Weddingbee boards

Our date is a palindrome -- same forwards and backwards ... go ahead check into it ... 0102 ... 2010 ... I love it!

Ours in in Boston. 

Would love to know if I have a date twin or even another January 2010 bride!

We didn't really plan for it -- but it kind of worked for us. We will have had a long engagement for many reasons.  First - I am traveling for work for three months (Mid Jan -- Mid April) so I knew I didn't want to get married - and then dissappear for three months ... also we have NINE wedding before our own!!!  Most of which were already planned before we were engaged and will keep us busy for most of the summer.  We are big football fans (okay, my fiance is and I just like the tailgating) so fall was out for us.  And then it came to the winter and we were thinking new years eve -- but looked at the dates and saw that the first will fall on a Friday this year -- so our guests and attendants will most likely have the first off from work -- and then the second is a saturday so that would work out well.... THEN we realized it was a palindrome and well - long story short we knew it was the perfect date. A friend got married on 06.07.08 and I just loved that idea.

You can make your date whatever you want!  Use it for your "logo" or "theme" throughout ... or I just realized 4 + 2 + 4 = 10 !!!  Go with it!  Congrats on your wedding, good luck!

I have the same date in Atlanta!! I love the fact that our date is a palindrome. :)

How is your planning going, HumarockBride?

Any other January '10ers out there?

Ooh, January 1st could really be worked beautifully into a design. All those ones and zeros will look lovely!

Oh my goodness YAAAY for date twins!!!  I've been wishing and hoping to find someone else!  When did you all get engaged?   We'll be engaged for a total of 20 months .... so although I am so excited about our one year pre-anniversary -- it just feels like it is still so far away!  We have a LOT of things planned because I am actually going to be traveling for work for three months (Jan 17-April 18) so we wanted to get most of the big things done before I left. I dont think we'll have to worry about having a snowy weekend, I'm pretty positive it will happen here in Boston! 

What colors, themes, ideas do you ladies have?  We are avoiding anything Christmas related -- not that we don't LOVE Christmas just that red and green aren't our favorite -- so we've decided to go with a deep plum color and use all different metallics (gold, silver, copper, etc) for accent colors. We're also going with a "star" theme. Just using stars in our stationary etc. 

So happy to hear of other brides who still have another year to go!

Good luck with your planning and happy almost one year pre-anniversary! :)

Haha. It's all winter, no Christmas for us, too!! Plum must be the color to choose right now, because my fiance and I are doing a frosty color with plum, moss, and peacock accents. We're going for something that feels like a snowy winter's night. Rich colors touched by frost and moonlight. I know, it's hard to communicate.

I doubt we'll have snow, since I'm in Atlanta, GA, but I can still hope! :)

By the way, Miss Bliss, I love your name! Please tell me it's an old school Saved by the Bell reference!

As far as a theme, we don't really have one, but we're working on nailing down a motif to brand our wedding with, and our "keywords" are rustic, elegant, playful, and whimsical. 

Do you girls have keywords you're using to communicate with your vendors?

This is so fun! I love that we have the same colors, makes me happy!  We are going with a "written in the stars" theme ... you can actually see our save the dates at www.jsullivandesign.com ... We are getting married downtown in the city of Boston so we are going with a really elegant city wedding. So far we havent really had to deal much with vendors that wonder about the theme except the stationery person and she helped us come up with it. I'm a little nervous about flower arrangements but I think we are going to go with using branches or something similar for the bigger pieces and accent flowers. I do need to think about meeting with a florist soon so I can check out all the "winter" flowers.

The "written in the stars" theme is adorable! My fiancee and I actually met in our Astronomy class in college, so we thought about doing something to that effect and having our reception at a local museum/planetarium, but it didn't work out. :( I will live vicariously through your theme though! So, so cute!!

Yay! Congrats, JPLilly! What colors/theme are you using?

Welcome to the group! :)

The "theme" kind of came about after the fact. The colors lended themselves it as well as the fact that we are doing it downtown Boston at night in (obviously) the middle of the winter!  So we just liked the idea of a romantic dark night with sparkly stars. Then after some googling I saw that there is a beautiful love song - It was written in the stars - by ella fitzgerald and it was all over then! I was in love with the theme and really excited to move forward with it!

I'm so excited that there are others out there - you have no idea!  Welcome jplilly!  

When did you all get engaged?  We got engaged May 10th 2008 -- so we'll have a 20 month engagement - so long!! 

