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:

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.

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.

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.

Mangagement ring!

So Nate and I went out to dinner last Thursday night (burger and martini night at the Sidecar, woo!) and I popped the question.

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.