I am a craft attempting, comfort food to healthy recipe cooking, sometimes exercising, adventure loving museum curator with a passion for politics, history, my husband, and our cat Mr. Moose.
There are moments every now and then where I sort of pull up short and just feel so astoundingly blessed. A few weeks ago, it was running to Kmart to buy Mr. C a bottle of shampoo. I know that sounds like the silliest thing, really I do. But I have a man who loves me, who cares for me, and who I love and care for. And sometimes that means I buy him shampoo. And that sounds strange, but it just sort of caught me as being wonderful.
This morning I had another one of those moments. While Mr. C works a regular Monday-Friday work week, I actually work Tuesday-Saturday. Most days, Mr. C's alarm goes off at 6:30, and he feeds The Moose.
The Moose says hi
Ala Pavlov, The Moose knows that when Mr. C's alarm goes off, it is time for breakfast. This morning, I woke up a little early. I sprained my ankle pretty badly, and it was aching pretty badly this morning and woke me up before my alarm. I stayed in bed for awhile, checking email and trying to find the perfect wedding necklace. The Moose hopped up on the bed, climbed right over me, and laid down on Mr. C's chest. Mr. C was still asleep, but sort of groggily came to, reached up, and started petting The Moose. Then the cat would jump down, trying to get Mr. C to follow him, realize he wasn't, and hop back up on the bed to start it all over again.
After three rounds of this, I managed to snag a picture. Mr. C might kill me for posting this, but it just makes my heart swell. Right after I took this photo, The Moose actually leaned down and sort of bumped Mr. C in the head, trying to get him to wake up, and Mr. C reached back up to pet him again. These are my boys. They are my whole life, and I love them so much that it almost aches. Mr. C has never had a cat before, and seeing how much he cares about The Moose makes me so happy.
I hear people ask sometimes why you should eve bother to get married, especially for people in our situation. We already live together, so what's the point? The point is, that as much as we love each other, after we sign our names on that paper we are officially a family. We are a team, emotionally, spiritually, and legally. In all senses of the world he is mine, and I am his, and we have the start of a very happy family together.
This weekend, we had the pleasure and the honor of heading to Greenville, South Carolina to celebrate the wedding of GM J and his new wife. The wedding party was just the siblings of the bride and groom, so Mr. C was an usher. They were a gorgeous couple, and the wedding was so much fun.
Two things really came out of the wedding for me. First, I feel reinvigorated for planning our own. Mr. C went down to South Carolina on Wednesday, and MaidoH A and I followed on Friday. On the trip back up, she and I had a four hour layover in Newark, and we spent a good hour of it talking about our wedding. We also walked through the duty free shops testing out perfumes. I think I may fall prey to the wedding day scent trend. What was nice though, is that after a few months of a lot of frustrations with work and ignoring wedding planning to be excited again. Some of the guests at this wedding will also be at ours!
The other piece of it was a very touching moment. The bride surprised me and handed me her bouquet at the end of the reception. I was honored and thrilled, and definitely carried it around with me the rest of the evening. Now I have their beautiful bouquet and Mr. C's boutonniere, and I'm trying to find something special to do with them that I can send back to the couple. I have two ideas, and I may do both.
I found this option online this morning while I was browsing around, and I really like it. You send in dried flowers from the bouquet, and they are made into beautiful pieces of jewelry. The best part is that they keep any extra beads for awhile, so if the bride really likes it, they can have jewelry made for their mothers. It is something I think Mr. C's mom would like to have.
This one was my original plan, basically from the moment she handed me the flowers. I saw it on Pinterest quite awhile ago, but really like it. You take petals from the bouquet and very gently put them inside of a large clear Christmas ornament. I like this one too because she has some very pretty crystals intermixed with the flowers, and I think this would look awesome on their Christmas tree.
New York indeed.
PS - I know Mr. C can sing. He sings in the car, he sang in the choir back at reunion, when we go to church and stand next to each other, I hear him sing. But. BUT. Oh my gosh. They had karaoke at the reception, and the groom finally convinced Mr. C to sing "New York, New York." Gotta love my Yankee. But, holy bovine, folks. Here's a photo of me literally fanning myself off because of the waves of hotness pouring off of my crooning fiance.
