Wedding Planning

They’re Playing Our Song

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

Back in the day I loved heading out to the bar or club on a Saturday night and closing it down, spending most of my time on the dance floor, amidst the crush of strangers and a few close friends.

I’m actually having trouble remembering the last time I did that. And it doesn’t really bother me.

What I’m trying to say is that the Road Trips are not really the dance-party type, though I adore music and have something playing whenever I’m at work, in the car or in my office and not streaming something via Netflix. And what goes on behind closed doors when I’m rocking out need not be discussed.

And yet, having that first dance, along with music and dancing during the reception in general, was important to me in our early planning days. Mainly because it was something I wasn’t able to do in the past (my first wedding being in a dancing-is-evil-believing church and the second being a private courthouse visit) and that lack I do feel.

Somewhere in my memory is the habit of a couple choosing “their song” by what was playing the night they met/the first time they kissed or at some other momentous occasion. Todd and I met online, in a chat room, and there wasn’t much music going on. Although there was one song, the night we stayed up until 4am chatting and flirting, that was shared.

(Direct link for the feed readers: The Gummy Bear Song by GummiBar)

Yeah, I don’t see that happening at the reception, do you?

(Oh, and you’re totally welcome–you cannot unsee or unhear that one. But at least it wasn’t a questionable Kermit cover that, as Mr Road Trip put it “ruined his childhood memories forever.” That I’ll spare you.)

No, back when we were emailing back and forth, getting to know each other and being a bit gushy, as you do, we’d email each other song lyrics. Only slightly less cheesy than the classic radio dedication model (which I cringe at, now) and a helluva lot safer than speaking lyrics to one another (a major pet peeve).

One of those songs was one I’d never heard of, before, and one which quickly became special to me once I tracked it down on iTunes.

(Direct link for the feed readers: Little Things Mean A Lot by Kitty Kallen)

While I’m a smidgen more materialistic than the song would suggest (I never say no to sparkly gifts), I really do love the overall sentiment of the song and it rings (hah!) true for us.

Our song became one of the earliest–and easiest–decisions early on in the planning process. After all, who else is looking back 60 years to a relatively obscure song for their big day? Not many, I’m betting, and that makes me happy not to have some song off a wedding compilation CD that everyone and their brother has used.

Not that there’s anything wrong with I Honestly Love You, but it’s been done. A lot. (10 points if you instantly got The Wedding Planner reference.)

Of course, once we got into the nitty gritty of planning, we decided to forgo dancing as a major part of the reception. Combined with the fact that we’re more of the sit-around-and-talk types rather than the dance party types, our reception being in the early afternoon just doesn’t lend itself to some wild party. (Hey, we’ve learned something from watching all those episodes of Four Weddings!)

So, while Little Things… remains “our song,” the jury is still out on if it’ll show up at the wedding at all. Mr. Road Trip is fine either way, I just can’t make up my mind on whether I really want it or not.

 Do you have a song with your significant other? How did you choose it?

Not-So-Best Practices

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

As I hinted at in the last post, I actually thought I was on the right track to finding a photographer that fit our needs (those needs being minimal upsell and budget economy).

Unfortunately, I had the audacity to ask for a meeting with the photographer when we were next schedules to be in Jacksonville. That’s when she explained that they work primarily online or over the phone.

Full stop.

Lady, unless you plan to shoot my wedding online or over the phone,
you’d damn well better be able to meet me in person.

Now, I knew this was one of the large national agencies, but I thought I’d been corresponding with the actual photographer in this region. Nope, just the “matchmaker”. If I went with them, I wouldn’t actually be assigned my photographer until a month before the wedding.

No.

I mean, can you imagine not meeting the person who’s going to be all up in your grill for 4 hours or more at the last possible moment? What if they rub you the wrong way? What if you get a creepy vibe from them? What if you just don’t mesh well?

That is NOT the way to get good wedding photos.

So I went back on the hunt for a photographic match for our wedding, only to add a few more items to the Not-So-Best Practices List:

  1. Not listing prices on your website, or even a starting package range.
  2. Auto-play music.
  3. Flash sites that open a new window instead of staying in the current one or otherwise hijack your browser.
  4. Password-protecting your wedding rate-sheet.
  5. Being obtuse in email responses.

The first three are pretty common transgressions, almost to be ignored except they truly do make it more difficult to find a vendor to hire. The last two are new encounters, and just as bad when it comes to making commerce that much easier.

Yes, one site really did have a password-protect on their rates page. Not their regular session fees or print packages, but to see the wedding fees you have to have a password. I’m sorry but that’s just patently ridiculous.

Finally, I had contacted one photographer and she was kind enough to send me her 2013 brochure–good job! And I liked the price, so I responded with a question, to clarify whether the stated fee included the disc with reprint rights. “No,” she replied, “the disc is extra.” And that was the end of her reply. Not how much the disc added to the cost, nothing. So I asked the obvious question and have yet to hear a reply.

On the up-side, one photographer I contacted was very nice and has worked up a quote that does fall just within the upper edges of our budget, and she’s local so there’s no issue there. Another one or two I’m waiting to hear back from that also sounded promising.

