The Post-Wedding…Facial Hair?

We’re all well aware of the phenomenon of the Post-Wedding-Chop…that is, when brides, who likely have been growing their hair long for months on end to achieve a beautiful updo for their weddings, CHOP their hair off shortly after getting married.  I myself thought I would be running right out to get my hair cut…but we’ve been married almost 6 months and I have yet to do so.  But ladies, have you ever heard of the Post-Wedding…Facial Hair?  No?  Allow me to explain.

This is the phenomenon that occurs with husbands who can grow facial hair at a high rate of speed.  Many of them choose to go fresh-faced for their weddings…ala my own husband:

(Photo by Sarah Immel Photography)

Afterwards, however…instead of a post-wedding-chop, they let their facial hair grow.  Sometimes, for months on end, until they have an epic beard like this one:

Then, they might shave their beard, say, at the end of football season, when their team has just won the Super Bowl.  Now it’s time to focus on the next sports, like March Madness…and baseball.  And if you know how superstitious men get about football…well, baseball, it’s like ten-fold.  If your husband decides not to shave for all of baseball season, you’re looking at like, 7 months out of the year of facial hair.  And even he might get annoyed.  So, he decides to find a player with some superb facial hair (hopefully from his own team) to emulate.  And he does. 

  (Source)

And then you come home from work and are scared shitless at the strange facial hair on your husband’s face.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Wedding Project Revisited: Family Photos

This is technically TWO wedding projects revisited:  our family wedding photo display and the “I Do” letters we used for our engagement pictures and our cake table.

I spent so much time on the family photo display and I LOVED how it turned out at the wedding…

(all 5 of the above photos by Sarah Immel Photography;
all remaining photos in this post are by me)

…so I knew I definitely wanted to incorporate them into our house somehow.  Thus, our “I Do” gallery wall was born!

This wall is to your left when you enter our apartment.  I hung the I Do letters…

And then hung the pictures in various spots all around!

SIGH, some day I’ll get them all to hang straight.  My type-A tendencies mean that I normally don’t go for willy-nilly gallery walls…and truth be told, I’m usually straightening one or the other every time I walk by, but for now, I really do love the way it turned out!  And look, there’s even a brand new picture up there:

Who could that be?!  Hint:  their names are written in calligraphy at the top of the gallery wall.  HA!

Did you find a way to reuse your family wedding photos?

My Best Friend’s Wedding: Shower, Part One

Thus begins a new series here on Little Miss Wedding Planner:  My Best Friend’s Wedding!

My BFF Michelle is getting married this year (whoop, whoop!) and I am her maid matron of honor.  So, you’ll be getting a behind the scenes sneak peek at my life as a bridesmaid.  First up, planning her shower!

[Note:  Michelle, on the off chance you are reading this post, please stop now.  I want there to be a few surprises for you!]

We decided to go with a “Bee” theme because that’s Michelle’s nickname. In fact, I don’t even call her Michelle, so from here on in, she’ll be known as B.  It all started back when I first met her.  Her little sister, Emily, was only three at the time, and she couldn’t say “Michelle.”  She always called her “Bichelle.”  It caught on with some of our friends, and from there it spiraled from Bichelle to B-chelle (emphasizing the B part), and then just to B.  Now we call her Beezus or B and I can’t imagine calling her anything else!

Anyways, back to the shower.  The bridesmaids and I plus B’s mom and future mother-in-law are all planning it. As I’ve said, we decided to go with a “bee” theme to commemorate her nickname.  I sent the invitations out this week and thought you might like to see how they turned out!

I designed everything in Word using fonts from Dafont.com, then printed them out on regular computer paper.

Then I backed them all in black cardstock, popped them in envelopes, and away they went!

B’s mother-in-law had suggested having each guest bring their favorite spice for B. We thought it was a great idea!  I am planning to put together a cute basket for all of the guests to drop their spices in so she can easily take them all home with her.

Address label front:

And back:

I used double-sided tape to attach these labels and so far, no problems from the post office that I’ve heard of.

I also designed some labels for the food table at the shower that will match the invites, plus a few other surprises to tie everything together. I can’t wait to show you how it all turns out!

Have you ever planned a shower?  Share some tips and ideas in the comments!

The Post In Which I Finally Tell You About My New Blog

So, first things first.  I’m not actually done posting here!  I still have a few more posts about some upcoming weddings I’m attending (I’m the matron of honor in one), plus the shower/bachelorette I’m helping throw, plus a few more ways we’ve repurposed some of our wedding projects.  So please don’t dump me from your Google Readers quite yet!  I’ll still be updating, though not as frequently as I have been in recent months.  I definitely still love weddings and hope to continue posting here for a long time to come!

Second things second:  time for a little sap.

