Phew. This is probably post-party exhaustion, but I'm wiped out today, and generally not feeling so hot. Pre-period body changes have made me extremely clumsy, overly emotional, feeling gross because I'm breaking out everywhere, my boobs almost too sensitive to put in a bra, and generally Ready To Be Done with it all. Of course, I was supposed to get my period last weekend (the Saturday before the party) but being stressed out and in go mode has delayed it for a few days... and hopefully not much more than that. I don't really want to have my period at war, thanks. Also, all that nice relaxin has made my back go out worse than it has all year, including fun-filled spasms. It's probably also a reaction to starting to de-stress after this weekend... fortunately, that mostly got wiped out at the chiropractor yesterday and I'm feeling stiff, but not dying.

Things I Learned from Throwing My First Party

• When my parents tell me we haven't bought enough food, DON'T LISTEN. Your eyes and the size of the Costco shopping cart are true compasses.
• Make sure I actually get to spend time with the person/people with whom I am throwing the party. I saw lots of guests at the party, and not much of Nate.
• Your guest list will never be final, nor will it ever be set in stone.
• There are people in your social group who have done this before, better, and more often than you. These people include your family. Use them. Don't be afraid to delegate; just delegate to people you trust.
• If you're going to speech, prep it before the party.
• If you can't prep your speech before the party, Mo bullshits as easily as breathing.
• Sometimes Nate gets stressed out about party-planning too.
• White wine sangria.

Don't let the bullets fool you, our party went really well. We had some last-minute no-shows and some folks changed their RSVP's to No, and my parents decided when they showed up at the house that we hadn't bought enough food, so they went back out and got more... and now we have leftovers for days... but the party itself was great. It was really great to get to finally introduce my awesome family to my awesome friends, and we were totally loved on during the party itself, so I floated on a nice cloud of happy community lurve for the next day or so.

My mom surprised us by giving us one of our engagement pictures, blown up to 8 x 10" and glued to a big piece of posterboard, for our guests to sign. We got signatures from almost everyone, and we're going to frame the whole shebang and hang it up in the apartment. I was really touched and pleased by Mom's thoughtfulness--I keep being surprised when they do these wonderful wedding-related things (visiting so often to help us look at venues, giving me my Grandma's wedding ring--well, that was a request from her to my mom, but still--talking with me about wedding plans and marriage in general). I think part of me still expects them to disapprove of me getting married at this age, but that seems to be entirely in my head now.

Having Nate's family out was great too. They got along famously with my family, and held their own during a traditional Bauman/Day family Drunken Dinner at a restaurant where we drank waaaaay too much wine, sang in harmony with each other, and threw things. Yep, typical us. There were some issues with Josh, Nate's little brother, but nothing to write home about. I'd been anticipating some drama with him, but it ended up manifesting in a different way than I'd thought it would, and Nate and I got some good conversations out of it, so it all worked out in the end.

And people came! They came to the party and drank beer and played kubb and hugged us and bantered and generally had a great time! My parents seemed to really like everyone, and Nate's parents said it was easy to talk to everyone and that everyone made them feel welcome, even though they were in the minority 10% of folks who didn't know anyone at the party other than us. I was really floored by how much people helped out--my mom, dad, and Linda all handled a lot of food stuff, Rachie, Monica, and Kim all did a bunch of food presentation stuff, and the boys did a lot of shopping on Friday and Saturday. It was really incredible to see the community come together and help us out with stuff, unasked.

We're so blessed.

Venue Acquired! ...and a food dilemma

So we've FINALLY found a wedding venue (yes, we've only been engaged for five months and we've got over a year to go, so there isn't much finally about it. But still, I'm an epic procrastinator, so I want to get all this shit done as fast as possible. Bear with me. FINALLY.) We're going to use the Museum of Ventura County. It's really pretty in sort of a mod-Spanish style way, it has indoor and outdoor options, it's totally decorateable, and it's (for Ventura county) fairly affordable.

We just have one issue--food!

