Every Rose Has its Thorn

Guys, I am like the worst bride ever.

Image via Funny Picture Script 

That's my guilty face.

I met with with two florists a few months ago. And now, there are only five months left til the wedding and I still haven't chosen one yet. And do you want to know why? It's not because I didn't like them (actually they were both pretty awesome). It's because I really just don't care about flowers.

I need to start out by saying that I know nothing about flowers. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Okay wait, I know two things! Ready?

1) I hate roses. 

2) I love calla lilies. 

Right. Well, I know that's not much to go on, but that's pretty much how I approached the florists I met with.

Red, Red Wine

So I mentioned two important things about our ceremony. 1) We aren't writing our own vows and 2) we're doing a wine box ceremony.

Before becoming obsessed with all things wedding the only ritual I knew of for a wedding ceremony was the unity candle. Then I stumbled into the glorious world of wedding blogging and learned about sand ceremonies, ring warming ceremonies, handfasting and oh my the list goes on. This was great for me since I have an irrational fear of setting my veil on fire.

I surprisingly could not find an appropriate image of a bride setting her veil on fire so here is a very technical drawing by me showing you exactly how I imagine this playing out. Oh and my husband-to-be is wearing a top hat because he thinks he's Abe Lincoln.

Anyways, one of the lovely rituals I came across was the wine box ceremony. As soon as I saw it I knew it would be perfect for us. After all, the dude and I are a couple of winos. Seriously, we can't get enough of the stuff. Actually, we're not that picky about the type of booze we drink so I think we might just be drunks, but it makes you sound much more acceptable to people when you tell them enjoy wine and the finer things in life.

Hey Baby, I Think I Wanna Marry You

After we put down a deposit with our awesome officiant, Robyn Posson, she sent us a ton of sample ceremonies and told us to get to it! Okay, so she was much nicer than that and told us to contact her if we had any questions or needed her guidance as we put together our ceremony. Did I mention she is super awesome?

In my excitement, I immediately dove into the samples she sent us. There was a ton of info -- and by a ton I'm talking ten Microsoft Word documents that averaged anywhere from 5 to 30 pages. Each document was labeled according to its category. Want to read Opening Prayers? Or Readings? Or maybe Ring Exchanges? It was all there.

Catherine College

Disclaimer: It was all electronic copies, so no trees were killed in the making of this ceremony. 

It felt a little like this though!

The dude was instantly overwhelmed by all of the material so I did the first sweep and pulled out a few pieces in each category that I thought would reflect us (and more importantly that we would both like).

It was absolutely exhausting and took me foreverrrrrr to get through each section. If I can offer any suggestions when writing your ceremony it would be to step back and take a break for a few days, maybe even a week or two if you have the time. After a while a lot of the passages started to sound the same to me so it was really good to work on something else for a little bit (like catching up on episodes of Parks & Recreation) and not focus on the ceremony.

After I had a few samples going I sat down with Mr. Coyote (again this is not something we whipped up overnight) and we narrowed it down even further.

I don't want to give away the whole ceremony up front, but I will share with you how we organized our ceremony... Hopefully it will help any couples out there who are planning on writing their own ceremony!

The Love Potato

This is kind of a Christmas story, but I figured with Valentine's Day approaching it would be appropriate to share with all of you now.

This is the story of the love potato.

I think I may have mentioned before that the Coyotes are not an incredibly romantic couple. Mushy-gushy just isn't our style and most of our romantic attempts either seem forced or just backfire in our faces (remind me to tell you about the great Valentine's Debacle of 2010 one day... That's a fun one). Anyways, we like to keep it real and express our love in ways that might seem a bit strange to others.

That is true love my friends. / (Personal Photo)

Now a few years back we were celebrating Christmas Day with my family. Everyone was exchanging gifts and doing their thing when Mr. Coyote dumped a small, oddly wrapped gift in my lap. He seemed very excited about it and was grinning like a fool while I opened it. I have never, ever seen him act this way over a silly Christmas gift so I was starting to feel a little suspicious. What in the hell was this thing and why he was so freakin' excited about it?

So what was this amazing gift that had my dude so giddy?