Feeling like I’m kissing a whole lotta frogs in the search for our photographic prince(ss).

Have you encountered anything else that would fall under not-so-best practices for wedding photographers?

Picture This

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

Photos are the one thing you take away from this very expensive, very busy day.

Or so the conventional wisdom goes.

And I agree, to a certain extent. The dress? Not going to have many opportunities to wear it again. The food? Eaten. The venue? No longer your own personal playground. The memories? Intangible.

So photos to the rescue. To show you what you didn’t see when you were talking to Uncle Eddie with your back to the rest of the room. To catch those little (sometimes staged) moments between you and your beloved, one of which you can blow up to 16×20 and have printed on canvas for your wall.

Or not.

See, we’re not the hang pictures of ourselves on the wall type of people. We’re not planning to have children, so no generations to pass them down to. And if our respective histories are any indication, we’re not going to pull out the album every anniversary and get all schmoopy over the pictures again.

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of the above behaviors, it’s just not us.

For the record, there were 3 separate videos taken of my first wedding and I’ve yet to see even 5 seconds of any of them. Of those wedding photos, the ones I valued most (we had a photographer-friend offer to take the pictures for the cost of the film–which we had developed ourselves) were the random, candid shots of folks at the reception. Mr. Road Trip thinks he might have watched his wedding video with his ex (before she was an ex, obviously) maybe twice in the 10 years they were married? And the photos flipped through about the same.

So when I see starting “investments” of $2500 or more for a local photographer (that being half our total wedding budget), I start thinking that the majority of pro photographers aren’t for us.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not even for a moment trying to say that photographers don’t earn every penny of their fee. Sure, a chunk goes into the physical album (which we do not want included, and I’ve asked several photographers at bridal shows ‘Do you have a package without an album?’ and, with the exception of the one dude with the very nice custom flash drives in their own wooden boxes, they all fluster and bluster about how we can’t possibly NOT want an album), but their time is just as important, and therefore valuable, as my own. They have a business to run and I respect that.

Nor am I whining about how I want stuff I can’t afford and hoping the Universe will hand it to me on a silver platter. Because that’s just it: I’m not lusting after a certain out-of-budget photographer. I don’t have visions of dreamy shots or over-saturated artistic interpretations. And I certainly have no desire to traipse around our venue for 2 hours doing photo after photo of T and I staring dreamily at each other; away from each other; at some indeterminate spot in the distance. Nor do I want a single shot of someone’s hands holding some tiny thing like it’s a fragile baby bird. This is a wedding, not a catalog shoot.

Yes, I want photos. Of us with our friends, of our ceremony, of our friends having fun and laughing and eating and drinking. I see the perfect photographer for us as a personal paparazzi-meets-photojournalist. No avant-garde artistic sensibilities, just an honest representation of the day, however it turns out.

And I’ve got a feeling that’s out there. At a price that won’t strangle what’s left of our budget after the venue, food, drinks, and attire have taken their chunks out. I just have to find it, is all.

So tell me, am I alone in my photography is not the most important thing ever sentiment? 

Dressing the Groom

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

First things first, let’s state the obvious: Mr. Road Trip is fully capable of dressing himself.

And I don’t mean in the sit-com-ish man-child ‘oh, look, he pulled something together that doesn’t look half bad, here’s a cookie’ way. I mean that when I met him he regularly wore ties to work. And he irons on a somewhat regular basis–even I don’t do that! So I’m not really worried about what he’s going to want to wear to our wedding, you know?

Still, I have thoughts on the subject–boy, do I!–but they’re more preferences than anything else. And if it comes down to 2 ensembles that are equally good and I prefer one a little more and he prefers the other, I’m not going to pout and fuss because he picks his preference. After all, I want him to be just as comfortable in his get-up as I am in mine.

And since we’re more than likely going the suit route, he actually has a prayer’s chance of wearing his again, which is more than I can say for my dress!

We’re not having a super-formal wedding. It’s going to be in the morning, in fall, with a small group of people and a brunch reception. A tuxedo strikes me as a bit too much and the sight of a cummerbund makes me think of high school formals. If he did go with more of a tuxedo-style jacket, I do prefer the long tie over the bow-tie, but in the store one day, T made a very good point:

I can wear a tie any day, I want something a little more special.

And who am I to argue with that?

That said, it was just recently that we even ventured into a Men’s Warehouse to look at what they had and start to figure out his jacket size.

Can I just take a moment, here, to say DAMN, the man cleans up nice.

But you’re going to have to take my word on it, for the moment. Because just as I was thinking ‘oh, maybe I should take some pictures of this’ a salesman (who I think might have helped me out when I bought some French cuff shirts for T the Christmas before our cruise) walked up and started to assist us.

A few things we learned, aside from his jacket size, were that we both preferred the European cut (straighter shoulders and more tapering to the waist) to the Continental cut (sloped shoulders and less tapering), and that there is a distinct difference between a suit coat, a sports coat, and a blazer. To which I replied, “I don’t care what you call if as long as it looks good.”