THANK YOU.  Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of my readers who have supported me throughout this process.  It has been so wonderful to be part of such a fabulous community of wedding bloggers.  It’s kind of hard to put into words—I definitely can’t explain it to most people in my real life, nor do most of them understand—that bond of friendship that forms between bloggers.  It’s a phenomenon, really.  So thank you to all of you who have laughed with me, cried with me, bitched with me, and helped me wade through the waters and wrap my head around this huge, life-changing event.  I lived for your comments and I loved reading every single one.  Your kind words and support left me feeling like I was never alone.  So thank you to each and every one of you for taking a peek into my life and letting me share our wedding with you.  Truly, I’m so grateful. 

Third things third, MY NEW BLOG!!!!!  Drum roll please…

www.thebookwormwife.com

Yep, I jumped off the ledge into my own domain.  And I’m so glad I did!  So head on over and check it out.  Please know that it’s still a work in progress, so there will be many more updates to the look and design in the coming months.  But I just couldn’t wait any longer to share it with you!  You’ll find posts about my life, marriage, home décor, food, fitness, and most of all, books & reading, because above all else, my nerdish “bookworm” tendencies help define who I am.  You might find the posts there a bit different from the ones posted here, as I’m trying to let the “real” me come across more in my blogging (not that you didn’t get the real me here, but, for example, I swear like a sailor in real life so some of my posts there might be a bit more crass).  I hope you’ll follow along on our next adventures!

THANK YOU for reading.

With love,
Little Miss Wedding Planner

*All photos in this post by Sarah Immel Photography.

The Post In Which I Bitch A Lot

So, there WERE actually some minor details that went wrong on our wedding day, which I alluded to briefly here.  While we had a beautiful, wonderful day and I wouldn’t change a thing about the events that transpired, there were two aesthetic issues that left me feeling…not so happy.  In the interest of full disclosure, I’m going to talk about them here so I can put them to bed once and for all.

We’ll start with the minor issue:  the chargers for our dinner tables.  Remember when we had our tasting and decided what our tablescape would look like?  We decided to go with gold runners and gold chargers to bring out the gold aspects of our color scheme, as the flowers were going to be red.  It was going to look something like this:

Photo by me

When we arrived at the venue, I was pretty much in a whirlwind…so it wasn’t until dinner that I sat down and noticed this:

Um, yeah.  There’s no chargers there.  No chargers…that we had paid extra money to rent.

I previously mentioned that on the day before our wedding, my sister and I had gone to the venue to do some set-up of our family wedding photo display.  When we left, I felt really…harried, because the venue coordinator wasn’t there when we were, the room was a mess, and no one seemed to know what was going on.  As it turns out, no one did.  My mom spoke to our coordinator after we realized the chargers weren’t there, and she was so apologetic and actually, downright horrified that her staff had forgotten the chargers.  She spoke to the head set-up guy right away (who was also there to assist her at our actual reception), and he said that he had seen the chargers on the event order but had forgotten to put them out.  Our coordinator had taken a VACATION DAY* the day before our wedding, so the event order had never been double-checked.

Honestly, I wasn’t too upset about it.  They gave us our money back for the rented chargers PLUS gave us  several gift certificates for their local restaurants to make up for it, and Maria, our coordinator, was so apologetic.   While I LOVED the aesthetics of the chargers and was disappointed they weren’t there, no one really noticed so in the end, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

The flowers, however, are a different story.

Let me first preface this by saying that YES, our flowers were beautiful and YES, the room looked great, and NO, no one noticed or knew about any of the problems with them. 

You’ll remember that I had previously raved about how much I loved our florist…and that fact remains true.  She was a charming woman who I felt got our vision through and through. We reviewed what I wanted several times and she took copious notes, plus copies of the inspiration pictures I had printed out to give to her.  I should have listened to those tiny alarm bells going off in my head when she took her notes on scrap paper, though…as later, it was a clear indication that maybe she wasn’t paying as close attention as I thought she was.   Hold on to your hats, kids, because I’m not sure you’ll believe the stark differences in what I thought I was getting and what we ended up with.

First up, my bouquet…

…was supposed to be RED.

As in, all of the flowers in my bouquet were supposed to be red.  RED.  Like my bridesmaids bouquets, just bigger with more roses and the like. 

Secondly, the flower girl…

…was supposed to be carrying a pomander.  Like this one—only in ivory/gold tones—which is the inspiration picture I gave to my florist.  She even confirmed the size with me several times!

(Source)

You’ll notice she’s carry a mini-bouquet.  To which she, as a 6 year old, was like, “What the hell**, Aunt Amy?  I thought I was having a ball like my sucker ball I practiced with last night?”

Photo by family friend

Lastly, and the biggest error…the one that made me make a beeline straight for my mom as soon as we arrived at the reception and tell her “I hate the flowers!”

