S+J Wedding Blog

As of last Saturday, Jose and I have been married for 7 weeks and I have to say, married life is great.  It’s not actually much different than pre-married life (which was also great) — but the fact that I’m still working through the process of changing my name reminds me that we’re married now.    We will be moving into our new house in less than two weeks, and I think that is really going to seal the deal.  Married and living in our first non-temporary home!  I can’t wait.

We finally got the CDs of our wedding photos from Christine last week, so I suppose it’s time to begin the wedding recap!  Without that, I think I’d feel like my wedding blog would be forever left unfinished.  I’ll be posting full recaps with photos in the coming days, and in the meantime, if you missed it, you can check out the sneak preview Christine put on her blog a few weeks after the wedding.

Before I get into the recaps, I wanted to reflect on one particular thing…

Over the six months we took to plan our wedding, I never bought a single bride magazine.  I did, however, read about a zillion wedding blogs, and in doing so, came across a surprising number of wedding recaps that included a list of the bride’s “wedding regrets.”  They talked about things they wish they’d done differently, dresses they wore but didn’t love, picking people they didn’t like to be in their wedding party, projects they wanted to do but ran out of time for, money they didn’t spend and wish they had, or did spend and wish they hadn’t.  You name it, and there’s probably a bride out there that regrets it.

I LOVED our wedding.  I loved every single second of it.

Did it go by too fast?  Yep.  Did I feel like I didn’t get a chance to talk to most of our guests?  Oh yeah.  Did I cringe when the DJ started leading people in choreographed dances, which was one things I most definitely did not want?  Big time.  Do I remember a single word of what the minister said during the ceremony?  Nope.

But regrets?  I can’t say I regret a single thing.  I loved the day.  I loved my dress.  I loved my hair.  I loved the food and the decor and the building.  I loved being surrounded by almost everyone who has ever been important to me in my ENTIRE LIFE.

Yes, it went by too fast, but good things always end too soon.  I didn’t get a chance to talk to most of our guests, but we did get a least a short moment at every table.  The DJ ended up basically checking off every item on a list of things I’d told him NOT to do, but in the end I decided not to care because people were still having fun.  (Even my parents were dancing!)  And even though I was so nervous and excited during the ceremony that I couldn’t concentrate on what our minister was actually saying, I remember looking at Jose and saying “I do” and clutching his hand so tightly he later told me that with his new ring on, it hurt.

The way I see it, that’s the important stuff.

This is the only photo I’ve got, since our most excellent photographer Christine took it with her iPhone moments before the ceremony.  I can’t wait to see more.  I’ll post them when I get them, and after the honeymoon.  We leave for Belize tomorrow morning!

p.s.  Doesn’t my dad look awesome??  I think he looks fantastic. 

A couple weeks ago I called our florist to ask for a mini-version of my bouquet, just to make sure I liked what we’d picked out on paper.  Mother’s Day slowed them down, but yesterday I finally got to pick up a lovely version!  It’s a mix of white hydrangeas, green hypericum berries, and cymbidium orchids.  The orchids in my final bouquet will be white — apparently those are “special order” so they used these pink orchids.  Oh well, I have a good imagination.  Picture white instead of pink.  (Maybe I’ll Photoshop it later.)

In any case: I like it!

Everything for the wedding is really going smoothly, even though we’re only a week and a half away.  Maybe it’s because there are some things I’m just not remembering, I dunno, but I feel pretty calm about the whole thing.  My sister and brother-in-law arrive on Saturday, my parents get here Tuesday night, and then on Thursday things really pick up with my brother, Jose’s mom and Jose’s brother all getting into town.

Amidst all that happiness, there is one thing that makes me a little sad.  It’s the people who can’t make it.  We made a very concerted effort to limit our guest list to family and very close friends, and I expected (perhaps naively) that most people would attend.  And really, most people are, but there are a few that surprised me.

Half of my high school friends won’t be there, due to a variety of reasons from the cost of plane tickets (for what’s now a family of four) to not being able to get off work at the hospital (for my med student friend).  And three of my college friends are coming without their significant other/husband/kids (though it could be argued that Christina is bringing a child, albeit one that hasn’t been born yet).

And of course I previously mentioned that neither of my grandmothers will be in attendance.  This one makes me particularly sad, especially since they were both at my sister’s wedding 4 years ago.  But 4 years is a long time.  My grandmothers are now 89 and 94 years old, and both have moved into some form of assisted living in these past few years.  The only way they could come to the wedding is if the wedding was held near where they live, and that didn’t make sense.  The worst part is that neither one of them has even met Jose, due to a number of factors.  I hope to fix that by the end of the year, but it’s still a bit of a downer.

So there are some people who won’t be there.  On the flip side, there are 92 adults and 10 kids who WILL be there.  Let’s party! 

I’m afraid that posts here are going to become all about the items I’ve checked off my to-do list lately.  This weekend we took care of a few decisions, the biggest being music — both for the ceremony and the reception.  That’s probably worthy of another post.  But I also got a little crafty and made our cake toppers!

I started with two plain wooden dolls like the ones above that I bought a while ago from Etsy seller Goose Grease.  (Can I just say how much I love Etsy?)  Using her dolls as inspiration, I made a mini-me and mini-Jose.

