Love. Live. Laugh. Wed.

Could you possibly be... the ones? The sweet sweet replacement for my long, lost completely-unfindable first love?

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Hey y'all! Happy Holidays! Happy New Year! Happy it's-been-way-too-long!

Sorry for my extended absence. The holidays were crazy, as usual, and as I'm sure you all understand. They also marked a big crazy wedding breakdown for me, which I'll dicuss in another post.

But now. Now, I'm here to talk about cake! This weekend we jumped back on the wedding planning wagon and booked our cake baker.

Please welcome to our wedding festivities.... Walker Cake Co.!

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Morgan over at The Handcrafted Life is giving away a Target gift card and a Starbucks gift card!

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I've changed the "Buff Bride" tab on the navigation bar to a new "Downloads" tab! It's all set up and live so you can go ahead and click on it.

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Or at least - now it will be because we've chosen our officiant!

It was such a weight off of my shoulders to get this crossed off our to-do list. Now I know that no matter how things go on July 9th, and whether I get all of my overly-abitious DIY projects done or not, we'll be married. This is also a big deal for us because the details of our ceremony (which have yet to be completely hashed out) were creating a bit of friction between myself, my dear fiance, the future in-laws and my parents. It mostly came down to a "Catholic church ceremony" vs "an outdoor Justice of the Peace ceremony".

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I'm that bride, that carries around a giant planning binder. Make fun of me all you want - I love that thing!

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I'm sure you are all well aware of this, but when you're planning a wedding, the amount of inspiration out there can be down-right overwhelming. Every single wedding is different and therefore they each lend their own inspiration to what a wedding can be.

When I was first planning and brainstorming, this was awesome! All of the pictures, diy tutorials, blogs, the ideas! But now that we are less than eight months out from the actual wedding day, I realized that I really need to pare down all of that inspiration to just the ideas that I plan on or really might still use. I have a wedding folder on my desktop that contains pretty much all of my wedding related stuff, but I wanted something different to organize all of this inspiration and to help me remember what I wanted to do for specific things.

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Happy One-Day-Shy-Of-One-Month-Without-A-Single-Freaking-Post!!!

I've been working on our save the dates (that were supposed to go out last month) and let me tell you, it is not going well. They are a mini-fail in larger fail that is my life right now. I really wanted my next couple of posts to touch on revealing my design, posting a tutorial for how I did them, and actually sending them out. But I can't freaking finish them!

In other fail news. We've barely spent any money on this wedding yet and I've already failed at keeping track of our budget. I got a bunch of stuff for our save the dates and never put half of it in there. So now I have to go back and add everything up again to get a real total. I just can't believe that it's like the third or fourth thing we've bought for this wedding and I'm already losing track.

However, for some delightfully awesome news, we are going on a weekend getaway this weekend and I'm so excited. We're going to Cleveland for the weekend and seeing the Jets crush the Browns on Sunday! No, Cleveland is not the most romantic of getaway spots, but it really doesn't matter to me where we're going. Just that it will be the two of us getting away for a few days and getting to spend time with each other. And that's two days that I don't have to spend trying to recover the mess that I call our save the dates!!

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I'm doing wedding stuff most of the day. If I'm not trying to directly cross of to-do list items, I'm doing "research" and reading blogs and bios to get inspiration. I'm doing this all.the.time. What's Sean doing while I'm immersed in my wedding world? Usually watching baseball, or football, or making calculated changes to any one of the number of fantasy sports teams he has, or he's adding to his massive collection of autographed sports stuff.

I really don't want to be bothering him all the time, showing him this awesome blog post from so-and-so or showing him every inspiration picture I save to my computer or bookmark for the future. But I realized recently that in my trying not to overwhelm him and bother him, I've been leaving him out.

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I've been itching to officially ask my bridal party since the day we got engaged. I asked my sister and future sister-in-law over the Winter because I kept getting questions about whether they were going to be in the bridal party and I knew 100% for sure they were, so I just asked.