A potato.

Key Largo, Montego.. Baby, Why Don't We Go?

Now that we had narrowed down islands and the type of resort we were looking for it was time for some research. We came across a ton of ah-mazing all-inclusive resorts, but unfortunately we had to choose just one. I personally love reading about different resorts so I'm going to give you guys a bit of a breakdown on some of the places we looked into. I hope you find it helpful! If you're just interested in seeing where we're going, then scroll on down to the bottom of the page for the big reveal. :)

Here were some of our favorites and why they did or didn't make the cut:

Honey Moon

I love me some Honey Moon.

 

Beer Melodies

Of course I'm also looking forward to this kind of honeymoon too:

Adironack Chair Plans*

I originally planned to leave the honeymoon up to the dude. After going to that ridiculous bridal show I dumped a bunch of brochures and info on his desk. And there it sat. And sat. And sat. And sat.

Every once in a while I would nag politely ask about our honeymoon plans and glance over at the pile of brochures collecting dust on his desk. After a few months of this my fiance reminded me that I was just a little too neurotic excited about the honeymoon and he didn't really want to plan the entire thing without my input anyways so why don't we just do it together?

Although I kind of wanted to just sit back and watch him to do the work on this one, truth be told... He's right. And so, we did it together! 

The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon

Image via Big Sky Astrology

(Just wait til the Fork finds out about this...)

Alternative title: The long, obnoxious task of registering for gifts.

Actually, our registry is still a work in progress right now so you can expect to see a few random incoherent posts about it in the upcoming weeks. I'm going to try and start from the very beginning (it's a very good place to start).

Goin' to the Chapel...

And we're gonna get maaaaarried.

Well, we're definitely not going to the chapel, but after we booked our venue and some of the other vendors we started to think about who would marry us.

I need to take a second here and explain that both Mr. Coyote and I were raised Roman Catholic. The Church has played a very significant role in my life and we both went to a Catholic college. But the truth is, neither of us have been practicing in quite a few years. Mr. C has a few issues with the Church (which I think are justified and I completely respect) and he didn't feel comfortable having a Catholic ceremony. And so we decided to not get married in the Church.

This wasn't a decision that was made lightly. I would have preferred to have a full-on Catholic ceremony, but after many conservations, I knew it just wasn't the right choice for us. I also know that if I had pushed back hard enough Mr. C would have just sucked it up and gone through with it. Because he loves me and he knows it's important to me. But was that how I wanted our marriage to start? With me pushing him to get married in an environment that he was uncomfortable with? Not exactly. 

Paint the Town Red

Or blue... Or yellow… Or pink...

I have a love/hate relationship with our wedding colors. After setting my eyes on the perfect bridesmaid dress...

Image via Alfred Angelo

I pretty much let the color of that dress dictate the rest of the wedding colors. I don't have much of a theme going on except for the "get married with a minimal number of things going wrong" theme (trademark pending) so there isn't much rhyme or reason to choosing the colors we did. I like that color, I think it's pretty annnnd let's move on to something else.

It's never that easy though is it? The problem is… I don't really know what color this is. It's not quite purple, it's not quite pink and the name the company gives it is "berry". Yea, try telling your florists that your color is "berry".

Wait, what's that? I also need accent colors? Oh, come on…. Now you're just messing with me.

And so I did what any other bride would do… I searched google images looking for anything wedding related that came close to this color. And that is how I found my inspiration photos. Heads up: Tons of colorful photos coming your way!

Shopping for the Ladies

For someone as indecisive as me finding the bridesmaids' dresses was actually pretty simple.

It all started years ago when I stumbled upon this dress in a bridal magazine:

Image via Alfred Angelo

I want it. I need it. Oh baby. Oh baby.

I love everything about it. The color, the fabric, the style. Some people go crazy about mason jars and photo booths?  I went cray-cray over this bridesmaid dress. Basically, I had to have it in my wedding.

It didn't take me long to discover that it was Alfred Angelo. And as I browsed through their site I realized that pretty much all of their dresses are freakin' gorgeous. So I've decided to let the ladies choose their own. 

