Reception Feast

We completed our final tastings for the cakes and the reception menu. All was a complete success, to say the least. 🙂

Wedding Cake – won’t contain chocolate, but will contain lots of other yumminess in a flavor combination that is sure to surprise the taste buds. Take the Cake just completed a custom design for us. We absolutely love the final sketch they sent us – this cake is going to be gorgeous and extremely tasty! 😀

Groom’s Cake – will contain the chocolate… the rest you’ll have to see when you get there. For those unable to make it, we’ll be sure to post photos! 🙂 This one is Jeff’s brain child.

Reception Menu – The game plan so far: 6 passed hors d’oeuvres with an action station for the cocktail hour followed by a lovely meal with soup and salad and the main entree, finished with dessert. There will be lots of great elements in this meal – Jen, Jeff, Marissa (wedding planner extraordinaire), Charlotte, and Jeff’s parents all participated in the tasting, and all unanimously approved the menu selections. The chef at The Blackstone (Eric) was fantastic, wonderfully polite, and he plates some gorgeous items. Beyond that, there needs to be some surprises for the evening!

 

*If you have any food concerns, please be sure to contact us.*

Crazy weekend of planning almost done

Well, our long weekend in Chicago is almost over – we made it to every appointment almost as scheduled! 🙂 Food has been finalized, cakes are finalized, make up trial was a success, my hair got cut and styles and is looking super cool, Char’s hair is looking wonderfully adorable – awesome bob, and the bridal shower was a complete success.

A giant thank you for Cathy Milam, Janet  and Alice Kramer for hosting this shower and making all the details happen. The shower was held at the lovely Cafe Pyrenees in Libertyville, IL. The appetizers and lunch were fantastic, and the desserts were perfect.  What a fantastic day!

We’re in the final month count down – more details to come, but we can’t share all the results from this week’s appointments! There will surely be a lot of surprises for everyone! 🙂

Food and Airplanes and Appointments, oh my!

So we missed our plane Thursday morning (along with several other people) because of security line length. We ended up catching a flight on another airline completely, but still made it perfectly on time to the cake tasting at 9:30am.

Cake tasting – AWESOME! We have our cake flavors. Because Jeff’s groom’s cake will be this chocolate confection, we opted for no chocolate in the wedding cake. There will be nutty flavors in the cake, though, as a warning.

Next Charlotte and I had our hair done – wow, we both love our new hair styles! Bob is awesome. You’ll see how fantastic he is when you see Charlotte’s and my hair on the big day.

Then we had the formal tasting at The Blackstone for the entire reception menu – action stations for the cocktail hour, passed appetizers, soups, salads, several entrees and more desserts for a sweets table – we spent almost 4 hours eating superb food. It was all fantastic, but we narrowed it down to our final choices for the menu. We can say with absolute confidence that no one will walk away hungry and everyone is going to love some part of this feast. I could go on, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise.

I had my make-up trial today – wow – Alicia Brooks did a great job. I’m extremely happy with the results! I also had my dress fitting today so we are well on our way to having all the major items done and checked off the list.

In usual fashion, we couldn’t have done any of this without Marissa or Jeff’s parents. I’m exhausted and am off to bed now. Thank heavens.

Jen

Final Round of Trials and Tastings!

We’re getting packed and ready to head out to Chicago this weekend for our final round of tastings, trials and fittings. How exciting!!

On our to-do list:

  1. Cake tasting for wedding cake,
  2. Main caterer for our reception menu tasting at The Blackstone,
  3. Final meeting w/ Bleeding Heart Bakery for the groom’s cake – this thing is going to be superb (in appearances and taste),
  4. Make-up Trial for Jen
  5. Hair trials for Jen
  6. Fittings for Jen and Charlotte
  7. Family photos at the Chicago Botanical Gardens on Mother’s Day
  8. Charlotte’s having her cut & styled
  9. I hear rumors about having our eyebrows shaped (this sounds uncomfortable)
  10. Get the marriage certificate (Jeff still really wants a ketubah – )
  11. Lazy time with the family is squeezed in there somewhere…
  12. Mother’s Day brunch with the moms in the family (Sharon, Jen and Alice) before the trip to the gardens
  13. and last but not least, a bridal shower for Jen – giant thank you to Janet Peterson and Cathy Milam for hosting this!

All in 4 busy days – with Marissa’s planning help, it all fits in there with some scheduled down time to boot! 😀 So we’re getting ready for a wonderful long weekend with the family and finalizing a lot of little details. More information will be posted here next week as we get things figured out.

 

Last call for food allergies! If you have one or more, make sure you send an email our way so we can plan accordingly!

 

Make sure to send your acceptances and regrets for any invitations we send your way. 🙂 You’re important to us and we look forward to hearing from you.

 

Jen & Jeff

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.

 

 

 

 

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!

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.

© Copyright Robots and Horses
Main logo designed by Kim Bradshaw