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Holy Moley Matrimony

March 24, 2009

While the average college student ventures to a warm, tropical location for Spring Break, I head up north to the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, the place where I call home. Lucky for me I was able to skip out of town early and spend about 10 days at home in Wisconsin. But, let me reassure you, those 10 days were not spent basking in the sun, water skiing in the ocean, or sipping fruity drinks at the pool.

Nearly every day of my Spring Break vacation was spent wedding planning, wedding planning, and more wedding planning. From sun up to sun down we spent the days finalizing details of the “big day,” which is coming up just right around the corner. One of the first days I was home my mom, sister, fiancée, and mother-in-law to be and I attended a bridal show in Milwaukee, WI. The show was filled with vendors offering information about their services and how they can help prepare you for your wedding day. While it was extremely crowded we navigated our way through the hotel ballroom and made it to the end for the finale … a fashion show of wedding gowns! We all had a great time and walked away with new ideas in our heads and stomachs full of cake samples!

Dan and I spent the next few days calling and meeting with several audio visual and instrument rental companies in search of finalizing the equipment rider needed for our reception entertainment.

Once the equipment and instruments had all been rented and finalized, we were able to move on to the more important parts of wedding planning – cake testing! Dan and I traveled to several different bakers in southeastern Wisconsin and taste tested as many cakes as possible! I think that has been my most favorite part so far out of all of the wedding planning activities. Dan had no problem deciding on the flavor of his groom’s cake – chocolate, chocolate, more chocolate, and a little bit of peanut butter. He chose to have a Reese’s peanut butter cup torte be made into a groom’s cake and decorated with a golf and Tiger Woods theme – so predictable! On the other hand, however, we could not decide for the life of us what kind of cake to make the “real” cake. Fortunately my mom’s cousin is an awesome baker and is going to be making our wedding cake for us and doesn’t need us to decide quite yet what flavor of cake we want. I guess this is still TBD!

After cake testing we moved on to linens, favors, programs, and place cards. I have the best mother-in-law to be who is making all of the linens for the reception and helping out with the party favors. While I love arts & crafts stores like Michael’s, Jo-Ann Fabrics, and Hobby Lobby, they aren’t exactly Dan’s favorite stores. He was definitely a sport and didn’t complain once about averaging nearly three stops a day to arts & crafts stores. Our missions were ribbon for the programs, paper for the place cards and favor boxes, fabric for the table clothes and napkins, and calligraphy pens. The fabric that we found and fell in love with is of course discontinued so we spent hours calling stores from Wisconsin all the way to Florida in hopes of finding enough yards to complete the job. We weren’t able to find the paper we wanted for the place cards, so we had them custom designed from the same company that made our invitations. However, we did find the perfect ribbon for the programs and wiped out the entire store’s stock in order to have enough for 250 programs. In addition to several stops at arts & crafts stores, we also visited several hardware stores (more down Dan’s alley) in search of supplies for our alternate guest book that my step-dad and step-brother have agreed to build together. The design is a secret …

While Dan was at work one day I was able to sneak away for a while and have my dress alterations scheduled and have a make-over to figure out the make-up I want to wear for the big day. I was also able to have my mom’s help in looking for shoes for the bridesmaids – which was successful!

Just as the week was coming to an end I received a very exciting phone call from the bridal shop – the flower girl and bridesmaids’ dresses were in! I raced over to the store to pick them up and was relieved by how perfect they turned out. One of the hardest things about picking out dresses for the bridesmaids is that you have to choose the color of the dress based off of a 1 inch color swatch. You have no real idea of how the dress is actually going to turn out when you can’t see the whole dress in the right color until they have all been ordered and delivered. That night the flower girl came over to try on the dress. It fit perfectly and she looks absolutely adorable in the dress. I cannot wait to see her with flowers in her hair walking down the aisle!

While the time I spent at home was jam packed with wedding planning activities, we still found time to spend with both of our families. March is a huge birthday month for my family, so the day before I left we threw a huge party for my brother, sister, step-sister, and grandma who were all born in March. It was such a great ending to a great Spring Break! We had an excellent time with everyone gathered together, which gets harder and harder to do as we continue to grow up and move away from home. Throughout this whole week I realized how lucky Dan and I are to have such wonderful and supportive families who are always and will always be there for us. If it wasn’t for them neither of us would be where we are today and we are so grateful for everything they have done for us individually and as a couple. This day that we have been planning for over a year will be such a special and amazing day as not only Dan and I join our lives together, but we merge our two families together to create an even bigger and stronger family!

P.S. We just booked the honeymoon … we’re going to HAWAII!!!

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