I know etiquette wise you're supposed to ask everyone at the same time so no one feels like they're the last kid getting picked to play dodge ball but, what can I say? I really wanted to wait until we were closer to the wedding and had actually set a date and venue before I went on inviting people to be in the bridal party. By the time we actually settled on a date I was beyond ready to ask my ladies. I had already designed their cards weeks earlier and I was just waiting to put them together.

Now of course I'm a terrible blogger and never took a picture of the finished card. Can you believe that? I made six of them and never took a picture of a single one. Fail. Oh well, I made you this nice little illustration to give you an idea of what they looked like.

 

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This might be boring to some people but I'm a big list maker and this wedding has me making a ton of to-do lists. I have a big planning binder and a few master lists that I'll show in another post, but another thing I do is make a to-do list every month. I feel like looking at those big long wedding checklists on TheKnot or any other wedding site, tend to be intimidating.

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That's the sound you would have heard if you were in our apartment last week while we made some minor adjustments to our budget.

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We finally picked a reception venue! That means we now have a reception venue, a caterer, a date  and even a possible ceremony venue!

I cannot even express to you how excited I am about this!

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I'm sure most of you are going to skip the previous long and wordy post leading up to this one and I gotta say, I don't blame you. But, I felt like it needed to be said, and it's important stuff! Now we'll get to the good parts (and the pictures!)

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You guys are lucky you're hearing this because I don't think I've ever told anyone the entire story truthfully. Now, before you go thinking I'm a compulsive liar or something, I have a few reasons. You'll see.

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or as I'd rather title this "You have got to be kidding me!!"

A few weeks ago I was chatting on the Weddingbee boards with local NY brides about their wedding locations and my venue searching woes. One nice Rochestarian mentioned that she was getting married at the White House in Webster Park. Intrigued, I looked it up. It turned out to be a gorgeous (white) house on a bluff overlooking the lake with tons of trees and gorgeous scenery. My first thought? "ohmygosh I love it!"

 

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So I know I haven't been around much lately, but life has been crazy. Normally I would post that crazy stuff but it's nothing I haven't posted about before (job hunting, deciding where to live, trying to find a freaking venue) and I really don't want to bore you with all of that. So until I get some new news, I'm staying quiet.

Well, after this post.

Have ya'll heard of Weddingbee? I'm pretty sure all of my readers (all two of you) found me from weddingbee but just in case you haven't heard of it, let me tell you a little bit. When I first started getting interested in wedding planning (which I will shamefully admit was much before our engagement) I found TheKnot. Now, I'm not here to poopoo all over TheKnot. The actual informational section of the website is pretty good. I love to go there for inspiration pictures and articles, and their tools are pretty useful as well. However, if you mosey on over to the boards, it's a different story. Some of the local boards are pretty nice, but the main boards can get really really nasty. And I just can't stand that crap. I mean really ladies, we're adults, must we act like it's 9th grade all over again?!

Anyway, back to Weddingbee. Eventually I found the site through some googling and it was like I found the fountain of youth! There are so many inspiring bee bloggers and they are all so down to earth! There are some bees I follow because their wedding ideas are similar to mine, some I follow because they always have great relationship advice, some I follow just because their posts are hilarious and fun to read. And the boards! If you post a question on the boards, 99% of the time, someone will answer it for you or at least try to help you. Even if that question has been asked 989,583 times before. The ladies on that board are incredibly kind and helpful.

So, the ladies on the Upstate NY board are trying to plan a meet up for everyone in the Central NY area. Right now, we're thinking the meeting place might be Syracuse, since it's between Rochester and Ithaca/Binghamton. We have a few responses but we would definitely like to get more people to join!

So if you're in the CNY area and want to join us, hop over on this thread and let us know!

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As you all know, we've been searching for a suitable venue for, ohhhh about, 8 months. We went to look at a few more places in the Binghamton area on Sunday and struck out. Four times. So far my plan of do-everything-myself and have it all be awesome has failed.

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