Prenuptial Braindump

Okay, so, our engagement party is over, Great Western is over, I think it's time to actually start doing wedding-related shit. Here beginneth the brain dump:

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.

Wringing my hands about wedding rings (ooh, I punned!)-- Part Deux

So when last we left our heroine (me), I had given some cashola to the jeweler I lurved in Ventura as a promissory payment on a custom ring... of some kind. I was torn about teal-blue diamonds vs. sapphires and feeling kind of guilty about spending so much money on such a frivolous thing and debating the moral implications of buying diamonds, even ethically sourced ones, and generally wringing my emotional hands about the whole situation.

So I got a call from the jeweler yesterday, and he told me he had ordered some diamonds for me to look over, but the color variations weren't as diverse as he thought I would like. I went in to take a look this morning, and he was right. I was hoping for a five-stone ring that had a very light stone, a medium-colored stone, a dark stone, a medium-colored stone, and a very light stone in a line, but when we put the diamonds next to each other, they all looked like pretty much the same shade of teal. Teal's my favorite color, and the stones were beautiful, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.

So long story short, I looked at the sapphire ring again, I looked at the diamonds, I mixed up the order of the stones, and finally George (the jeweler) suggested we put a couple of sky-blue diamonds on the ends of the line of teal stones. I took out the two middle stones, bumped the lightest color teal stones into the second and fourth positions, and put two sky-colored stones on the end, and voila--colors I loved, the gradations I wanted, and stones I didn't have to worry would wear out in fifteen years, like sapphires can. Sold.

Until recently, I'd been wrestling with buying a diamond wedding ring. I trusted the jeweler when he said the diamonds were ethically sourced, but I felt guilty about spending what, to me, is a good amount of money on a purely symbolic item. I felt like diamonds are so stereotypically decadent and chi-chi, would I really be happy with a diamond ring, or would I look at it and think I could have had something almost as pretty without the pricetag? Would I feel guilty about spending money other folks didn't have on something that was, on some level, a status symbol?

So I was driving to work on Thursday and it occurred to me--I'm paying for this ring by myself, with money I earned. Doing so isn't going to keep me from paying my bills or put me in debt. Nate's not helping me with it. My family isn't helping me with it. I'm choosing to spend money I earned with my own work on this.

All of a sudden, the ring changed from a petty concession to capitalism (and my fixation on sparkly things) to a symbol of my independence and capability. I'm spending money I earned on this ring, money I worked for. It's not an indulgence or a stereotype, it's a token of achievement. It's a symbol of my ability to take care of myself, to commit myself to a marriage as an independent adult.

That doesn't suck. :)

Dolphins again

Last Friday, Nate and I collected a local friend, went down to a beach, and had a handfasting. 

This was one of those things I knew wanted to do even before we got engaged. There isn't a lot of tradition I'd consider part of my cultural heritage, but pre-Christian Celtic traditions have always rung true for me, just like I find myself drawn to the deities my ancestors probably worshiped in my own spiritual practice.

As I got into wedding planning and began to be confronted head-on with what before had been solely a conceptual understanding of how much inanity and demeaning tradition goes into planning a Western wedding, I wanted to do a handfasting more and more. Back in the day, before the Church took over marriage and then capitalism took over the celebration, this was what they did. This was all they had, all they needed. Marriages worked for a year and a day, or for a few years, or forever, or not at all. 

We dressed up fancy and drove out to Spinnaker. The song our friends had their first dance to came up on the iPod, which I took as a good sign. The next song was "Bad Romance," and I decided not to take it as any kind of sign at all. We stood on the beach together. We debated whether we should call animal control about the sea lion flopping listlessly around on the warm sand. We watched another pair of dolphins slicing through the waves. We sipped beer and ate a spice cake I'd baked that afternoon, and our friend tied our hands together with the cords Nate made--three colors for him, three colors for me, one thick ribbon to symbolize our commitment, seven strands in total. 

We exchanged vows, which we'd kept private before we spoke them (which caused my control freak brain no end of nervousness). Mine were very direct and legalistic, but also lighthearted ("...to support you; to laugh with you (and occasionally at you); to have epic slow-motion fistfights with you as a means of settling our differences...") , and his were more of a recollection of where our relationship had come from, what we had gone through, and where we were going now. Unplanned, I promised to have very serious conversations with him while slow-dancing around the living room, and he promised to always slow-dance with me at the grocery store. 

We kissed. We finished the beer. Our friend joked that "Your handfasting will self-destruct in three hundred and sixty-six days." and we laughed. And we grinned. And we kissed.

