Oh, hello there.

If you still have this blog in your reader, hello! It has been a long, long time since I posted here, and I’ve moved on to greener pastures. E and I did end up getting married, in August, 2011, in a beautiful, fun, meaningful day that was bursting with joy. Now, we’re settling into everyday life and trying to find our path in a world that is very much the same as it was before we got married, and yet so different.

I’m now writing at http://workoflove.wordpress.com, and I hope you’ll join the conversation there.

Thanks for your comments and thoughts as I muddled my way through wedding planning and all it entailed!

Invitations, Part 1: Pre-game

This past Friday night, E and I spent the night around our dining table with a good friend, drinking wine, eating cookies, and stuffing wedding invitations.  It took a long time – especially when you consider the fact that we had relatively few invitations with 55 – and by the time we were done, I thought I’d never want to look at the damned things again.  But when we went to the post office to drop them off the next day (more on that later), I was a little sad to hand them off.

Invitations were the wedding-related project I’d been most looking forward to.  Paper goods are what catch my eye on wedding-porn blogs, and I love seeing other people’s invitations show up in my mailbox.  So, this was a big deal for us.  Going into it, we had a few goals for our invitations.  We felt that they should:

• Set the tone for the event to come.  We’ve managed to avoid talking about our wedding plans with most of our extended friends and families (we’re both pretty private/prone to avoid hype) and our save-the-dates were pretty nondescript, so the invitation moment was one we felt could really help to set a mood, and to set our guests’ expectations.
• Reflect us, our personalities, and our aesthetic preferences.  Loathe as we are to admit it, we’re pretty kitschy people.  E will be quick to say that it’s really just that I am a kitschy person, but we have had an origami heart banner hanging in our living room since our anniversary last August because E keeps refusing to let me take it down, so I think it’s safe to say that we are kitschy people.
• Convey important information to guests. Duh, right?  Well, we’re having a cocktail reception with heavy hors d’ouevres and stations, so it was important to warn guests of this fact. To be honest, we will be having more than enough food for people to stuff themselves with, but I think if you don’t warn people that you’re not serving a sit-down meal, they’ll feel like they didn’t eat enough, even if they did.  I’m basically an expert on human behavior, okay? Gosh.
• Be cohesive.  Similar to setting the stage for the event, I wanted the elements of the invitation suite to work together and also to work with other elements of the event.  This is a no-brainer, but it was an important goal from the beginning, and I feel it’s important to mention the fact that we’ve been thinking of ways to coordinate our invitation elements with each other and then carry those themes and design elements into the rest of the event from the very beginning.
• Not be expensive. As much as I love, love, love pretty paper, I couldn’t justify allocating a large amount of our budget to it, especially since they will, of course, ultimately end up in the garbage.  We have other priorities, like booze.

With these goals in mind, we started thinking about process.  I felt pretty sure that I wanted to do the bulk of the design work myself.  I’m something of a frustrated amateur graphic designer.  I’ve spent the last 10-ish years of my life designing stuff for a vast array of online sites and printed projects, but I’ve never had any formal training.  It’s a little intimidating to dive into designing a wedding invitation suite when your brother-in-law is a (professional) graphic designer and you work in a (non-design department in a) design firm.  Luckily, I had memories of all the sick-nasty-awesome signature banners I made when I was on various message boards as a teenager to bolster me. F*ck yeah!

Early on, we agreed to use a postcard for an RSVP card for practical, financial and environmental reasons.  One less item (envelope) to worry about, and less postage to boot!  I stumbled upon this vintage postcard and an idea started brewing:

That is the entrance to Lake Compounce, the nation’s oldest continuously operating amusement park and the place where E and I first met.  It looks a lot different today, but that roller coaster is still there, so it’s immediately recognizable.  We both really, really liked the look of this postcard and the sentimental notions attached to it. And, just like that, we had our RSVP card front and a starting point for our invitations.

Next I’ll talk about designing the other components of the invitation suite, including some hand-drawn elements on the main invitation card and the back of the RSVP card!  Stay tuned…

Invitation to Design

Over the weekend, I finally sat down and attempted to translate the invitation ideas we’ve been talking about to an actual design in Photoshop. I am not a graphic designer, but I’ve been making banners and websites and other fun things for the web ever since high school, when I moderated a Harry Potter message board (yep) and taught myself Photoshop and HTML. Nowadays, I’m more than rusty when it comes to web programming, but I find reasons to open Photoshop enough (even if I’m still using the antiquated CS) that I know my way around.

