My First Ever STD....

So.  We booked the resort.  Now we needed to get out information to our guests ASAP because we only had about a month in which our guests could put down deposits and get our negotiated and discounted rate.  Luckily I had been doing my research on Save the Dates (STDs....the good kind). 

Folks, meet my new best friend.  Etsy.  If you've never been to etsy.com....go right now.  Even before I started wedding planning, I was obsessed with Etsy, and now it has become a full-on addiction.  All things wonderful can be found on Etsy, and it is all handmade.  I could not love it more. 

Anyway. 

At first I was drawn to Boarding Pass STDs:

Sproullie Designs



Or Passport STD:

 Sproullie Designs

Both are cute, no?  And all customizable.  But the more I looked, the more I saw.  And after seeing hundred and hundreds of them, I was over it.  Wanted something different. 

Then I saw these Skyline Drawings:

Architette

Love.  I really love her work.  Something about the simplicity of the black and white, but the cuteness of the little stars....it just speaks to me.  But I prefer the skyline drawing of cities that have more visual (and vertical) interest and didn't love the one of the generic beach scene.  So I decided against that one (but ordered other prints for non-wedding purposes!).

Then I came across custom maps.  First I saw this one:

LHCalligraphy

Georgeous.  Whimsical, perfect for the light feeling I was going for, but still beautiful.  This seller does really amazing work.  But the price was not so right for me.  So I kept looking, and came up with this one:

EfineStationary

Also super cute and it had a price I could handle.  So I worked the owner, gave her some information to customize it, and this is what we finally settled on.  She was very easy to work with and was very accommodating with my short time-frame.  I thought it was unique and I liked how it came out.  So we put those together with an information sheet drawn up by our travel agent, and sent them off to our guests.  Here's how it came out:

Then we just had to sit back and wait for our friends and family to book....

Paradise Found

So I got the ring.  I kind of relaxed once he had engaged.  Figured I had time to kill before working out a wedding plan.  I always knew I wanted a destination wedding, and just had to find out if Chris was on the same page.  Was REALLY hoping he was, because I just was not feeling a big at-home wedding. 

When we talked about it, and Chris agreed.  I am not anti-wedding or anti-bride or anything of the sort.  I just don't like a lot of attention, and frankly, the idea of 300 of our nearest and dearest staring at me as I walked down the aisle made me break out in hives.  Not to mention the money.   And Chris felt the same way, thankfully.  I started doing the math in my head and realized I needed to get started planning quickly, because I didn't want a marathon engagement, but I also wanted to give our guests as much time to plan as possible.

So.....where to go?  There's the Virgin Islands.  Would be nice to get married in the US Virgin Islands because it's a US territory, which makes all of the legalities easier.  And no passports needed. 

There's Jamaica.  Beautiful beaches.  Enough said.

Aruba.  Mexico.  Bahamas.  The Dominican Republic.  Costa Rica.  HAWAII.

Source:  http://www.world-of-beaches.com/

Oh, Hawaii.  I would have loved Hawaii in all of its island luau glory.  Would have been wonderful for Chris and I.  We didn't have a specific budget in mind, but we knew it would just be too expensive to ask of our guests.   

So I started doing my homework.  Countless hours spent on the internets trying to figure this out.  Turns out this is a larger task than it may sound.  If we had a certain attachment to a place, it would have been easier, but we didn't.  And looking at hundreds of resorts in all different places was getting me nowhere, so I enlisted the help of a travel agent specializing in destination weddings, Susan.

Susan pushed me into reality pretty quickly.  I didn't give her much to work with - somewhere with a beach that was affordable for our guests, and all-inclusive.  She narrowed in on Mexico very quickly.  It's fairly economical, which help assuage the guilt I felt over forcing our guests to travel and pay to attend our wedding.  It's easy to get to....and doesn't require a day of travel, which is important because a lot of guests will only come for 3-4 nights.  Most of the resort are all-inclusive, which is not necessarily the case with many of the Caribbean islands.   

Still, I wasn't completely sold, so I had Susan price out a few locations.  Mexico really was the most economical choice, so we just decided to go with it.  Susan has a favorite resort, and was heavily pushing it.  Of course, I'm fully aware that there is a relationship with the resort that Susan is benefiting from, but honestly, at that point I didn't really care.  I was so ready to just nail down the date the the place and get going with the rest of it.  And the place looked amazing anyway and the price Susan was able to get us was fairly decent, all things considered.

Once we chose Mexico, we had to choose a date.  It was already September, and the spring seemed too soon, not for us to plan and travel, but too quickly to expect our guests to plan a trip and pay for it.  So Spring was out.  Summertime in Mexico just didn't seem like an awesome idea for two reasons:  HOT and HURRICANES.  Yikes.  So that pushed us all the way to at least November.  November can technically still be hurricane season, but December seemed not that great because it is Christmastime and people have other plans, and we definitely didn't want to push it back to 2012 (and risk Armageddon), so November it was. 

So.  November 2011.  Azul Sensatori, Riviera Maya, Mexico.  I cannot wait.

He Put a Ring On It

So, we got engaged.  Of course we did, otherwise I would have no business writing a wedding blog, no?

Anyway, it happened without much fanfare.  Which is what I preferred.  I didn't want him to do it anywhere public really.  Well, at least not anywhere public and crowded.  One random Tuesday night he locked himself and our 2 cats in the bedroom.  Not something he normally does, so I knew something was up.  I stood outside the door, knocking and asking what was going on.  When Chris finally opened the door, my sweet boy Dexter leaped out of his arms and ran underneath the bed in the guest bedroom.  I pretty much figured it out right away since they were all acting so weird.

I would like to pretend that everything went perfectly - that Chris slipped the special sparkly collar around Dexter's neck (with the ring of course) and Dexter came trotting over to me and we all had this beautiful moment while I read the special "Will you marry me?" medallion affixed to the collar.  Didn't happen that way.  Instead, I chased Dex around, pulled him from out under the bed, and then Chris and I basically held him down while trying to get the damn collar off of him so I could retrieve that diamond ring before something truly bad happened.  But it was a cute moment (to the extent that two sweaty, red-faced folks and one pissed-off black cat can be cute), and really, more befitting of us than a truly romantic moment would have been.  For better or worse, we just are not that couple. I wish we had gotten a picture of Dexter with the ring, but it just wasn't happening.  This is as close as the two of them will ever come again:

 Taking a picture of a diamond is hard.  As is taking a picture of Dex.

So now I wear a diamond ring on my left hand.  I always wondered what it would feel like to have a diamond ring on that finger.  I saw all of my girlfriends get married one after another about 10 years ago, and when we would get together back then we would all sit and pass the rings around, trying them all out on our own hands.  But I always wanted to know how it truly felt to have that ring on my hand, bearing the weight and meaning of a man's love and promise of a lifetime together.  Now I know.  Chosen.