This blog has just been sitting here since the wedding ended.  I’ve done a lot of thinking about what I’ll use it for, but the obvious came to me earlier as I was reading.

“A WEDDING BLOG!” I thought, feeling slightly less empty inside.

“A wedding blog?” you ask.  “But this is already a wedding blog.”

Correction.  This is my wedding blog.  I am going to turn this into your wedding blog.  How?  Let me explain.

First, I would like to post helpful hints on how to save on weddings.  I know, I know.  Everyone does this.  But every website I visited offering to help save me money seemed to be making the assumption that I was still OK with spending $10-20k.  I was not.  I’m going to explain how to really save money.  I think I spent $3-4k overall.  Yes, I’m serious.

Second, post some awesome wedding things that I find for you to benefit from.  Why?  Because sometimes brides get lost amongst all of the websites offering to help.  I would like to eventually have enough on this website, enough in the archives, that you can find whatever you need without having to sift through all of the crap in your Google search results.

Third, I will have a question and answer period.  Meaning, you send in a question and I answer it here on the website (or I can just email a response, if you don’t wish for your question to be published).

Fourth, I’d like for you to send me your favorite or most frustrating wedding stories.  Maybe your fondest wedding from your own wedding, a problem you had with a bridezilla at a wedding you attended, etc.  Anything you want, as long as it’s appropriate.

I may have more ideas, but this is what I’ve come up with so far.  We’ll see how it goes!  Now that I’m no longer stressing out over my own wedding, this could be fun.

I faked my way through the ceremony (translation: I pretended that I wasn’t annoyed with the whole thing…it worked really well).  The reception was bullshit.  I didn’t want to go the bouquet/garter toss, but they had us do it anyway.  I didn’t even buy a throwing bouquet, so now I don’t have my flowers.  I wanted to keep those.  =(  Every time I tried to put my foot down and say I didn’t want to do something, though, they accused me of being a “bridezilla” so I finally just shut up and put them all on my list of people to kill later.  And apparently I was a “bridezilla” when my aunt put those fake nails on me (I wanted the nails, but not so long) and told me I couldn’t cut them to a decent size (they were the length of some kind of trailer-trash whore, I swear to God) and THEN I couldn’t do ANYTHING.  Seriously.  I had to have Cori speed dial Mom because I couldn’t.  And then I couldn’t make people understand that I couldn’t do anything with the nails.  Cori wanted me to tie things and sew things and when I yelled at her, Mom said I was being a “bridezilla.”  No, I’m not.  I’m the bitch yelling at the retarded girl for being a retard.  HUGE difference.  It’s not being a bridezilla if it’s something you would have been doing ANYWAY.  Also, this is the reason why I always keep my nails cut.  I hate long nails.  I can’t do shit with them.  And when I finally gave up trying to explain that I couldn’t do anything and tried to do something (I don’t remember what) the nail fell off.  Fortunately, we had more glue so we put it back on.  As soon as Zach and I got to the hotel, I cut them.  They looked and felt SO much better.

Anyway.  We were almost half an hour late to the church because I couldn’t get a hold of Mom who was at the Elks setting up food.  That was yet another reason I was mad.  She could have called and told me to go over to the church and that she’d meet me, but I guess that was just too hard.  Oh.  And she hid the safety pins I’d bought the night before.  Yes, hid them.  Dad and I both needed them and couldn’t find them.  Anyway, about an hour into the reception, Zach and I were trashed.  Hence the happy faces.  The night ended with my aunt’s friend Kim laying on the sidewalk outside and puking her guts out while my aunt stood there with a full drink in her hand asking, “You OK?”  Party = success.

Jordan drove Zach and me to the Lafayette in Marietta and bitched the whole way there about how abused he is because he has to do work around the house and Cori doesn’t (he also kept seeking me out during the reception so he could bitch about how much my wedding sucks–it’s like everyone’s sole purpose that day was to try to ruin everything for me).  News flash: you’re 21 and living with Mommy and Daddy.  Cori is almost 16 and is forced by law to live with them.  See why you’re expected to either get a job or do a shit ton of house work?  Dumbass.  But we were still drunk enough to ignore him (but not so drunk that I didn’t see him texting while he was driving…I yelled at him quite a few times for that because I’ll be damned if I was going to die on my wedding night because my brother is a moron).  When we got to the hotel, it took us about ten or fifteen minutes to get all of the bobby pins and flowers out of my hair…with both of us working on it.

We went home Saturday morning and opened wedding gifts.  We got a LOT of duplicates because people didn’t mark what they bought off the registry.  Oh well.  All of the duplicates came with receipts (and were coincidentally the only gifts we got that came with the receipts which we found quite funny).  Mostly we got cash, which was excellent.  =D

We’ll be heading to Gatlinburg in October and we’ll be there through the whole first week of November.  I can’t wait.

In the end, I wish I could change almost everything about the wedding (mostly concerning how I looked–I hated my hair, my dress, and my nails…but I did love my shoes).  I think I’m just not the type of person who’s meant to have a wedding.  Any time I was trying to figure out what I wanted, someone would ask, “What do you picture when you dream about your wedding?”  Well, I had never dreamed about a wedding.  I’ve dreamed about marriage itself, kids, a job, all the really important things, but I’ve never dreamed about my wedding day.  That should have been my first sign that I was supposed to elope and leave it at that.  Whatever.  It’s over now and all I have left are horrible pictures to a not-so-great memory.  At least I still have Gatlinburg to look forward to.