So anyway. We’ve been talking about invitations for a long time, and about the ways we hope they’ll set the mood for our wedding and help to get people excited. There’s also a need to convey a lot of information – namely, that we aren’t serving dinner – in a small space. And we wanted the invitations to feel intimate and personal, and to nod to our history as a couple.

I spent a lot (a lot) of time on the invitations this weekend, but luckily they are all designed and ready to be sent to the printer once I take another look at them (by the time I went to bed last night, my eyeballs were crying in pain). I’ll upload a little preview later, and talk about the specifics. One of the happiest surprises was how involved E got in the process. This was his last weekend of schoolwork for the semester, so mostly he was writing a paper in the living room while I was tooling away on PS in the bedroom, but every time I came out into the kitchen with another printout with some minor thing changed, he gave really thoughtful input and owned his opinions. This from a guy who usually refuses to comment on any aesthetic decisions. I was proud of him, and of our collaboration, and of the final product. I can’t wait to get everything back and see it all come together with the final products rather than with hastily printed copy-paper-proofs.

I’m also excited that E is finally done with this semester and I get to have my righthand man back, but that’s another story. Seriously, we went on our first date-date in MONTHS on Friday night, and it was so awesome. I can’t wait to be greedy with his time, at least for a little while.

Planning meeting #1

On Saturday, hours before I embark on another friend’s sure-to-be-raucous bachelorette party, E and I are finally, finally meeting with out venue for our first planning meeting. This was supposed to happen months ago. Whoops! It turns out, we’re both pretty low key about the wedding and our expectations, though I will feel a little bit better about the flow of our planning once we can ask a bunch of questions and start making decisions on things like the menu.

When I spoke with our day-of coordinator (provided by the venue, and one of the reasons we went with this location!), she said to bring our binder, information on all of our vendors, and our questions. We have the questions, sure, but we sort of don’t really have a binder, and we only have one other vendor (our photographer) that we’ve booked, and we don’t really plan to hire too many other vendors. We’re planning to handle the music, the favors, and the flowers, and pretty much everything else we need is covered by the venue.

I do, however, plan to start printing and organizing some of the inspiration and ideas we’ve had to put into a binder and bring with us, in case we need to refer to them or to use while we talk to our families when we see them while we’re up yonder (planning a wedding from a distance means a lot of emailed invitation photos and “No, no, no, that OTHER email from a couple weeks ago with the kraft paper envelopes!!!”). But… I don’t know what else to put in there?

I am clearly not good at this game, ha!

DOUBLE DIGITS!

That’s all for now. More tomorrow. After I do or do not get up for the Royal Wedding.

Twenty-five.

So, I’m sitting here eating my salad for lunch (Springtime Saladtime!), and it just occurred to me that I am 25. Like, I speared some romaine, raised it to my mouth and thought, “Huh. I’m twenty-five years old.” All articulated like that. Twen. Ty. Five. Years. Old. I guess it just sunk in that I am solidly in my mid-twenties. The decade of finding oneself and settling down and all that other stuff is halfway done, and I am (hopefully) done with school, I’m getting married, I have a weird little cat and I am working a grown up job. Things seem to be trucking along as I thought they would when I was 14 and had no idea what “normal” was for adults.

I do feel like an adult, these days, or at least as much as I think anyone feels like an adult. And I think this whole wedding thing is helping with that. It’s forcing me to think about what I believe in, define my community, and stick up for myself when dealing with members of that community and vendors. For that, I am grateful. I also think it’s helping E and I define ourselves as a unit. Like, yeah, we’ve been dating for almost 5 years, and we’ve been living together for almost 3 years, but we’ve still been operating as two individuals who happen to like each other. Now, the wedding and all of the stuff surrounding us is forcing us to deal with things we’ve avoided — holidays, family expectations, etc. — because we were “only” dating.

I’m sure that these feelings and changes will continue until and after the wedding. It’s exceedingly nice, though, to have had E as a partner in crime for my twenties, and to do all of this self-discovery and change and stuff with him by my side. In the last 5 years, we’ve attended 5 schools and lived in 3 states between us, and in a lot of ways, we’re both different people than we were when we were 20. But, we’re fundamentally the same, and we are lucky to have known each other so intimately through all of this. It’s taken a lot of work to get here, but it’s been worth it. And the rest of our twenties will be worth it, and so forth.

