Planning Excitement - It's All Real Now!

Yipeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

We have our first wedding appointment scheduled! We're visiting a possible venue on the evening of April 43rd. I was surprised to hear that they were nearly booked for 10/09 already. Fortunately, none of the Sundays are taken yet. Whew! The gentleman I spoke to said that regardless of where we book, we should do so soon, as dates are already filling up. I had no idea so many people were planning as far ahead as we are.

I'm a little bummed today. I had to take my ring back to have it sized. They said it's going to take a week to get it back! :( I was really looking forward to wearing it all the time once I got it. It'll be more comfortable and fit better though, so I suppose it's worth the wait!

Now that this is really and truly official, there are a few things I want to do within the next three to four months.

1) Book our venue.
Unfortunately, we probably won't be able to afford a deposit until late next month. *bites fingernails* I hope our date will still be available.

2) Dress shopping.
There is a problem with this, though...my weight! I am more motivated now than ever before to drop all this extra baggage. No, I don't want to be a size 6 bride, but I do want to be thinner. I'm still keeping up with my weight loss journal pretty regularly. I've lost 11lbs and have 39 more to go. I think once I've lost a total of 25 lbs (so 14 more to go), I'll start seriously looking for dresses. I think that'll be a substantial enough loss that I won't feel so bad when I put on a dress. Maybe it won't feel so much like a tent then!

3) Decide on stationery.
I've had a real problem finding stationery I like. From Save the Dates to Invitations, I just can't seem to find anything that really catches my eye. I've thought about going DIY with stationery, but I think that's a bit too complicated for me. I'm not great with printing/formatting stuff.

4) Talk to our potential officiant.
We'd like a mutual friend/acquaintance to perform our ceremony, but we aren't sure if he'll be comfortable with straying from tradition. I'm writing our ceremony (with input from J, of course), and it's important to me that we make it our own. So, I want to know if he'll be comfortable with it, or if we need to figure out another plan of action.

I know these aren't necessarily the 'proper' order of doing things, but since when is anything J and I do 'proper?' There are a lot of things I need to wait to do, either because it's too early or I simply need this autumn to roll around for reasonably priced supplies to become available. I'm very anxious to try my DIY boquets, but I've heard the flowers I want to use (mums) are more affordable in autumn.

I've put together a binder for wedding planning. I was going to buy one of the wedding planners I saw at Border's, but $30 and up seemed awfully expensive for something I could put together myself. I think what I might add to it is my own timeline/checklist. I've found a lot online, but I want to customize them.

Dance Lessons

J agreed to take lessons for our first dance. So today, I called a place and they want $250 for 5 private lessons. Yikes! That's a lot more than I thought we'd have to spend on it. He also tried to sell us classes. I know J won't want to do that. I don't like the upsell to begin with, but especially before I've even agreed to buy in the first place!

I'm definitely going to call around.

Cakes

So I find that I'm not very interested in the wedding cake...or food for that matter. Food has really always been J's thing. He asked for free reign over the menu and I said ok!

However, I would like a cake that kind of matches our theme/colors.



I saw a few cakes with chocolate icing (it may have been brown fondant...) that were kind of nice, but I'm not loving anything. I also don't really like cake toppers at all! I find most of them tacky or too froofy. I've decided that there will be no cake topper...it'll be flowers instead.

I'd really love to use foliage as cake decor, but uhh, I don't see anyone wanting to eat a cake that had dead leaves picked from the ground all over it. LOL. Maybe I could buy some fake foliage to use.

I did really like this idea when I was browsing...

I think I'd prefer a chocolate color with an orange ribbon of icing. I'm not sure what those flowers are, but I do kind of like the colors. What really makes it for me are the branches. Regardless of what kind of cake we do, I now know that it must have branches!