Because we are all scattered across the wonderful state of New York it just wasn't possible for us to all go shopping together. That meant multiple trips to multiple shops for moi. 

Meeting the Maids

I wanted to chat a little bit about the bridesmaid dress hunt with you, but then I realized that I never properly introduced you to my ladies or even told you how I asked them! You caught a glimpse of some of them way back in this post, but I figured it's time we chat about them a little more.

My bridal party breakdown goes a little like this: two maids of honor (friends from high school) and four bridesmaids (two friends from college, two family members). 

Because we were having a long engagement many people advised me to wait a while before asking our bridal party. But the thing is, I've pretty much known since day one who I was going to ask. And now, with five months to go I don't regret asking any of them!

With six bridesmaids I will admit that our party leans on the larger side. Having a large party makes me a little busier, but honestly I just feel lucky to have six wonderful ladies in my life that are always there for me.

So how did I ask them? Well I didn't ask them all in the same way.

Saving the Date

Now that we had received our awesome engagement photos it was time to decide what to do with them.

The first thing was…. Save the Dates!

I knew from the start that I wanted to use magnets for our save the dates. I started squirreling away inspiration photos like this:

Image via Wedding Paper Divas

Image via Wedding Paper Divas

Image via Wedding Paper Chicks 

When our photos came in I set to work.

The Engagement Photo Saga

Word of warning: Photo bomb ahead!!!

Because we booked with our photographers so early they threw in a free engagement session. W00t! I was super stoked about this. Mostly because about 90% of our photos look a little something like this:

[Personal Pic: Miami 2006]

[Personal Pic: Apple Picking... Every year]

[Personal Pic: New Year's 2011]

Don't get me wrong, I love that I can look back on photos of us and laugh, but I wanted at least a few photos where I could look back and say, "Awww" instead of "ROFLCOPTERS". <-- Yes, it's a real word. I don't care what spellcheck says.

YouTube

Goldilocks and the Three Photographers

So here's a glimpse of my crazy-ass spreadsheet:

[Personal Pic]

I know it's hard to see, but I scribbled in some ridiculous notes in some of these cells. Can you find our photographer? The only note I wrote next to their name was "I like these". Nice.

For like 4 months I was photography crazy. I scrolled through site after site of local photographers. After a few weeks of this I swear I was seeing wedding photos in my sleep.

I collected quotes from as many photographers as I could. Some provided pricing on their sites, some did not. Some emailed me promptly, some told me to go away and come back next year. Since I had started with such a huge list  I'd say I easily crossed off the first 15 or so for various reasons (over budget, don't want to book with us yet, don't like their style, just plain old never responded to me, etc.).

When I had narrowed it down to about 7 photographers that's where the real fun started. I began comparing their packages and what they offered with what Mr. Coyote and I wanted for our wedding day. Did they include engagement photos? How many hours do they typically book for? Is there a second shooter or do they work solo? What do they offer us in terms of prints, albums, digital copies of the photos?

There were so many questions to ask and yes, I put them all into that rockin' spreadsheet of mine.

We eventually somehow narrowed it down to three photographers and totally pulled a Goldilocks.

Could You Take My Picture? / Cause I Won’t Remember

IIIIIIIIIIII feel like a newbooooooorrrrrnn....

Ahem, sorry. Does anyone else start randomly singing this song when talking about photography? Just me? Okay then...

Aside from finding a venue, finding a photographer was high up on our list of things to do right after our engagement. Even though we were still over a year and a half out that wasn't stopping me from contacting photographers for availability and pricing.  

Now I know I’ve mentioned before about being a semi-long distance bride. My hometown is 3 hours away from where we’re currently living so vendor shopping can be tough. Add in the fact that NONE of our friends are married yet and you’ve got yourself a couple of clueless Coyotes.

Image via IMDB

I started the photographer hunt by searching through wedding reviews on good ole Wedding Wire.

Stripper Shoes

A few weeks ago my flippy floppies, which I will henceforth refer to as my stripper shoes, came in.

I promise they don't look like this:

 

Image via Leather Lollipop

But they do look like this:

(Personal Photo)

(Personal Photo)