This year, for the first time ever, I am going to be participating in National Novel Writing Month. In fact, I've never written a novel before. But a few years ago, my very first semester of graduate school, I was sitting by the lake with my classmates. We were playing a game "who will be the first" where you basically chose different achievements (or failures) and decided who in the group would be the first to do it. The first to publish a book came up, and I was quite shocked when they unanimously chose me. Maybe a fiction book isn't want they have in mind, but I like the idea.
As for what exactly I'm going to write, I haven't decided yet. I have a number of thoughts floating around, and my goal for the rest of October is to decide on a likely one, lay out some background and figure out my characters so when I'm ready to I can jump write in. In order to stay on track for a 50,000 word novel, I'll need to write an average of 1,667 words each day for the month of November. The goal is to have a good draft completed by the end of the month.
I'm really looking forward to this. I've been talking about writing a novel for years now, but have never really taken any steps towards making it happen. I may be really terrible at fiction writing, but at least this is a chance for me to actually find out! I'll write more about some of my ideas as I do more over the next couple of weeks to solidify which story I want to tell.
When people say wedding, I almost always think of this song from My Best Friend's Wedding:
To me, wedding planning so far has been lots of wishing, praying, hoping, and planning. Luckily I've got an incredible team in my corner. They're incredibly supportive, and I can bounce ideas off of them all the time. Eventually, I'll do posts on each of them, so you can see how lucky I've been to have this network that is there to help me out, listen to my ideas, and call me out when I'm being an idiot.
That said, Mr. Burg, MaidoH A, and MatronoH K often get sent pictures or blogs of things that I've found that are awesome. I try to limit myself to things I'll actually be able to use, but every now and then fancy things that are nowhere near our budget catch my eye. We're exceptionally lucky and are receiving financial support from my parents and from Mr. C's, but I don't want to blow their money.
But, as is bound to happen, every so often something sparkly or fun or just downright amazing catches my eye and makes me wish I didn't have student loan bills or you know, basic living expenses so I could spend all of my money on these things. In addition to the finances, some things just seem logistically difficult. Especially when you consider we're in NY and the wedding is in Iowa. Makes things tough sometimes, but that doesn't mean a girl can't dream. Here's a few prime examples:
Take for instance this lovely, elegant statement necklace from BHLDN. It is pearl and blush, which are my two accent colors and would look AWESOME with my dress. The only problem. $480. I can't really justify spending $20 less than my wedding gown on the necklace to wear with it. It sure is pretty though.
Ah, the flower arch. With big, beautiful, puffy, soft, gorgeous flowers that are probably peonies and we're getting married in August. Now, I haven't totally given up on the idea of a floral arch, and Mr. C actually suggested the idea, but I have a hunch this would take a big chunk out of our budget.
This is from the same wedding as the arch from above. Can you tell that I love this wedding? Visually it just has a lot of the softness and elegance that I love, plus that blue color is exactly what I'm aiming for. And I adore the look of this lace overlay on the tablecloth, but yeah, custom designed table linens are WAY out of the budget.
Bakery Beauty Dress via Modcloth (no longer available)
Oh boy. There are some really freaking adorable little white dresses out there. And how adorable are they for things like bridal showers, bachelorette parties, and rehearsal dinners? I wish I could afford one dress for each wedding related event. After all, how many times in your life are you a bride? But I really don't think I can justify spending the money on a new dress for each event. Perhaps this will be a little splurge where I find one dress that will work for multiple events? Or maybe I'll just keep scoping out Kohls, Target, and Marshalls and see if anything jumps out at me. MaidoH A is awesome at scoring deals, so maybe I can ask her to keep her eyes peeled for a good deal.
Oh boy. I want this. Like, I'd forgotten about it until just now and going back into my Pinterest boards and I found it again. This one isn't so much the financial difficulty (although that many books isn't cheap) as the logistics. In the original iteration, this is actually one of two of these little displays, set into a larger wall. I'm not sure how you could do it to make it free-standing. And if we could do it, I'd want to try to find a way to move it down from the ceremony down to the reception.