Since my dress is a creamy ivory, we were thinking a tan or taupe suit would look good with it, but their idea of taupe has a lot of grey in it. And then, come to find out, several coats that looked the correct color on the rack and against my skin-tone when I picked them up looked almost green against T’s skin! Mr. Trips also made the point that we were under store lighting and not in natural light, and that could make a difference, too, but I still think the color change is worth being aware of.

Our salesman pointed out that if we went on their website we could have free range of the colors they offered in various styles and cuts. If we made a note of the color codes (a particular part of the item number on all their wares) he would order them in (give it a week as some might be making a cross-country trek) with no obligation by us, and then T could try them on in person.

So that was our homework, but we decided to look around the rest of the store just to see.

Shirt & Tie from Men's Warehouse | personal photo

Shirt & Tie from Men’s Warehouse | personal photo

And the one thing I took a picture of was this shirt and tie combo (see, we’re back to the tie for the time being, at least). The dark chocolate shirt with a creamy tie really struck a chord with both of us.

What we’re thinking, based on this little Saturday side-trip, is that a dark shirt with a light tie, a light-colored blazer (sports coats tend to have patterns that could conflict with the tie, etc.), and dark or neutral-colored slacks might be the direction we go for the grooms wedding day look.

All things subject to change, of course.

How involved were you with the groom’s attire?

Honeymoon Dreaming

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

About a year and a bit out from the wedding many of the big to-dos had been taken care of (venue/catering/lodging/DoC and my dress), my DIYs were coming along, but a lot of the fiddly details couldn’t really be started on yet. So I started dreaming about the honeymoon.

Yup, I’m totally obsessed about where we’re going and what we’ll be doing on the day after the wedding, and the day after that, and the day after that… You get the idea.

And the worst part of it? It’s not even my decision.

We decided from the beginning that Mr. Road Trip would be in charge of the honeymoon–budget, decisions, etc.–and I would happily take a back seat. That lasted about a year, apparently, when suddenly a switch flipped in my brain and I started stalking cruise schedules.

Because that’s what we figured we’d be doing: floating in the middle of the ocean, somewhere, with nothing to do or no where to go that we didn’t want to. We’ve done one cruise together, just before we started cohabitating, and to say it was bliss would be an understatement. So a cruise seemed the logical, wonderful choice.

Only thing is, we’re getting married on a Saturday morning and when do the best cruises leave? Riiiiight, on Saturday mornings. So that was out. There were a handful of Sunday embarkations, but that would mean driving all night or getting up REALLY early our first married morning and, well, that wasn’t ticking too many boxes on the appealing chart.

In fact, the best cruising options–aside from waiting a week to honeymoon, something neither of us were too keen on–hit on the Thursday after the wedding, out of the Tampa port. On the up side, we could take our time on Sunday getting up and getting going, but oh what would we ever do in Central Florida for 3 or 4 days.

That’s when I realized it’s been an awfully long time since I’d been to Disney World–and even longer for T.

So the wheels began to turn, 3 days in the parks, then off to a cruise for 4 or 5 days. Then I wandered over to the Disney Cruise site, just for kicks, to see if there was a similar cruise on the Disney Dream we could take instead of the Carnival option. And there was. And it seemed comparable.

But was it really?

Yes and no–the Disney cruise was 1 night shorter than the Carnival cruise, but gave us 2 ports instead of 1 (not that I give 2 pins about the ports, though Castaway Cay does sound like fun). There seem to be more activities on Carnival, but we didn’t do many of those anyway. Disney is a heavily-kid-oriented brand, but we’re kids at heart. We’ve cruised Carnival before, so there might be additional discounts available.

Oh, the decisions!

And then, when we started pricing out the Disney World side of things, the original wish-list was pushing things out of the budget comfort zone. Not good! Next thing you know we’re back to looking at Carnival, or maybe skipping the cruise and just doing a longer WDW stay as Mr. RT made an excellent point: we’ve done a cruise together, we haven’t done Walt Disney World.

So the obsession continued. I’ve renewed all my old Disney forum accounts (as many as I could remember) and pulled out my old guidebooks–most of which are from 2004 (my last trip was 2006). So much has changed, though, that there are tons of options to consider: Fl Resident’s Pass, 3  or 4 day passes, Weekday Pass? Value or Moderate? ADRs or go with the flow? Dining Plan or not? It’s enough to make your head spin, but to tell the truth I love it!

Still,  it was super-early and I managed to restrain myself from investing in current guidebooks until the 2013 Passporter was published because we could decide to do something completely different. As much as I’m dreaming of a relaxed, Disney-fied honeymoon complete with bride and groom mouse ears, the decision is still T’s. And I’m going to hold to that.

Bride Ears complete with tiara and veil | image via DisneyStore.com

Bride Ears complete with tiara and veil | image via DisneyStore.com

groomears

Tuxedo’d grooms ears | image via DisneyStore.com

All I ask is that he not “surprise” me with our destination at the last minute. A girls gotta know what to pack!

Did you leave the honeymoon decision to the groom?
How would you feel about a surprise destination?Â