It's not even 9:00 am and I already feel behind with my huge list of things to get done today, so this will have to be short. I just can't believe that our wedding is in TWO days! And kudos to all of you who planned your wedding while working full time (and/or keeping up with a blog!) I feel like my life has been devoted to nothing but this wedding for the last couple weeks! I am SO excited though and ready for all the hard work to pay off. Some of Will's family started arriving yesterday and a few more are coming today. My family starts coming in tomorrow and I am SO excited to see everyone, and for everyone to see each other! My parents are divorced (and have been for 22 years) so my Mom has not seen my Dad's side of the family and vice versa in a very long time! I have one cousin my Mom has never met, and two that she hasn't seen since they were toddlers!
Sunday we will spend a little more time visiting with family and friends before heading down to Charlotte to stay in the Westin (for free- thank you credit card points!) and flying out early Monday morning to spend the week in Playa Del Carmen. The weather looks great so far for the wedding and the honeymoon, so keep your fingers crossed!
Once we get back from Mexico and settle in, I expect I will feel like I have a lot of free time on my hands (with no wedding planning to do!) but if you know me, you know I never completely relax and always have several lists in my head, so I'll share my thoughts on what I want to accomplish when we get back:
1. Find a new job. Seriously. It has now been six months since I got laid off and I am sick of being broke! I haven't had a whole lot of time to be looking for jobs, but really didn't think anyone would want to hire someone who was planning a wedding and about to need a week and a half off right away. But now it is time. This is priority numero uno.
2. Thank You's. I hate writing thank you cards. In fact, I'm pretty terrible at doing them for birthdays and Christmas, but I forced myself to for both graduations, and I know that this is one more time where they are neccessary. So my goal is to get at least 5 done a day until they are DONE.
3. Organize our house! It has become wedding crap central and I can't wait to get rid of all of it, so I can actually see what we have (gift-wise) and start getting rid of duplicates and making space for our new things. Our neighborhood is having a community yard sale a few weeks after we get back, so that is my deadline for getting rid of the old stuff to make room for the new!
4. Scrapbooking! Ohhhhh, how I have missed this hobby. In fact, the last time I scrapbooked anything was the night we got engaged (way back in November!) I am so behind on things- I have Christmas presents from last year that never were finished! I must get those done before this Christmas and I want to scrapbook the engagement/wedding/honeymoon ASAP before I forget any details or lose any of the little memorobilia pieces I have been saving (like the bows that I broke at my showers.... hello, those are my future children we're talking about! Three to be exact!)
5. Working out again. I know this is something I should have been doing before the wedding but we canceled our Y membership last Fall when money was getting a little tight and without that, I really had no desire or motivation to work out at home. But I'm not giving up yet! I have gained a good 25-30 pounds in the last 3-4 years, and I am sick of it! It's not really about how I look, it's about how I feel in my own clothes. Even though I can hide it with flowy pretty shirts, I'm just not a fan of how the muffin top FEELS, hanging over my jeans! That's gross, I know, but tell me you've never experienced this!
Okay, well there you have it..... my top 5 things to do post-honeymoon.
Now for the 5,000 things I must still do pre-wedding!
Thanks for all the encouraging words throughout this process! I promise to be back when it is over!
Oh, and I should add (since this was supposed to be the whole theme of this blog), that I think we did a pretty good job with our wedding budget. I will finalize it and post the details of it sometime. We may end up going over budget by a little bit, but we did get some AMAZING deals along the way! I'll have to post a picture of me and Will in Harris Teeter with FOUR grocery carts full of beer! (It was on sale- $8.88 for 18 bottles! That's about $1.50 less PER BOTTLE than what the caterer charges! Yes, we will have over 1,000 bottles of beer at our reception, thankyouverymuch!)
Bye for now Bloggy friends!!!
Edited to Add: For those of you reading this that have kept up with the situation with my FBIL, he is doing great! He's been at Walter Reed for the last few weeks- he got his leg! And he has been learning how to walk on it. He's coming home today (and going to stay with us tonight- yay!) so on Saturday he will WALK DOWN THE AISLE as Will's Best Man. Probably with crutches or a cane, but that is still amazing to me. I'm tearing up right now just thinking about it. In fact, I don't expect there to be a dry eye in the place on the wedding day! I am not a very religious person, but I have prayed harder for TJ than I ever have about anything in my whole life. I know that just to have him alive is a mircale in itself, but considering we almost called off the wedding because we didn't know if he would walk again, and now, just six months later, everything is coming together, all his hard work is paying off, and all the prayers were heard- so thank you everyone for praying for him and thinking about him! I can't tell you how happy it makes me!