There was a sign by the sea lion which said it was there all the time and was being studied by the Channel Island Aquatic Mammals Institute (or something like that) and that we should just ignore him. He looked very comfortable on the sand.

Baby's First Wedding Squee

Hokay, so--I found a photographer, well, a pair of photographers, I love. I talked to Nate about it. He liked them too. I emailed them. I expected to hear nothing. Apparently in the world of weddings, no one ever gets back to you and you have to chase them down (in the world of Santa Barbara/Ventura weddings, this is so far been untrue for me. Every single vendor inquiry I've made has been followed up on quickly. I guess it pays to live in one of the two most expensive places to get married in the US. Pays someone, anyway.)

So, we hear back from the photographers, and they say sorry, we alternate every other year between LA and Seattle, and 2012 is a Seattle year. We could come down, but we'd have to charge you a travel fee... and since you're in California, it's a flat fee, not a full rental-car-airfare-hotel kind of fee. What do you think?

We thought yes. Even with the fee, the number they gave was less than any other photographer I've looked at so far. It's still a heck of a lot of money, but hey. Photography is one of those things that's important to us, so we'll pay to have it done fr srs legit.

Anyway, nothing's set in stone yet, but it was really gratifying to hear back so quickly, get such a great price, and have such nice communication with the photographers. :) I sent them a response email introducing us, talking a bit about our wedding, and asking a couple of questions, and we've been trading emails for the last couple of days. They seem really prompt and happy to answer all my questions, and we're looking at setting up scheduling an engagement shoot sometime this summer. Eeeeee!

So Nate was subjected to my very first Wedding Planning Squee on Monday night. Like, with dancing and wiggling and going of "Eeeee!" I have to say, since checking out the wedding-in-a-box venue, I've been a bit wary of wedding planning. I had really been striking out with research and such on venues, I'd had some budgetary issues, and I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and like this wedding thing was going to be way more work and fraught with way more difficulty than I'd originally planned.

And yeah, it's going to be a hell of a lot of work, and stuff isn't always going to turn out as quickly, easily, or cheaply as I feel like it should. But this thing? This particular thing? Seems to be working out perfectly. :)

"Be your own well of happiness. Don't let anyone poop in your well." --this chick

After yesterday's srs post, something light

Have some tasty dress inspiration. Sadly, I can't give credits for these photos, but none of them are mine.

Weddings While You're Planning One

I took a few days off work this week and took a trip up to the Bay Area. 

Tuesday afternoon, I got all dolled up and headed out to the event that had prompted this trip in the first place, Kristen and Ryan's wedding! Kristen's a friend and former roomie from college, and I actually went to 8th grade with her as well. We've done our separate thing for the last few years, and most of our contact has been on the internet, so I was surprised and honored to get an invitation to their wedding. And the wedding? Was awesome.

It wasn't about the decorations or the food or the dancing, although all of those things were great. It was about the community coming together to celebrate the people they loved. It was about the tiny flower girl doing stiff-armed five-year-old dances until she was falling asleep on her feet because she was so excited. It was about post-ceremony croquet to commemorate their first date. It was about the beginning of the ceremony, where each of them acknowledged and thanked their parents, and every single person in the audience cried.

I kept taking little pauses during the reception and thinking This is it. This is how a wedding should be. Meg Keene occasionally talks about the wedding magic, the thing that makes weddings happen even when caterers don't show up or rain ruins the photoshoots or you didn't get any sleep the night before because you were up finishing the last of your projects. There was wedding magic all the fuck over that place.

And waterproof mascara? Worth every fucking penny.

A post too silly even for Twitter

I seriously cannot fucking wait to marry this guy.

*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. 

Wedding thought of the day

Slightly Firefly themed wedding.

Geeky, yes. Also awesome. Also, if there's anything that I like at all in the current "vintage" trend that seems to be sweeping the wedding/decor/fashion world, it's a grungy old-world Western kind of look. :) All the other vintage stuff kind of drives me crazy, but if we rocked the Firefly stuff, I could wear something like this:

This moment of vanity and geekery brought to you by a slow day at work.

Transmission ends.

How it all went down

This is the proposal story in its entirety. It'll almost certainly get cut down for Facebook and emails. Really, it's quite long.

Warm fuzzies

The drive to work has officially become "Holy shit my ring looks great in sunlight" time. Seriously, I've been super busy this week, but I have to take some time to get some pictures this afternoon for Facebook and Picasa.

I also have to find time to write down how it all went. I have to get crackin' at work right now, but I definitely want to take some time to write and remember. I have a feeling things are going to start to go very fast.