Wow, that is a long engagement! We got engaged on June 12th, 2008. Just one month after you! How did your future hubby propose?

By the way, I'm Courtney! I don't know how everyone else feels about first names, but I'm pleased to meet you all!! It's great to have other brides to share the experience with, especially since we're all getting married in such an atypical season. 

Why did everyone else choose January?

I chose January because my FH and I originally wanted an October wedding, but when we realized that they were the "it" thing to do right now (and that Atlanta has such an unpredictable Autumn that we might not even get the beautiful fall color that lured us in the first place), we decided to look for another date. Then I found a beautiful, snowy dress, and we realized that January 2nd would be easier for our OOT families, because most of them would be off and able to travel on January 1st!

Plus, I've always loved winter, and as a knitter who loves roaring fireplaces and leafless branches, I couldn't think of a prettier, cozier time to wed! 

Now I'm just hoping to be able to find some pretty flowers in season. 

What about you girls? What flowers are you using? Do you have particularly wintry dresses? I'll inclue a pic of mine, for fun!

 

 

Aww, congrats Twinkletoes! You're in the final countdown now. :)

Have you been doing any planning yet or did you wait until the year-ish mark to start? 

Long distance is so hard. Good for you for making it through (and won't it make the time around the wedding that much sweeter when you're able to see each other again? maybe I'll send my FH to Boston! ;) )

Welcome twinkletoes! 

Boston! Yaay! Well, sad for you that he's far away but Boston is a great city!!  And there are a lot of good schools in Boston so you must have a smarty pants fiance.  If you need any suggestions for weekend day trips while you're visiting him, let me know, I looove Boston.

Where is your wedding taking place? Down in Miami? How's the planning going with him being away?  Make sure he still helps and participates! You dont want him showing up to the wedding day saying "what is all this?!" haha

 And even though you're not a 1/2/10 bride don't be afraid to chat with us here, I'm sure there won't be a bunch of January brides so I want you to be a part of our group! :)

driftslikesmoke - you are smokin! that dress is gorgeous!  i'm sure everyone will agree when i say -- we want to see more!     

Thanks, HumarockBride! I'm going to go try it on this weekend with my choice of veil and earrings and everything, so I'll take some more pics from the front. I'm not showing my groom the dress until the day of the wedding, so it's really really reassuring to hear that people like it. Thank you!!

Ladies!  11 months now! :)  It keeps flying by. I haven't done much in the last month since I'm on the other side of the country now, but I'm starting to think about all the little details ... and I feel like that's finally acceptable! :)

I'm jealous that you're getting to focus on details! I'm at the point where we're finally nailing down the big stuff, and it's not as much fun.

We actually just got an email from our church yesterday saying that due to an error in their system, our date/time was given to another couple. :( So, we're now stuck with changing our date from 01/02/2010 to something else, hopefully still in January, or changing churches. :( Wish us luck!

Oh no!!  Bad news bears!!!

How does that happen? Did you have any sort of contract with them? That sucks big time. I'm sorry that happened.  I loved that we were almost engaged twins and date twins!

Keep us updated! 

I know! I agree about the date/engaged twins thing! It was kinda fun. :(

Congrats on becoming a Busy Bee! I saw your thread yesterday and it cracked me up. Didn't have a chance to reply though. :) We'll have something else in common pretty soon, though. Keep an eye out!

We didn't have a contract with our church, unfortunately. For being such a big Cathedral, they're surprisingly disorganized. We could still have the noon slot on our day, but we're not sure about the big gap we'd have between a noon ceremony and evening reception. Even with an hour Catholic mass, that's still 4 hours between then and the cocktail hour. :-/ Considering most of our guests would be OOT, it'd be awkward. 

What do you think? How do you feel about ceremony/reception gaps? :-/

Hmm ... I actually do have some thoughts (aka an opinion!!) on big gaps in time between the ceremony and reception.  (this is a long one!)

I thought I hated them.

I was invited to a wedding last summer with a similar time frame -- I think it was a 1-2pm ceremony and then a 6pm cocktail hour, I was so confused/concerned about this 4 hour gap that I wasn't really looking forward to the wedding (I was also extra nervous because I was traveling by myself since my fiance was a groomsman in another wedding that same day .. long story, his friends wedding was planned in 4 months, my friend had been engaged with their date for over a year!)