Showing posts with label budget. Show all posts
Showing posts with label budget. Show all posts
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Check!
We have our photographer! FINALLY! I am so excited to have this settled- it was one of our last major things we had to get done!
A quick re-cap of our photography issues..... A good family friend is, or was, a professional photographer and my Dad and I both assumed that he would shoot our wedding, as a gift to us, so in our original wedding budget we only accounted for the cost of materials ($500 or less). About 3 months into planning, my Dad actually got around to asking him about it, and he said he'd really rather not do it. Since he doesn't do it professionally anymore, he doesn't have a lot of the equipment he'd need and I wouldn't be happy with his work, and he would rather just come and enjoy himself at our wedding, considering he has known me my whole life. So we go to Plan B.... Will's parents recommend a family friend of theirs, saying that he does weddings all the time and they were sure he'd be more than happy to do it. A couple more months go by.... he basically says the same thing. So now it is almost March and we still have no photographer...... Plan C: I ask a friend from college, who was a photojournalism major, if her and her roommate, also a photographer, could do it and how much they would charge, explaining that we basically have NO photography budget. They email me back a quote, which seemed a little high, but I assumed it would be the best we'd find, since she was giving us a price break from what she normally charges, because we're friends. Will is shocked at how much photography costs and suggests that we just have friends and family email us their digital pictures..... umm... hell no? Sorry, but I am too obsessed with pictures and memories and scrapbooks to have no one there to photograph the most important day of our lives!
So, now I'm on a mission to contact other photographers and prove to him that the quote isn't bad, considering what others are charging... and low and behold... I find Melissa Smith! I had some business cards of photographers in a file, from various wedding events I've been to, and I just started contacting them. Melissa got back to me right away, and once I told her about our photography struggles, and about our wedding/honeymoon budget getting slashed due to the trips to Florida and me being laid off, she agreed to shoot our wedding for $500! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT??? I couldn't! I was so excited yesterday, I could barely contain myself!!! I probably shouldn't be advertising this, because it is not something she normally does. Most of her packages start around $700, but I think that's still a lot more reasonable than most of the others out there. To me, she is an angel, and if there is any money leftover when September rolls around, I will definitely be spending it with her! Her work is amazing and I absolutely cannot wait to have her be a part of our big day!!
Check out her work! www.melissasmithphotography.ifp3.com
A quick re-cap of our photography issues..... A good family friend is, or was, a professional photographer and my Dad and I both assumed that he would shoot our wedding, as a gift to us, so in our original wedding budget we only accounted for the cost of materials ($500 or less). About 3 months into planning, my Dad actually got around to asking him about it, and he said he'd really rather not do it. Since he doesn't do it professionally anymore, he doesn't have a lot of the equipment he'd need and I wouldn't be happy with his work, and he would rather just come and enjoy himself at our wedding, considering he has known me my whole life. So we go to Plan B.... Will's parents recommend a family friend of theirs, saying that he does weddings all the time and they were sure he'd be more than happy to do it. A couple more months go by.... he basically says the same thing. So now it is almost March and we still have no photographer...... Plan C: I ask a friend from college, who was a photojournalism major, if her and her roommate, also a photographer, could do it and how much they would charge, explaining that we basically have NO photography budget. They email me back a quote, which seemed a little high, but I assumed it would be the best we'd find, since she was giving us a price break from what she normally charges, because we're friends. Will is shocked at how much photography costs and suggests that we just have friends and family email us their digital pictures..... umm... hell no? Sorry, but I am too obsessed with pictures and memories and scrapbooks to have no one there to photograph the most important day of our lives!
So, now I'm on a mission to contact other photographers and prove to him that the quote isn't bad, considering what others are charging... and low and behold... I find Melissa Smith! I had some business cards of photographers in a file, from various wedding events I've been to, and I just started contacting them. Melissa got back to me right away, and once I told her about our photography struggles, and about our wedding/honeymoon budget getting slashed due to the trips to Florida and me being laid off, she agreed to shoot our wedding for $500! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT??? I couldn't! I was so excited yesterday, I could barely contain myself!!! I probably shouldn't be advertising this, because it is not something she normally does. Most of her packages start around $700, but I think that's still a lot more reasonable than most of the others out there. To me, she is an angel, and if there is any money leftover when September rolls around, I will definitely be spending it with her! Her work is amazing and I absolutely cannot wait to have her be a part of our big day!!
Check out her work! www.melissasmithphotography.ifp3.com
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