Cute!  I was happy with how they turned out.  Poor Jose is very black, but, well, that’s what he’s wearing!  A suave black tux, white vest, and white tie.  I had a hard time getting my hair to look right.  It’s very long at the moment, but I’ll be wearing it up for the wedding, so I tried to convey an updo.  And the color is a combination of yellow, light brown, and dark brown.  Now I just need to varnish them, which shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Other DIY projects remaining (this is why it will be nice to have all of next week off, plus my sister here to maybe help):  favors, programs, and possibly some small additions to the floral centerpieces that our florist is creating.

Our “Mad Libs” RSVP cards, which were only sent to about a quarter of our guests out of fear that others wouldn’t quite get it, were pretty fun to get back in the mail.  Some people were more creative than others.  We had Cari, who wrote in Russian, and Debbie, who wrote everything backwards (I mean, sdrawkcab).  Some people chose more colorful adjectives than others (flabbergasted, belly-aching, and rhapsodic, for instance).

But by far the winners of the unofficial competition are Melissa and Matt:

A while ago, I mentioned that we were getting our engagement photos done.  And then it was pouring rain that day, and then life happened, and another month passed before we finally got together with Christine two weeks ago.  We met at the Pearland airport and ended up just staying there instead of trying to drive the 25 minutes back to JSC.  We had a lot of fun during the two hours we spent shooting, especially once Jose and I got over our awkwardness at being photographed.  It was BRIGHT and SUNNY and even at 6:00 it was hard to not be all squinty in the sunshine.  It was also quite windy, and I’m sure she got a lot of rejects of me with my hair in my face.  Afterwards, we had a yummy dinner and fun conversation at dinner before Christine began her long drive home to the other side of Houston.

Here are my favorites!  (These are the unedited proofs.)

That last one?  See the plane taking off in the background?  That’s the plane Jose learned to fly in!!  Too cool.

There are so many things happening these days to remind me that the wedding is rapidly approaching — and not just the fact that all small talk now begins with “your wedding is coming up very soon!”

On Saturday, Jose and I went to our “not a shower” bridal BBQ.  Cari and Jen did a totally awesome job of hosting and the pavilion at Waterford Harbor looked great.  There were bright blue paper lanterns hanging from the rafters and centerpieces full of origami paper airplanes.  There was enough food for a least three times the number of people that were actually there, and Byron did a great job manning the grill.  Oh, and for dessert there was an awesome selection of cupcakes from a local bakery that I must now visit.  I would show you all the pictures — except I don’t think anyone actually TOOK any pictures.  Horrifying, I know.

Here are a couple pictures from the Waterford Harbor website so you can at least see where we were.  Here’s the pavilion, with just enough of a roof to keep us from all getting totally sunburned:

And here’s a sample of the view.  Yes, lots of boats and million dollar homes behind that.  Not too shabby a location!  And the weather held out and it didn’t rain at all.  It was humid and sticky, but not too awful.

We didn’t play any games, but Cari and Jen did come up with an awesome activity.  There were a bunch of tiny peat pots, a bag of potting soil, and bags of seeds.  Every person that came planted something for us in a little pot with a cute little tag saying what they planted.  When we get into our house in a few months, we can plant everything in the ground — that should be just enough time to get everything sprouting on our own.  Then we’ll have a cool collection of veggies, herbs and flowers planted by all our friends. 

All in all, it was very fun to hang out with all of our Houston friends in one place at the same time.  That pretty much never happens.

Jose’s family (mom and brother) came up from Corpus for the weekend, so on Saturday afternoon we took them downtown to see the Magnolia Ballroom.  It was really good to see it again — it had been three months since our last visit for the open house in January!  They were setting up for a wedding that evening, so it was also good to see another example of the set up.  They had 11 tables set up, so space for 110 people.  We may need 1-2 extra tables, but no more than that.

I liked the centerpieces for this wedding.  They were super minimalist — even more than our simple flowers in bowls will be.  But they were also a fire hazard.  When we came in from the balcony, we smelled something odd, and it turned out the candle in the middle of one had caught the lavendar on fire.  Um, oops?  Hopefully that didn’t happen again.

I snapped a quick photo of the buffet setup, and the “mirror wall” at one end of the ballroom that will serve as our “altar.”  They had two pillars on either side that we can use if we want to hold flowers.  I need to send this photo to our florist, since she asked for a photo to use in helping her create two tall arrangements to mark the space as the ceremony site.

This wedding was also putting some simple white sashes on every other chair.  If you’d asked me if I wanted chair sashes, I would have said NO WAY, TOTALLY TACKY.  However, these actually look quite nice.  They made me want to go get chair sashes.  However, I’m not going too because we are spending enough money already as it is. 

The bigger question is this:  black tablecloths or white tablecloths?  (I found the photo on the right online.)  The plan thus far was to go with the black, which are subtlely striped.  But my mom suggested that the white would look better since there’s so much dark wood in the room already.

So what do you guys think?  Black or white?

This weekend is bridal shower #2 — aka the coed barbecue that is really just an excuse to hang out with our friends.  Cari and Jen are running the show.  Look at the cute invitations Cari made with cards she found at CVS, of all places!

I’m excited, so I’m just crossing my fingers that the torrential, flooding downpours of the past two weekends will abate long enough for us to have some fun!