Engagement Photography Brainstorming

We are starting to get down to business with this whole wedding planning thing, and with the date a mere 3.5 months away, it’s about time. I’ve been brainstorming invitations, sourcing inspiration for tablescapes and flowers, and my sisters are busily plotting things like showers and bachelorette parties. Right now, we are trying to decide where we’d like to do our engagement photos, and it is proving surprisingly difficult.

We are considering 3 main options right now:

1. Coney Island: E and I met while working at an amusement park in college, so of taking our photos among what’s left of Coney Island’s attractions would be really fun. The only tricky part is that neither of us has… ever actually been there. I know! Bad New York City dwellers. So, if we go this route, we are planning to head down there sometime before the session so we get a feel for the place. (example!)

2. Flushing-Corona Meadows Park (World’s Fair Grounds): I (and E to a lesser extent) am a big giant World’s Fairs nerd, and we both love the World’s Fair Grounds out here in Queens. Better known today as the location of the US Open and CitiField, home of the Mets, the park is huge and houses many remnants from the 1939-40 and 1964-65 World’s Fairs, including the Unisphere! We visit the park pretty regularly to bring visitors out to see the New York City Panorama, to go to the Queens Zoo, and to hang out with the fun ruins there. (example!)

3. Astoria Park and the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden: This is the waterfront park in our neighborhood (much of the coastline along the East River in Queens is made up of lovely parks!), and where we watch fireworks on the Fourth o’ July, picnic when the whether is nice in spring, and go for walks and runs together and separately. It’s a pretty park on the water, in between two awesome bridges, and it has lovely Manhattan views. The Bohemian Beer Garden is this awesome, 100-year-old outdoor bar, basically, with old trees and a giant stone wall and picnic tables. We pretty much live there in the summer. And, on Sunday evenings, they have a band playing swing music and folks (some of whom actually KNOW HOW TO DAAAANCE, unlike me) go and dance and have fun. (Astoria Park example! And another! No examples at the beer garden, though, apparently people don’t associate beer with love. They are wrong.)

So, at some point soon we have to make a decision. Each is appealing for different reasons (and E is leaning towards Coney Island, while I am leaning towards the World’s Fairgrounds, ha), and our photographers, who are absolutely wonderful in general, refuse to make the decision for us! The nerve.

I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.

Sometimes I don’t particularly like my wedding.  Sometimes it seems frivolous and far away and expensive and, well, silly.  Especially when life in general is hard.  Right now, a close family member is having some serious financial trouble and our relatively modest wedding is feeling particularly expensive and ridiculous.  And, in general, it sometimes seems strange to be planning this wedding, which the WIC claims will be our One Perfect Day, when the grinding reality of everyday life can seem so tedious and tiresome.  Lately, I am feeling worn out, and the thought of blocking hotel rooms and designing invitations and finding shoes to wear just seems like a huge waste.

And yet we are due to get married in 4 months and 1 week.  Our next big venue deposit is coming due in about a month, and sooner than later we have to start ticking off things on our to-do list like, oh, invitations and playlists and suits and such.  But tonight I need to open a bottle of wine, organize the new (old) bookshelf I just brought home from my mom’s house, and not think about the wedding.  I know the wedding will be lovely, and fun, and an event that we will remember in good times and in bad.  And even though there seems always to be something awful happening in or on the periphery of our lives, the wedding will be something to buoy us up, when it is going on and in the future.  But right now, I don’t particularly like it. So there.

Save the anxiety.

We haven’t sent out the save-the-dates yet.  We’ve had them in our hands for like… 2 weeks? now and they’re still sitting on the dining table.  Like 98% of them have been addressed and stamped and are good to go! But they haven’t made it out the door yet.  A bunch have been delivered to friends and family members we’ve seen since they came in, but that’s not very exciting.

Aside from the usual address snafus and inferiority complexes about handwriting, etc., I have also begun having a nagging feeling that they are useless.  I mean, we all know they’re useless. Just one more thing to get thrown out, and, even more than that, a piece of paper that is saying exactly the same thing (just more vaguely) as another piece of paper that will go in the mail in a few months!  And several people of the generation preceding my own have made comments about how they don’t get the save-the-dates. Okay. I don’t want to field phone calls from people thinking the save-the-date is our strange, guessing-game invitation.