The venue has 3 recommended caterers, which is to say, 3 caterers you can use without having to pay a $500 fee. This is the only issue I have with the venue--the only reason I agreed to go with it is because they have three caterers you can choose from, not just one you're required to use. Having good food at the wedding is a pretty high priority for me, but I'm worried about how much the catering is going to cost. We calculated the cost for the mid-level caterer to do a meal for our guest list and it totaled up to the remainder of our budget. So we'd have photographers, a venue, great food, and no decorations, invites, clothing, gifts for the bridal party, rentals... you get the picture. That ain't gonna fly.

We're waiting on a quote from the "value" (AKA, cheaper) caterer, but I can't imagine it's going to be less than $3500. So, here are our options:

• Swallow $500 and self-cater. I absolutely don't want to self-cater, but it's the cheapest option. I don't trust myself, Nate, or our fridge to stand up to preparing food for 150 people the week before we get married, so this is pretty much off the table, but it is, technically, an option. 
• Move the wedding to Friday, rather than Saturday, and pay half as much for the venue, freeing up extra funds for catering. I'm okay with this option, but I'm worried it would be really inconvenient for our families and half of Team Bride, which is coming from 5 hours away--they'd have to take more time off work/school, and that could very possibly suck for them in terms of time, money, and getting behind on work. We'd also have to do the wedding in the evening, and with a lot of folks coming north from LA, would all the guests make it? Traffic's pretty heinous on Friday afternoons, and I'd hate for any of the folks I love to miss the ceremony... or to have to leave work early to make sure they make it at all. 
• Move the wedding to Saturday afternoon, rather than evening, and do tapas/appetizers instead of a full meal. This is another option I'm fine with, but I'm worried my more traditional father would freak out at the idea that we wouldn't be feeding our friends a full meal. 

What do you guys think? I'm kind of at a standstill here--any of these options would work, but I'm not thrilled about the potential screw-ups or problems with any of them.

Stress is not doubt.

Why is the wedding already freaking me out?

*Giggle*

Me: "Sooooo we're thinking of having a Firefly-themed wedding reception."
My mother: *Long pause* "Does that mean I get to wear red cowboy boots?"

Guess I don't have to worry about scandalizing my family with my non-traditional ideas. Well, not my mother, at any rate. 

A nod to tradition. Kinda.

When we were first discussing getting engaged, Nate and I had a conversation about names. He said he didn't care what I did with mine (he'd already had a woman change her name to his, and clearly that didn't turn out well), but he didn't really want to change his.

Nate's last name isn't the one he was born with--he was legally adopted by his stepfather in high school, and had spent a couple of years before that going by a hyphenated version of his biological father's last name and his stepfather's last name, which his mother had taken when they married. Like a lot of Nate's family history, his name is simple on the surface with complicated underpinnings. He loves his stepfather, he likes his last name, and he wants to hang onto it, so the option of both of us changing our last names to a mutual one is off the table.

I'm fine with that. My main concern at the time was that he didn't have strong feelings about what I did with mine, because I had already pretty much made up my mind.

I'm keeping my last name. It's something I've planned on doing even before Nate and I got together, and there's an added bonus that I don't really like the way my last name sounds with his anyway... but you know, even if he had an awesome last name like "Bonesaw" or "Runswithwolves" or something, I'd still probably hang onto my birth name.

It's always something I've been pretty certain of, I think in large part because my mom kept her last name when she married my dad (they were both married and divorced from other people before they met and married each other and had me and my brother). My brother and I both have our dad's last name, and our mom's birth name as our middle name.

When I was little, I would go through the school phone books we got every year and look at my classmates' parents' names. Whenever I saw a woman whose last name was different than her husbands, I felt a shivery sense of pride--like those women, and my mother, were making statements about themselves just by ignoring tradition and doing what they wanted.

I asked once my mom why she had kept her birth name when she married my dad, and she said she'd changed her name for her first marriage, reverted to her birth name after the divorce, and didn't feel like changing it a second time. That, and she didn't like the way her first name sounded with my dad's last name. For her, it was that simple--her commitment had nothing to do with what name was on her driver's license, so why not hang onto the one she liked?