Our centerpieces.

The low ones were beautiful, and EXACTLY what I pictured.  So, there’s that, at least.

The tall ones, though?  Well, let’s just say there’s a STARK difference between this:

(Source)

And this:

THREE MEASLEY STICKS.  I WAS SO PISSED ABOUT THIS.

Hello, fall wedding?  HUGE branches?  Hello, hello, hello?!  What about the first picture evokes ANYTHING in the second picture?

I got over it quickly and went about enjoying the evening.  I didn’t want to let this ruin it, and most if not all of our guests never noticed my displeasure. But honestly, for a few weeks afterwards, it was one of the only things about the wedding I could think about.   So stupid, right?  I mean, we had such a wonderful day, and here I was concentrating on the dumb flowers…something that I, admittedly, had said I didn’t really care about it.  But the truth is…

You care.  You do.  When you’ve put months into planning an event and then expect it to have a certain aesthetic, and that aesthetic falls short, you care. 

I’m over it now and I am able to look back at the pictures and think, it doesn’t matter, because our wedding was beautiful and gorgeous regardless and I know how amazing it looked and was.    But I wanted to blog about this to let you unmarried gals know—no matter how prepared you are, no matter how well your plans have gone—something will go wrong and it is OK to be upset about it for a hot minute.  Try not to let it ruin your night (I was really good about moving right along), but it IS ok to dwell a little bit after the fact.

And since we’re being truthful here:  I’ve never had the guts to confront my florist about this.  I know I should, because we paid a lot of money, but I don’t know how to tell a woman who I really do LIKE so much that her work was sub-par.***

So, that’s that.  It feels good to get it off my chest and be done with it.  I love how beautiful our wedding turned out, but I think it’s important to be a realist about what really went down. Now it’s your turn:  anything go wrong like this at your nuptials?

*Listen, everyone’s entitled to a vacation now and then.  But the day before an event like a wedding?  I don’t know…if it was me, I probably wouldn’t plan a day off the day before an event that I’d been working on with the bride and groom for TWO YEARS.
**She didn’t say hell.  She’s 6, people.  But you catch my drift.
***And we’re not the only ones.  Brad’s barber—er, barbette?—actually used the same florist for her wedding and had not so great results, also.

All photos by Sarah Immel Photography unless otherwise noted.

P.S.  Did you notice my new button at the top of the page?  Now you can click on “Wedding Recaps” to find links to every recap I wrote! 

Wedding Project Revisited: Advice Cards

Remember those advice cards I made for everyone to fill out at the rehearsal dinner?

(Photo by Sarah Immel Photography)

Well, we still have ‘em and we LOVE going through them when we hit one of the milestones listed on the envelopes.  I thought you might like to see how we’re storing and saving them!

We keep the unopened cards in one of the baskets we used for our “Tears of Joy” tissue packets at the wedding.  Man, I love these little baskets!  They’re so stylish and the envelopes fit perfectly inside them.

As for the cards we’ve opened? We keep those in a simply black photo album.  They fit perfectly!  And since there’s usually two cards to open for each occasion, this little album works great.

We store the album and the unopened cards underneath one of our side tables in the living room.  You can see we’re using another of those baskets to hold all of our coasters.

The cards have been SO fun to read.  This was the list of occasions we used (the ones that are bolded are cards we’ve already opened):

On Your Wedding Night
On the First Night of Your Honeymoon
On the Night You Come Home from Your Honeymoon
On the Night of Your First Married Fight
On the Night One of You Burns the Dinner
On Your First Night as Homeowners
On Your First Anniversary
On Your Fifth Anniversary
On Your Tenth Anniversary
On Your Fifteenth Anniversary
On Your Twentieth Anniversary
On Your Twenty-fifth Anniversary
On Your Fiftieth Anniversary
On the Day You Find Out You’re Expecting
On the Birth of Your First Child
On the First Night Home with the New Baby
On Your First Child’s First Day of School
On Your First Child’s High School Graduation
On Your First Night as Empty Nesters
On the Birth of Your Second Child
On the Night One of You Loses Their Job
On the Night One of You Leaves Their Job
On the Death of a Parent
On the Death of Your Animal

Some of the cards have been funny, some have been heartfelt, and some have been a mixture of both.  My favorite one so far came from my dear friend (and one of our ceremony readers!), Jordan:

(And such a lovely reader she was, too!  We actually fist-bumped
through the air across the church from each other when she was finished. 
It was awesome.)
(Photo by Sarah Immel Photography)

She wrote On The Night One of You Burns the Dinner…

“Throw it out and order a pizza…on me!”  She included $20 in the envelope.

And Jordan, we did just that.  Thanks, doll!

What fun projects have carried over from your wedding plans?