And, frankly, I’m nervous about putting the wedding out into the world.  People, I think, are vaguely aware that we’ve set a date, and some of them know more detail than that, but in general I kind of like the wedding being this private little thing.  I feel like, once it gets out to a wider circle, it won’t be our exciting little sort-of secret. And then we’ll have to start dealing much more directly with outside folks’ expectations. Sigh.

Annnnnd, the addressing.  I’ve been keeping it pretty informal, but there are all these etiquettey things that we have to deal with. Unresolved things, like +1′s and children and whatnot. And apparently the new thing is for married women to use their born name and married name in tandem on Facebook, but everywhere else to just use their married name or whatever and it is MESSING WITH MY HEAD. Like really, if you’re going to change your name, that’s cool.  But they have this neat little feature where you can also input your past name or w/e so that you come up in search results if people search for your born name.  You don’t have to use your born name as an additional last name for people to be able to find you, and that way you won’t be confusing those of us trying to respect your naming conventions!

So, the short of it is, I’m stressing about save-the-dates and starting to wonder if we shouldn’t just nix them altogether.  I mean, we spent about 35 bucks on them, including postage, so it’s not a huge loss, but we still spent some dough on them.  I think, ultimately, that they just need to go in the mail so I can stop nitpicking them.

Put this on the list of things I did not think would be this complicated.

On being ready

It is amazing what a little time will do for your wedding planning outlook.  This fall, after a year of stalled wedding plans, when we were finally, FINALLY getting around to contacting our first venue to officially cancel our reservations, we called off our engagement.  It had been too much stress and pressure and to-do, and I never felt like I had E’s help or like we were even on the same page.  We decided to just quietly set our Facebook relationship status back to In a Relationship (although we are now In a Domestic Partnership, which I like better than Engaged, anyway), put the ring in a safe place, and not talk about weddings for a while.  Sure, there were times when we mentioned the prospect, but in general we stopped facing the wedding and instead turned and faced each other.  We had some Big Talks, we worked through a lot of issues, and we are in a much better, stronger place than we were 6 months ago.

We went to Tampa, Florida, in January, to visit E’s grandmother along with his brother, N, and N’s girlfriend.  While we were there, we talked about getting married.  It was on our minds because the night we drove up to Connecticut to board a plane with the rest of the group should have been our wedding night.  Luckily, it wasn’t, because there was a really nasty snow/ice/wintry mix thing going on, but still.  We’d gotten to thinking.

And so, in Florida, on a lovely 60-some-odd degree evening on a porch in a retirement community full of identical porches, we looked at each other and decided, once again, to get married.  It felt more like a joint decision than the ambush proposal the first time around.  It felt exciting, and happy, and really, really peaceful, which is a nice way to feel about the decision to spend forever with someone.

When we got home, I pulled the ring out of its hiding space and handed it to E, and he slipped it on my finger and we giggled a little bit.  And a week later we had a venue and a date, and a month later we had a photographer and a dress, and things have been rolling onward since.

To say this process has been a complete 180 from the first wedding plan would be an understatement.  Everything has been smooth and easy, whereas we avoided our original plans and agonized over the simplest of decisions.  Even those that we made often didn’t end up feeling right (see: my original wedding dress, which I cried over and decided I hated 24 hours after I bought it).  Part of the newfound ease comes from having done things like choosing a nearly-all-inclusive venue, which really eliminates a lot of headaches. And the rest of that ease is because E and I are ready.  We are in a good place.  We are both fully onboard the wedding and marriage train (even when I want to  derail the train for how expensive it is).  And that is the benefit of time and distance and personal growth.  I am so glad we called off our engagement for a little while and gave ourselves some time to breathe without the specter of the wedding taunting us from the sidelines.  The marriage was always the ultimate goal, but we needed some more time to get to that point.  It gave us some perspective and let us work on our relationship and not an event.  And now it’s a whole different ballgame, as far as wedding planning goes, and we are swinging for the fences.

Three days following our wedding will be our fifth anniversary of dating.  Yes, it’s been a long time, but we started young and have had a lot of life transitions to work through to get to this point.  And the next transition — no matter how big or how small — will be our transition to married life, together.  It’s about time. It’s the right time.