This is the one I may actually see if I can find a way to make it happen. I haven't yet met a unity ceremony idea that I'm completely enamored with, other than copying my parents idea of giving each other trees. But then tonight, I stumbled across this. I adore glass. One of the neatest museums I've been to (and I've been to a LOT of museums) is the Corning Museum of Glass. What made the trip really phenomenal was getting to do a couple of the workshops while we were there. I also dropped quite a bit of cash in their gift shop, getting ornaments for my whole family. So, when I saw this, I was intrigued. Rather than a simple sand blending ceremony, you purchase various sand colors from the artist. After you've blended them during your ceremony, they form them into these beautiful sculptures or bowls that you can keep forever. You can also purchase ornaments or glass hearts with "your" glass after you've bought the sculpture or bowl. They start at $379 for the sculpture, but man how amazing would it be to have that in your home forever? This may be one of my big wedding splurges.
Apologies for the delay in blogging. Although I won't get into it too much here, my work situation has been exceptionally difficult lately, and has made it hard to focus on things like planning the wedding, coming up with creative recipes, or sprucing up the apartment.
Luckily, we're at a point at least with the wedding where we don't have any immediate to-do's on our list. I'm trying to take the week before Christmas to go back to Iowa, both to see my family and also to do things like meet with florists, go dress shopping with my girls, and actually sit down with my Matron o' H and Bridesmaid S to talk about things. Mr. C will join me at the end of the week to visit the venue, try some macaroons (instead of cake?), and also hopefully do our engagement photos.
The big exciting news right now is that my parents will be visiting for almost a week at the very beginning of November. I haven't seen them since April, which is way, way, way too long. I'm really excited. And, actually, while we'll spend most of the time just enjoying each others company, there are some wedding tasks as well.
First, I get to (finally) show my mom my dress. I actually thought I would call the salon where I bought it to see if they'd mind us coming in to try it on there. Since she wasn't with me when I bought it, maybe that's a way we can still get that experience.
Secondly, we're also looking for my mom's dress! I was browsing around on Pinterest awhile back and saw this beauty:
It is out of the box for my mom, but I think its still very pretty and looks comfortable. Plus the navy I think will go well with the dusty blue for the girls. I sent it to her, and she's ordering it. She'll have it sent to my apartment out here, so she can try it on while she's visiting.
And finally, this will be the first time my parents meet Mr. C's parents. We're really looking forward to that. I love his parents, and am so grateful for the support they've provided me already, and am so happy to be acquiring them as my own family. I'm really excited for them to meet each other, especially because we see a lot of similarities between my mom and Mr. C's dad. Should be fun to see them together in person!
But, that would be a wedding all about me. And I don't want that! The whole point of this is Mr. C and I joining together, so the wedding needs to reflect that. The wedding that Mr. C and I are having is taking place here:
What that means, then, is that I'm having to figure out how to transition the ideas that I had for the first picture into the reality for the second picture. And I'll be honest with you, I haven't figured it out. I've let it stress me out for WEEKS now.
Finally, last night, I realized that it was probably time to call in the professionals. This morning, I called the florist my family has used since forever. We didn't talk flowers, or centerpieces, or bouquets, but they are sending me some information.
Even more reassuring for me was the fact that they did a wedding for a couple who lived in Oregon, and who the florist never actually saw in person. We'll be going back home in December, and so we won't have to be that drastic, but knowing that they are comfortable with long distance correspondence is reassuring.
I'll have to talk with them about more specific flowers and centerpieces and all that before we book with them, of course, but I think I'd forgotten that there are people that do this for a living and was just sort of expecting myself to have to have all of the answers figured out. Thank goodness that's not the case!
"And through this process, I realized that this is what marriage is. It’s making a home, where you are, no matter what the circumstances. It’s being home, whenever you’re with your partner. It’s not waiting for the one-days, and the might-bes, and mourning the could-have-beens. It’s being home. Now." - Meg of APW fame