I’ll post pictures as soon as Chris sends them.

We found my shoes.  I had them hidden in a suitcase so my sister wouldn’t steal them, wear them, and ruin them, and I forgot about it.  So that’s settled.  I had my first and second dress fitting–they both sucked.  I hated my original seamstress, but the second one was really nice and didn’t bitch at me for wearing short shoes like the first one did.

I got most of the invitations sent out.  If you didn’t get one, but I told you you were invited, it’s because I don’t give a shit anymore.  Don’t expect an invitation because you probably won’t get one.

I graduate this Saturday.  I’m excited.  I worked hard for four years and I want a damn celebration.  Unfortunately, the wedding is getting in the way of that, which makes no sense to me.  It is so easy to get married.  Do you want to know how hard it was to get my degree?  Very hard.  This achievement should be getting way more attention than the wedding.  I don’t even know if my parents are planning any kind of celebration.  It’s not that I want something big with lots of presents (although, I wouldn’t mind some cake), I just want everyone to be aware of how hard I worked.  I would like someone to be proud because I earned this, not because I managed to trick a guy into thinking I was the woman of his dreams (I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m either just an amazing enough actress that I still haven’t realized I’m working Zach…or he’s just on some serious drugs.  Why else would he want to marry me?).  There’s no reason to throw a fit about a marriage that happened so easily when the hard part is staying together.  We’ll celebrate this in 50 years.

/rant

In other news, we have moved almost all of my stuff into the apartment.  *excitement*

Now I need to finish my paper for my history class.

Yes, I want to get married.  But every time I think about the wedding, I think, “I have so much work to do before I can get from here to there.”  So I’m not excited because I’m stressed out.  Leave me the hell alone.

A couple friends came over and one of them did my nails today in champagne to see if I’d like it for my wedding (I think I’ve decided I do, but I’ll have to wait and see how I like it with my dress and stuff on).  After they left, I called Mom and told her about it.  She then asked me how many invitations I ordered.  I told her I ordered seventy-five, because I needed fifty-two and you’re only allowed to order in increments of twenty-five (at least where I got them from).  It pleased her that I had so many extras.  First, I thought it was because we wanted to keep a couple as keepsakes or because she had a few extra people she wanted to invite.  That turned out to not be the case.  The real reason?  The cat peed on the invitations.

The cat peed on the invitations.

As soon as she told me, my heart sank.  I knew there was no way in hell I was ordering more invitations and everyone who didn’t get one would have to suck it up and just accept a phone call as a formal invitation to the wedding.  So I asked the question I dreaded hearing the answer to, “How many were destroyed?”

“Only three,” Mom said.  Words cannot describe how relieved I was to hear that.  Only three.  Thank God.  Mom worked today and as soon as she walked through the front door, she heard the cat getting into the box and ran into the dining room.  Her timing couldn’t have been more perfect.  Had it happened earlier, all of them would have been destroyed. My brother just keeps saying, “I can’t believe this happened.  Holy crap.”  Me neither, Jordan, me neither.

Obviously she put them up after that.  Why were they just sitting out, you ask?  Who in their right mind thinks that, of all the bad things to happen, their cat will pee on the invitations?  I mean, really.

I still can’t believe it.

I will now leave you with this picture of my champagne colored nails.

Here they are, all over the floor. Yes, the invitations fold...and I had to do it myself. It wasn't much fun. I folded a couple of them wrong.

Here are the envelopes. It took forever for me to figure out why there were THREE sets.

This little baby is the secret to getting the writing straight on the envelope. I think I'll keep this and use it always.

I know it's really blurry. But this is how they're arranged: invitation on bottom, tissue paper over invitation, envelope for RSVP, and then the RSVP with a "secret number" on the back (see bottom for info on secret number).

Everything in the picture above goes into this envelope that remains non-sealed with no writing on it.

That envelope then goes into THIS envelope, which is sealed, written on, and later stamped.

Here is my ever increasing pile of invitations.

Cini found the process exhausting. Notice he didn't even make it to the part with the tissue paper.

About the secret number: apparently, you’re supposed to assign all of your guests a number.  This number goes on the back of the RSVP so if someone sends back the RSVP but forgot to put a name on it, you’ll know who it came from.  Ingenious, yes…but I don’t think I’ll have a problem with people forgetting to write their names.  Here’s why:

RSVP with huge, obnoxious line on which to write a name.

Does anyone not see that?

I also figured out what the unmarked inner envelope is for!  It’s for when you screw up the outside envelope and have to redo the address.  I did that MULTIPLE times.

Anyway, here’s a picture of the final version of the invitation.

They wanted me to order separate cards to announce the reception…but that would have been an extra $100.  So I said, “screw that.”  They told me I had sixteen lines on which to write whatever I wanted, so I did!  And, yes, I used all sixteen lines.  I got my money’s worth, man.

/rant