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: