Bridal Blunder + Yay!

On Thursday, May 4, we finally finished and mailed most of our invitations! I say "most" because I still have about 12 to make for Keegan's co-workers that he will hand deliver at work. I ran out of double stick tape, however, so I can't complete them until we run to the store.

All of my lovelies in a bag on their way to the post office. 

Anyways, before the wonderful day of sending my packets of joy into the world, I made a bridal blunder. You see, when I had the invitations about 50% completed, I weighed them on the mail scale we have at work. They weighed half an ounce. To use the regular 45 cent, or "forever" stamps, your letter has to weigh under 1 ounce. I figured that adding our RSVP cards and envelopes couldn't possibly put us over the 1 ounce mark, so I went ahead and purchased 6 sheets of the "Love" forever stamps from USPS.com to total about $57.

Do you see where this is going?

One day at work, I decided to bring in a completed invitation to weigh once again just to make sure we were still under the 1 ounce mark.

I set the invitation down on the scale and 1.1 ounces flashed up at me. I take the invitation off and weigh it again. 1.1 ounces.

Crap.

Long story short, I had to go to the post office, have them weigh it to make sure we were actually over 1 ounce and then buy $75 of the 65 cent wedding cake stamps.

We figured that it was cheaper for us to use one 65 cent stamp per invitation as apposed to two 45 cent stamps.

I suppose our water, gas, electric and mortgage companies will think we love them whenever we send in our bills.

Future, (or current) brides, take it from me. Double, no, triple check how much your invitations and save the dates weigh before buying postage. It'll save you from having your electric company thinking that you love to give them your money. 

Etsy Is My Best Friend....

....and my worst enemy.

Over the weekend, I made a hair flower that I'm thinking of wearing after I take off my veil for the reception.

(If anyone wants a tutorial, just tell me. It basically involves a lot of petal stripping and hot glueing.) 

Anyways, after I made my hair flower (of course) I decided to check out Etsy to see if they had anything that might interest me. I didn't look at Etsy before making my flower because I figured I wouldn't find anything or everything would be out of my price range.

Boy was I wrong.

First I started out with maple leaf hair thing-ys (yes, that's the technical name.) 

Found here. 

A little out of my price range ($51,) but amazing nonetheless. 

Found here.

Much more in my budget and so cute! 

Found here.
Want.

Next I moved onto clover/shamrock hair thing-ys

Unfortunately, a lot of them were made out of ribbon which was too much of a hand-made feeling for me, but I still think they're cute. 

Found here. 

Found here.

Only $4!

Found here, again only $4. 

Maybe I could wear a leaf in my hair and Keegan could wear a clover as a boutonniere?

Anyone want to help me convince Keegan that I need one of these since I already made my hair flower?

Edit:
Scratch all those, I want these:

Found here.

These are more than I would pay for hair flowers ($39), but they're so pretty! And they look so much more put together than anything I could make.   

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!

Source

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."