About "Us"

Country Concert, Summer 2010

I decided to start this blog as an online scrapbook of sorts, to document the planning and preparation leading up to my wedding. Although I may pick up some readers along the way, I mostly look forward to having this to look back on years from now, for myself, as a way to reflect on how crazy-hectic, stressful and totally fun planning a wedding is! But like I said, it would also be awesome to pull in a few fellow-future-brides, in hopes that my do-it-yourself wedding planning is worthy enough of repeat (and if not, at least maybe someone can learn from my, hopefully few, mistakes)!

Dillon Beach with friends, 2006

As a quick background, my fiancé’s name is James. He 27, I almost 25, and we met 6 years ago and have been together ever since. We both grew up in the same area, El Dorado County, CA, and went to the same high school but never knew each other until after high school when we met. We’ve lived together, with our cat, Tessie, just about the entire time we’ve been together and I think it has set us up to be pretty compatible partners in life. Anyway, he proposed to me in our kitchen in our old little one bedroom apartment on July 3^rd, 2009 (he was going to do it on the 4^th, but he couldn’t wait) and obviously, I said “Yes!”. Since then, we have bought ourselves a home in Mather, CA, and grown our family with two crazy pups, Cali and Tex. We are both pretty excited to get married and throw a fat party of a wedding for all of our family and friends to take part in!

Us now, Engagement shoot, Fall 2012

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You know how they say, "every little girl dreams of her wedding day"? Is this just a phrase, or do little girls actually imagine their wedding day? Does an 8 year old know what flavor cake she is going to shove in her new husbands mouth 20 years down the road? Does she have a color scheme? A venue? And does an 8 year old know how much custom invitations cost, 'cause if so, why aren't they filling up their piggy banks and saving for the big day? I never "dreamt about" or imagined my wedding day until after I was proposed to and now that a wedding is actually in my near future, I haven't found it easy to nail down any of the above (so how the heck is an 8 year old supposed to?).

There was a battle inside of my head at first. Do I go with a smaller, intimate wedding? After all, it's supposed to be about you and the groom and your vows and all that. Or, do I want a bigger wedding, as in, the whole family (which, on my side, is a lot of people) where I can throw a fat party, a good time, with all the works?

...the works, duh...

No, but really, here is my logic. First of all, my fiance, James, truly is my best friend. In my opinion, we are already better off than many married couples I know and we know each other better than most (Just my personal opinion). I could easily go to a courthouse or some destination island and marry him in 5 minutes, with no qualms. Married or not, nothing would change, I know this. But why pass up the opportunity to celebrate? I am always looking for an opportunity to throw a party and go all out, and my own wedding shouldn't be the exception. So that basically made up my mind, and once I started really getting into the details, I just got way too excited about food and decorations and all that and there was no turning back from there. Secondly, the general size of James family compared to mine is just WAY off. James' entire family, including aunts, uncles and grandparents is literally, like 16 people... and they are very close, more like an immediate family than most. My family, is around 60 large... lots of aunts and uncles and cousins. This unbalance in the family sizes would just make the invite list for a small wedding a little awkward, and basically, unfair... so yeah, it's just out of the question for me.

So once I decided that our guest list was going to have to be somewhere between 100 and 130 people, I knew that we were going to have a nice, BIG party! And so, the planning begins... bring it on!