Gearing up for the official tastings!

We’re scheduled to be in Chicago over Mother’s Day weekend in order to attend to a number of final details, such as the cake and caterer tastings, hair and make up trials, and more! It’s going to be a crazy, event filled weekend. We’ll post more details as we have some ideas on what’s going on, especially where menu items are concerned.

If you have any food allergies, now is the time to tell us so we can plan for you accordingly.

If you want to provide an opinion on a favorite cake flavor, filling or combination – please comment to this post. 🙂 Our wedding cake is being made by Take the Cake. Feel free to check out their website for cake flavors and fillings. The groom’s cake is being made by Bleeding Heart Bakery – and will be a chocolate suicide cake – Jeff decided that one already. The wedding cake is all mine to decide. 😉

Dueling Dresses

Phew! Just when things seem all relaxed and progressing so nicely, the little things come bite you. We’re pushing ahead trying to make ordering deadlines for a variety of things. So far, so good! Who would have thought finding the right dress would be so challenging! 🙂 I think my dress was the simplest to find! Now we’re looking for mom dresses and grandma dresses and little girl dresses, oh my!

Added to that, Charlotte requested a short dress for dancing because she is concerned her long dress will be an impediment to proper dancing. 😀 Go figure.

Save the Date postcards have arrived!

Hopefully everyone has received their save the date cards by now. I hope you like them!

Flowers

We just got our initial quotes back from our 2 final florists, and are now trying to decide between them. It’s fun to give your vision to someone and see how they interpret it and what they end up with. My main requests were to 1) use native and/or local plants as much as possible, 2) avoid things that would need to get trucked in from way out of area, and 3) I would like to use more parts of the plant than just the inflorescence (flower parts).

However, I completely underestimated how much is involved in flowers and particularly, wedding flowers. Geez. It makes me just want to walk out into a meadow the day of and make a pass through the wildflowers…there. Done. 🙂 Luckily, Jeff’s mom is awesome and they are handling the rest of the flower coordination to work out the details from their end in Chicago.

I hope you all will love the end product!

Engagement Photos Have Arrived!

We’re really happy with how they turned out – and we hope you’ll like them too.

Check them out and let us know what you think!

Engagement Photos

Where oh where in Turkey should we go?

Jeff and I are busy researching Turkey, trying to decide where exactly we want to go. There are so many exciting things to see and do… Eastern Turkey is all mountains and awesome hiking and cool sights…and Western Turkey is all beautiful sights, more hiking and fewer mountains…

So far, we want to see Istanbul, but beyond that, where to go?

Options include: Cappadocia/Goreme, Mt. Nemrut, Black Sea coast, Lycian Way (long hiking route), Gaziantep (home of baklava), Pamukkale, and more! Wow.

Possible activities include: hot air balloon ride, lots of hiking, lots of ruins – some of the best preserved of the ancient world, horse back riding through Cappadocia, more ruins, sea kayaking, sailing, tons of great food no matter where we go, hot springs, and of course, planes, trains and automobiles.

Snow!!

We’re sort of snowed in today. Well, not exactly snowed in, but digging the cars out is a bit more than we want to tackle for our first quiet weekend in some time. We’re making some final tweaks to the website, so hopefully everyone loves the end results. 🙂 Please leave comments throughout the webpage! We want to hear what you have to say!

We’re finalizing details with our singer/performer – Jeff is handling that part, since he’s the music aficionado. I just listen to whatever is playing, mostly. Save the dates are back for a minor tweaking, then they should be going out.

By the way, have I mentioned that Char wants to show off her Irish dancing at the wedding? The only problem so far is that the song she chose to dance to (and we all love) has lyrics that are less than suited to a wedding. I believe the gist of the story is this English lady who leaves her lord to run off with the gypsies and tells her husband that she’s keeping this handsome stud over here in the gypsy camp and leaving his stuffy self. Sooo…we’re searching for another awesome song. Either that, or we’ll play Raggle Taggle Gypsy and hope none of you pay attention to the lyrics. 🙂

And on the 2nd day of planning, my true love gave to me, 2 musicians…

Webpage is almost live…

We’re going to be sending out the save the date postcards very soon…invitations are selected, we have our DJ, location, groom’s cake is planned, dresses are ordered…all in all, plans are coming along extremely well. Giant kudos to Jeff’s mom and our wedding planner Marissa.

On the 1st day of planning, my true love gave to me…a glass of water and an Aleve…

Engagement Photos

Engagement photos should be posted soon. We met with our wedding photographer and had a photo session today in the city. 🙂 Yeah! It was a bit chilly, to say the least, but with it being Chicago in the middle of winter, it could have been FAR worse. So we were very happy. I hope you enjoy them too, once we get them posted.

Our First Post!

Simply a test of the emergency blogging system.

This is only a test.

Expect real content soon! =)