I was even extra confused when I got a frantic call from a girlfriend the morning of the wedding who was also attending the wedding asking if I was planning to wear two different dresses. Two dresses?!?! I exclaimed!  What?!?!  Apparently she had heard it was customary to wear "church clothes" to the ceremony and then an"evening dress" to the reception. I was not prepared for that and only had one dress with me. 

In the end - the 4 hours flew by!  The church was nearly an hour away from the hotel which was another 15 minutes from the reception location (they provided a bus to and from the hotel to the reception). So there goes an hour and a half approx. I hadn't checked into the hotel until after the ceremony so it was perfect for me to check in, get settled, etc. Also I would guess that about 50% of the guests actually DID change their clothes in between.  I did not, and I was totally fine with it, but I was able to spend some more time on my hair and freshen up my make up and make it a little more "night time" appropriate.  The bride and groom also offered "light refreshments" - which was literally cheese and crackers and veggies - in one of the smaller hotel conference rooms for about an hour and a half. We were definitely hungry by the time the cocktail hour came, but it was worth the wait and a little bit of an empty stomach because the food was fantastic.

With all that said, if there is a drive time between your ceremony and reception and like Miss Bliss stated - if you dont want to see each other before the wedding and still be able to get day time pictures in -- then GO for it. Just make sure that you do make some sort of accomodations, or at least acknowledge the fact that there is a time gap. As long as you make your guests aware of the reasoning (maybe via your website?) then it's up to you, like I love to say, it's YOUR wedding! 

Phew, sorry that was so long and opinionated!  

Oh and CONGRATS! you hive hostess you :)

Thanks ladies! I love opinions. Huma & Bliss, are we all Catholic? Too funny. :)

I agree that the extra time if we don't have a 2:00 wedding might be a little much, so we're going to do whatever it takes to have the ceremony at 2:00. Apparently there's now some conflict as to who had "dibs" on the date, since we really did email first. I would hate for some other bride to have to move her wedding, but... we'll see how it goes. 

Thanks for the feedback on the gaps. I figure if we have a full mass, the ceremony will end a little after 3:00 (in our two families, nothing ever seems to start on time), then we're planning to do a bit of lingering in the church afterwards. Not a formal receiving line, but trying to linger and say hello to the guests as they go out like the priest always does after mass. That should take until at least 3:30. Then the wedding party and families can take pictures for a couple of hours, and the reception can start with a cocktail hour at five (is that too early?). Including the 30 minute drive from the church to the reception, that leaves about an hour of down time. 

We're just trying to figure out a way to fill that hour for our guests. It would almost be easier to have MORE time to fill! 

We were thinking we migth get a hospitality suite at a hotel right near the church where most of the guests will likely be staying and set up a few snacks, OOT bags, and a faux-tobooth there with props and music to entertain guests in the interim. Then, maybe a shuttle could leave from there to transport those who plan on drinking or who are uncomfortable driving in Atlanta (most of my family and his!).

My fiance and I were both raised Catholic but we aren't doing a Catholic ceremony -- oh boy that's another long story for another long day!! :)  But I've been to plenty of Catholic weddings so I'm all on board for these types of questions.

First - drifts - the hospitality suite is a great idea.  Perhaps you could put some games in the hotel bags too -- put some fun questions about the bride and groom, or a deck of cards with your monogram (i think they might offer these on vistaprint) or just other quick "to do" while they wait inbetween could be really cute and fun and a conversation starter.

Next - miss bliss - what is the distance between your ceremony site and your reception site? I think  your timing is exactly the same as my brother's wedding -- and they did miss their cocktail hour because of pictures, but it wasn't the end of the world. Could/would you consider pushing the cocktail back just by a little bit. I honestly think pictures go faster then you think!  Especially if you get the bridesmaids and groomsmen shots done before the wedding, then quickly assemble the families and the group shots and then your own ... would you ever "sneak away" for 20 minutes during the reception?  It will give you two a minute to breath and take in the night before returning to the dance floor.  I think missing your cocktail hour is worth it if you really dont want to see each other before the ceremony.  I know we are doing a "first look" but that is because we are both super nervous and I thikn it will help us!

I am definitely using a timeline. I am timeline obsessed. I'm in the process of writing mine up. I'll get it to you when I finish. Otherwise I would def search the Wiki for timelines -- a few of the Bees have written some awesome posts including their timelines!

10 months to go ladies!