asked to speak with a manager. They hung up on him. We called again a different day and were told that we would get a discount on our service and they would be out the next day. They didn't come.

After about the 7th time of being rescheduled, we called and pulled our deposit. At first they wouldn't give it back to us, but Keegan argued that we had been stood up so many times and their customer service frankly sucked. They grudgingly gave it back to us and we started looking around for someone, anyone else to get our internet from. Two of our friends who lived in our city but have since moved to Tupelo told us that they had the worst customer service with Cable One so they switched to AT&T. We were wary about using AT&T for our internet because it wouldn't be cable internet and if we ever wanted to get T.V. service, we would have to get a dish. Not the ideal situation, but we were getting desperate.

Keegan called AT&T and was told they would have to find us again. Side note, the reason that these companies have had to "find" our house is because our builder never told the 911 listing that we were living there. As far as we know, the only people who knew we were living in our house besides our builder were our realtor and the attorney who helped us sign the paperwork. After finding our house AT&T flat out told us that they couldn't provide internet for us because we lived "too far away." Ugh.

We decided to give the internet search a break. We were both getting frustrated and we were busy with other things. That is until last weekend.

We woke up on Saturday (4/7/12) and noticed there were men digging in our yard behind our fence. They had a large CAT machine that was digging the dirt in the front and laying cable in the back. After some prodding, Keegan asked where they were from. Guess what? They were from AT&T. Too far away my butt.

Keegan called AT&T on Saturday and was told the earliest they could come out and install our internet would be May 7, even though cables had just been run. After hearing that, we decided to get crafty and play one company against the other. Keegan called Cable One back and told them that AT&T had just installed cable on our street and that we would go with them unless Cable One could provide faster service. The first guy Keegan talked to hung up on him (great service eh?) but the second lady he talked to told us they would be on Wednesday (today) to install our internet at 8 a.m. We were told that we were their first customer of the day so if the men weren't at our house by 8:15 we were to call and tell them. We were excited and planned for me to take today off work to meet them.

Guess what? They didn't show up. Again. At 10:15, I texted Keegan and told him I was going to work.

Of course we got our hopes up with the promise of them being at our house at 8 a.m. Of course we thought this time would be different just like we thought all the other times.

Today was attempt number 9 at getting the internet (we're keeping track on the white board in our kitchen.) I swear, if we didn't enjoy the internet so much, (we're both avid gamers and I'm trying to plan a wedding!) I'd just say screw it and live without.

I don't know if Keegan has called Cable One today to find out why they didn't show up, but I guess all we can do is wait for the next time they say they're going to come out.

DIY Wedding: Bouquet

This past weekend, I finally finished a wedding project my subconscious has been berating me about for the last few weeks. Seriously, I had a dream that my bouquet wasn't done yet and I was frantically trying to finish it in the back of the church before I walked down the aisle. We're not even getting married in a church...

Anyways, to put my subconscious to rest, I got down to business and finished my bouquet. 

Since January, it's looked like this: 

tied together with asparagus ties with the tags still attached. 

We took off the asparagus ties and tags...

and then decided how long I wanted the stems to be. 

Keegan got his trusty tin snips...

And snipped every...

last...

stem. As you can tell, they were a bit hard to cut, but he did it. 

Perfect length for me since Keegan has monster hands.

Next, we wrapped the stems in floral tape and a cream ribbon. It helped that Keegan has had practice wrapping tennis rackets. He was so careful and made sure that everything lined up perfectly. 

Ta-da! One bouquet for under $30. The 7 or 8 stems of flowers were about $25 at Hobby Lobby, and then the floral tape and cream ribbon was under $5 total. 

I'm still on the hunt to add a locket to honor passed loved ones, but it's basically done! Now my subconscious can rest easy.

Apparently...

when you put your engagement announcement in the newspaper, your fiance's state representative will send you a congratulations card (click to see larger images.)

 

Now to send one to Obama and maybe the Queen of England...

"Holy Crap We're Getting Married!"

That was basically the overarching theme of this past weekend. On the to-do list:

Buy Wedding Bands.....check!
Buy wedding shoes....check!
Start Invitations.....check!
Finish bouquet...check!
Buy things at Michael's to finish other wedding projects....check!
Make sure bridesmaid's buy their dresses.....check

Have bridesmaid drop out of wedding......unfortunately check

First on the list: we finally bought our wedding bands! Of course I forgot my camera at home today so you get internet pictures:

Mine

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Keegan's

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(except his is the opposite of this one. Where it's dark, his is silver; where it's silver, his is dark)

He originally wanted this ring off of Etsy:

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but he decided that he'd rather buy a ring that he could get fixed locally if something was wrong with it. This ring is titanium and rosewood with an inlay of carbon fiber. I really liked this ring, but I'm happy that he's happy with the one he got. (Fun fact, he told me yesterday that he's excited to get his ring. That made my heart melt.)

Kay was having a 10-50% off sale so we got both rings under $700 including a service plan for mine. After buying the rings, I promptly texted my mom a picture with the caption, "Holy crap we're getting married!" This weekend was definitely the weekend where things sunk in a bit more.

Next, wedding shoes! I knew I wanted green shoes to match our color scheme, but I couldn't find any that I liked in stores or on the internet. I've posted before about my shoe search and finally just gave up and decided to go to David's Bridal. I was against this originally because I feel like they're the WalMart of the wedding industry, but I had to do what I had to do. 

After a difficult decision between flats and heels, I finally decided to go with these:

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which will be dyed in their dark green color called "Holly" which is the same color as the bridesmaid's dresses. Fun fact, I didn't cry when I bought my wedding dress, but I definitely teared up when we decided on these shoes. Don't ask me why, I just did. I'm not even a shoes person!

After a quick trip to Michaels to buy some supplies for random wedding things, we went home. I promptly started on the invitations and decided on the final layout and design (finally!) Sunday and Monday were spent cutting out pieces which will probably continue on for the rest of the week. Hopefully I can start assembling them this weekend. I want to have them out by the beginning of May since our guests only have until July 21 to reserve their hotel rooms.

I also finished my bouquet this weekend. Since January, it's looked like this:

(yes, those are asparagus ties holding it together.) This weekend the ties came off, the floral tape went on and it was wrapped with ribbon. Again, since I forgot my camera at home, I don't have pictures to show, but I'll try and put some up tomorrow.

My last bridesmaid bought her dress yesterday so we're all caught up on that front. She picked out the same dress as my sister which I'm fine with. What surprised me is we ordered my sister's dress in January and it still hasn't come in yet. However, when Sarah ordered her's yesterday, they said it would be in by June. I really really really hope it does come in by June and we don't have a naked bridesmaid walking down the aisle.

Unfortunately, one of my bridesmaids dropped out of the wedding yesterday. She started a new job at the end of last year and she's working almost as many hours as Keegan is. Pair that with some family problems and she just doesn't feel comfortable committing to the wedding. I had a feeling this was going to happen. She still hadn't bought her dress and had been hard to get a hold of for the last few months. It makes me sad that she won't be standing by my side on the big day because she was a main part of our engagement, but I hope she'll be able to make it as a guest.

Keegan and I talked about asking someone else to step in for her, but since we're only 4 months away, I'm afraid that person would feel like they're second rate because they didn't make the first cut, if that makes any sense. We're just going to have Sarah bring two guys down the aisle, her boyfriend and one of our good college friends. I'm a lot less stressed out and worried about this than I thought I'd be so all's good!