As you can see, I’ve been MIA for the last month or so. To say I've been busy would be an understatement. A quick summary, of the last 4-5 weeks:
· We received our initial BEO (finally), made our first round of revisions, and received the latest revision back
· We decided to list our townhome for sale (earlier than planned)
· Accepted an offer on our townhome after just over a week on the market
· Entered Escrow and started to pack up our home
· Finally got our invitation design finalized, got them printed and mailed out
· Had a phone conference with my planner and our cake chef to discuss/decide on a cake design
· Continuing to spend time with my terminally ill grandfather (my last living grandparent)
Invitations:
The process of getting our invitations designed turned into a more stressful situation than we anticipated, due to our designer running into some health issues, which greatly affected the timeline. She was extremely apologetic and embarrassed, and wound up paying for the invitations to be printed and expedited (if you are reading for the first time, our designer is a personal acquaintance). I have to hand it to Wedding Paper Divas for their customer service and expediting. We approved the design that had been uploaded t our account there on Monday early evening, and we had our order in hand on Wednesday afternoon of the same week. The final product:
Front:
Back:
BEO & Communications w/ our Planner’s assistant:
Our BEO is currently 15 pages long, so I am going to refrain from posting it here for the moment. If there is anything specific that you are curious about, let me know and I’ll happily give you the info (we have custom menus at all 3 events, custom BOC bar at the Reception, 2 characters, a silhouette artist, bubble exit, simple centerpieces, almost no actual floral, etc). The grand total of everything (Welcome Party, Ceremony/Reception, & Dessert Party) is higher than we had planned for, but not significantly, and wasn’t a surprise. We’ve made some tweaks to transportation (to save some money) and some menu adjustments to our Welcome Party & Dessert Party (just because). Most of the real savings/reductions will come once we start to get RSVPs back and can reduce the number of guests listed on the BEO. The husband prefers to overbudget, so our BEO us currently set to budget for 100% “yes” response for all events, which is HIGHLY HIGHLY unlikely (about 83 total). I am really excited at how things are moving forward (and also freaking out a little bit, because all of a sudden we are just under 4 months away)! I know things will work themselves out and everything will be beautiful and awesome.
Within the first 2 or 3 months of communicating with our Planner and her assistant, she got a new assistant. We are not impressed with him, at all. To the point where I won’t send him any emails, I send everything directly to our Planner, even though I know she will forward things to him to handle. He isn’t thorough, he sends incorrect information (even when we send clarification questions when something doesn’t look correct or clear), and it was basically because of poor information from him that we had to schedule a phone conference with our cake chef. When our planner sent the latest revision of our BEO, she suggested that for the next round of revisions we schedule a phone call, which we are going to take her up on, due to more mistakes/possibly inaccurate information on this latest BEO.
90 Day Payment:
Our 90 day payment is due 3 weeks from this coming Monday (what?!) and I am really hoping we get some no RSVPs over the next week or two, so that I can have my planner lower the guest count on our BEO, therefore lowering how much we owe them initially. We have the money to make the payment as it stands right now, but lower would be nicer, so fingers crossed.
Conference call with the cake chef:
At our planning session, we discussed a cake design, but shortly after, we changed our minds/got really inspired with a different design. We put together some pictures of our general idea for them to take inspiration from, and were basically told they couldn’t do it because Disney legal said so. The rejection was poorly worded and the suggested design that they sent in place of what we sent was extremely lackluster. Fast forward to the phone conference with our cake chef and we are all on the same page now and are really excited for the design. We still need to finalize the design for the topper they are making us, but an overall design has been decided on and we got pricing for it in our revised BEO and it’s very reasonable, hooray!
My dress:
I should be getting a call any day saying that my dress has come in. I am both excited about this and dreading it. I’ve been having some weight gain issues over the last 10 months or so, and I am almost 100% positive that my dress is not going to fit right now. I know that I still have time, but it is definitely adding to my anxiety and stress level at the moment. I’m excited because I still love it and can’t wait to see it again and touch it. I may or may not still occasionally look at the photos we took when I tried it on.
Guest Book:
For a long time, I've wanted to do one of the "fingerprint as leaves/balloons" type art pieces as our guest book, alongside a mat for people to frame, that we would combine after the wedding. I really love these two designs:
However, since we are having a silhouette artist, I'm wondering if we should just ask guests to sign our copies of their silhouettes and then make something out of those once we get home. My biggest concern with doing that is that unless we have a large amount of wall space available to be able to display them all individually, that they will end up in some sort of book or album that doesn't get looked at much.
Our move:
As I mentioned before, we decided to list/sell our home. We have been talking about moving (out of state) for quite some time, but we were going to wait until January of next year, so that we weren’t dealing with a move AND wedding planning at the same time. Well, that plan has gone out the window and we are now elbow deep in both. When escrow closes, we will likely be moving in with my MIL for a couple months until we can finalize everything for our move. I’m not looking forward to living with MIL for any length, she drives me batty (though I am grateful that she has offered us temporary living space). There is a small possibility that we will be moving into my Grandfather’s house to take care of it, so that he feels better about moving into a board and care facility, we shall see. If all goes as we hope, we will be moving about 2 -3 weeks prior to the wedding. Not ideal, but we already signed up for the Dr. Strange 10K at Disneyland the second weekend in November and if we move before then, then we would have to add the cost of flights/food/possibly lodging in to everything else we are paying for at the moment, so the husband would prefer to wait until after we have completed the race to move.
Still on the to do list (eep!):
· Choose ceremony music
· Order husband’s attire
· Order kid’s attire
· Make practice bouquet
· Make actual bouquet
· Make practice Mickey pomanders
· Make actual Mickey pomanders
· Make faux fiddlehead ferns for boutonnieres & bouquet
· Make geodesic domes for boutonnieres, corsages, bouquet, and pomanders
· Choose “practical” shoes for after the ceremony (I've found more options, but don't think you guys want to see more shoe pictures until I actually pick a pair!)
· Decide on who I am having do my makeup for the day of
· Finalize cake topper design with the Disney pastry team
· Pay Disney
· Finish paying photographer
· Choose table names
· Design/print table name cards
· Decide on favors (which will act as escort cards), order favors (what we originally wanted through Disney is not something that is available anymore, and we have more than met our expenditure minimums, so we are exploring some options outside of Disney)
· Lose weight so my dress fits
· Book sleigh ride
· Decide what we are doing about tablecloth overlays for the reception (one of the ones we chose at the planning session isn’t available as an overlay), which won’t happen until I’m out in Florida for the Wine & Dine Half Marathon in November
· Decide what we are doing for our guest book
This ended up being another post without a lot of pictures, sorry about that. If you are still here and following along, thank you!