Wedding planning and preparations...

The past several days have been spent in a flurry of activities as we've been making preparations and the final decisions for our upcoming wedding. Invitations and RSVP's have been written, addressed, and are ready to be mailed. I need to make a trip to the post office for several booklets of Christmas themed stamps, get them stuck onto the envies, and return them for mailing. Our wedding vows and actual ceremony has been written and revised a zillion times, before I finally came up with one we both love! We need to schedule an appointment with our minister for further discussions and suggestions.

Earlier in the week, Don and I did a little shopping and christmas/wedding browsing. We purchased a nice pair of black men's slack for him for the wedding and looked for him a pair of new black dress shoes. While, I, on the other hand intend to take inventory of my closet prior to purchasing anything else. I did pull out a beautiful black dinner dress and long sleeve jacket that I could wear. It's a cocktail length dress, beautiful embellished with a silk leaf design, although I'm uncertain if I desire to wear black on my wedding day. I'm thinking red would compliment his black and white attire nicely, perhaps I can find white and red cocktail dress, anyways there are always more decisions, decisions.....

Since we're hosting this small, intimate wedding and reception here in our home, we've decided to keep things as simple, yet elaborate, and as low-cost as possible. I can assure you that attempting to accomplish "simple" and "wedding" all in one event, hasn't been an easy feat! I thought we'd make a checklist of what we want, what we don't want, and go from there... sounds easy enough, until I hear Don say things like, "there may be more people show up" and "we can't turn them away!" I think to myself, "Isn't that the point of sending out invitations and RSVP's? So, you know who's coming and who isn't?" Anyways, we decide to plan for 5 more "unexpected" guests....

We previously decided to decorate our home for Christmas, using the tradition pine green, bright red, and gold color scheme. It will compliment our home decor nicely and any items purchased will be a wonderful reminder of our wedding day year after year.

Having an evening wedding ceremony, scheduled at 6:30 p.m., deciding what foods to serve was probably our biggest challenge. We're thinking we'd both love to greet our guests as they arrive, mingle a bit, have the ceremony, and jump straight into the champagne toast and cutting our wedding cake. Together, we consider all of our options before deciding to skip the unity candle lighting. We decide on offering a few appetizers {finger food style] both a meat, cheese, and veggie tray, and a dessert station consisting of sugar cookies, petit fours, brownies and perhaps, some other christmas themed candies. This will allow us to us to mingle and enjoy the company of our family and friends, be quickly set up vs. having an eleborate wedding dinner to stress out over!

We'll use our wedding cake for our centerpiece on our kitchen table, all dressed up in fine linens, surrounded by charger plates, our frost white Corelle dinnerware, and champagne flutes. Coffee, cold drinks, and champagne for a toast! Then, it's on to eating, drinking, and being merry!

Then, my thoughts turned to entertainment... what to do here? We won't have room for a band, a dj, then it hit me! Couldn't we design a couple of video cds using photographs of all our years together, pictures of times spent with family and friends throughout the years? We could use our favorite love songs for background music and this could play on the TV screen without anyone needing to babysit it! Sounds like a great plan to me, now I need to start getting that prepared!

Speaking of preparations....

Yesterday, I raked and cleaned our front yard. Our trees there are still filled with leaves and with wind continuing to blow, the yard was quickly recovered a few hours later. Hopefully the weather will remain warm enough to continue this process for another week and begin to decorate while the temperatures remain in the high 40's/low 50 degree range. While taking a few breaks from raking leaves, I made a couple quick sketches of how I envision the front of our home to look on our big day. Here's a sampling of those:



After calling my hairdresser, Rita, scheduling two hair appointments with her --- one a few weeks prior to the wedding for any cut/coloring that may need done; and the other for styling on my wedding day, sprucing our home up, I began tackling my paper art supplies, cleaning, and clearing but leaving a few of the items out that I'll need to create our party favors, napkin rings, ect. with. Shortly thereafter, Christine and Deb stopped by for a brief visit. We discussed getting together soon to create! Perhaps, I can find some time this week to gather up some supplies, get what I need printed out, and enjoy their company while I work creating those things.

Don arrived home and we decided to have dinner out. Afterwards, we stopped at The Dollar Tree, browsing for ideas for the wedding favors. I stumbled upon some beautiful snowflake frosted votive candle holders that would compliment the frosted coasters I've been coveting for wedding favors. I don't know why I didn't just purchase all that I need instead of the three I did for a floral arrangement I'm planning to create. I did purchase twelve gold trimmed champagne flutes; at $1 each; those were a great bargain. I wiped them out of all that they had so when we're out we'll check a few other Dollar Tree stores for more, providing me the opportunity to purchase more of the candle votives. Anyways, as you can tell, the fun continues... {*very big smile...*}