I've always liked the symbolism of keeping my last name--expressing that, like my husband, I'll still be an individual and independent person as well as a committed partner. It makes me feel strong. The fact that doing so also honors my mother and the choices she made makes me extra happy, because my mom is awesome.

And it gives a snarky explanation to anyone who demands to know why I'd keep my last name: "Because it's tradition!"

Nate and I have begun tackling the first logistical nightmare of our wedding planning adventure--the engagement party.

Musing on tradition, and how much weight moral outrage gets in wedding planning

One afternoon last week, I found myself napping on some friends' couch in Long Beach for a couple of hours. It had been a long couple of days, including two trips to LA and back, some hospital visits, lots of nerves and worrying, and finally a happy ending. I was completely wiped out exhausted and prone to falling asleep wherever I was sitting, which, in this case, happened to be our friends' house. When I woke up, Adrienne had retrieved their toddler from preschool and Jeff, who works nights, was awake and sociable. I showed him my engagement ring and Nate and I squeed about wedding stuff briefly, and in a flurry of conversation about naming children, family traditions, and cultural traditions and expectations, we came across my opinions on lots of modern traditions.

I had just asked Nate if there were any naming conventions in his family (Nature willing, we'll be reproducing someday, and if I'm marrying into a family where every firstborn daughter is named Euphegenia, I want plenty of warning). He said he couldn't think of any, and I said okay, but to let me know if he could... and that if he wanted to adhere to those conventions, I wanted to know that, too, so I had time to mull it over. This prompted a comment from someone (and I'm not being intentionally vague, I'm just completely exhausted and my memory is bad) about being surprised to hear that from me, because I'm usually pretty anti-tradition.

Guest list, round 1

Preliminary total from our first draft "include everyone you've ever met and talked to for more than 10 minutes" spreadsheet: 213 people, not counting our extended families. On the other hand, it includes all the people who a) probably won't travel out to the wedding, b) I know and used to hang out with a lot but haven't seen in years (college roommates from sophomore year, etc.), and c) people I don't really want to invite, but will if politeness dictates.

That might, might, might be manageable, but I doubt it. And frankly, I'd like something smaller. We'll see.

Ring sizing and Conversations with Mom.

I'm working on the bigass engagement post, but just wanted to jot a few things down.

I dropped my ring off at the jeweler to be sized yesterday, which was way more nerve-wracking than I'd anticipated. I know it's just a thing, I shouldn't be so attached to it, but I love the hell out of my engagement ring and I didn't love the way the jeweler talked to me--he was pretty bored-looking and dismissive and tried to get me to size my ring down smaller than I wanted originally. I was very direct about what I wanted, and he wrote down the correct size on the order sheet, but it didn't do a lot to inspire customer confidence. I know sizing a ring he didn't make is a small-potatoes job for him, but still. They've done good work for me in the past, so I have no reason to expect them to screw up the ring, but the combination of being nervous about having it altered to begin with and the way the jeweler acted doesn't exactly encourage my confidence. :/

I moved the ring Nate got me for Xmas over from my right hand to my left, which helped. It's still a silly thing to worry so much about.

On a brighter note, my mom seems to be coming around to the whole engagement thing. My mom and I are really close (like talking on the phone 4 or 5 times a week close), and I know she'd been and, to a certain extent, still is nervous about me getting married so young. I imagine telling her we planned to wait a year or two to get married helped assuage her fears, and last night on the phone she said she'd had some time to think about it (we'd been out of town for the weekend and I hadn't spoken to her for a few days) and was actually getting excited. She went far enough to ask if we were planning an engagement party and said "Okay, and I'll help you plan it. I'm the mother of the bride, that's my job." which made me and Nate laugh--her initial reaction to the engagement was "That's wonderful! ...But you're only twelve!"

We haven't spoken more about it in detail, but I'm really glad to hear she's slowly getting on board with the idea. As Nate said when I related the conversation to him (after laughing) "Your family loves you so much!" to which I responded "They love the shit out of me," and it's true.