Pile o' wedding

After several suggestions from Vader's mom that I check out My Fair Wedding by David Tutera, I put it on the DVR list and would watch an occasional episode. It's a pretty low budget, very predictable show, but I like watching lavish recreations of sometimes ridiculous wedding themes.

We are currently about to move, and have been packing for weeks. Packing is B-O-R-I-N-G, so I often put on TV shows we've recorded to entertain me while I jam our stuff into every box corner I can find. Since Chopped always makes me hungry and there are currently 24 episodes of My Fair Wedding on our DVR, I've watched a whole lot of David Tutera in the past week.

On the show he always asks brides to display everything they have for their wedding on a table for him to then pick apart. The concept seemed like fun, and since I'm packing making a giant mess anyways I thought I would put (one of) everything we currently have in our apartment for the wedding together. Here it is:

It's a little depressing to think how much time/money/online shopping/beer processing has gone into such a small pile, but I also think it's a great representation of Vader and I as a fun, geeky, creative, and classy (??) couple. Looking forward to seeing how this pile grows, what it will have to say about us together as it grows, and to attempting to fit the growing pile into our new and smaller apartment. 

Name(s)

When I was in seventh grade, I had an L.L. Bean backpack with my initials monogrammed on the front. At least once a week some kid would yell "hey, your initials are Saturday Night Live!" and I would respond with  feigned shock, because my snarky little self couldn't help it. 

But they were right, my initials are SNL, which in and of itself is pretty sweet. Though I had my doubts about it growing up, I now realize that my full name is uniquely cool, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that when I get married. The name change situation gets mixed up pretty fast in another big decision: children. Here are my current thoughts:

1.) My first name, which has the least significance to me in some ways, is what my students call me. Thus, I won't be changing that. Plus it means princess, which is pretty hard to argue with. 

2.) My middle name is that of my maternal great-grandfather, and is a name that died when his three daughters all changed their names after marriage. It's a source of pride that I get to carry the name on, and someday I will give it to one of my children as their middle name. Until then, I like its uniqueness (though this would be far less of a dilemma if my parents had just named me Sarah Ann or something similarly generic) and don't want it to slip into name oblivion.

3.) My current last name will also die with my generation if myself and my three female cousins (my sister already changed hers) all change our names. Again, not eager to see the name slip away. I had also planned to make my current last name the middle name of another child (we're at 2+ for those who are counting), though my sister just beat me to it with my adorable month old nephew. 

4.) Incorporating Vader's last name into my name is also important to me, so that we have a public symbol of our relationship and so we can share a family name with these future children. Plus, as one of my former students said (with regard to his last name), "It's fresh."

If I want to keep them all, I have 4 names. That definitely won't fit in the little boxes, should I ever have to take a standardized test again. And it will inevitably be shortened to Mrs. Something on mail, so I would need to decide what Something is. And whatever Something becomes, one of the other names would be lost until it is assigned to (future) Vader baby. 

I could hyphenate my current last name and Vader's last name, but then our children would either have hyphenated last names or just Vader's last name. If the kids get hyphenated names, they have to make this decision should they decide to marry and it gets even more complicated. Also, Vader likes this option less. If the kids just get Vader's last name, my current last name will die (on my end) anyway, making the whole thing a little silly. 

AGH! Voilà, my name dilemma. I'm choosing to let it stew until I have to actually make a decision next spring, but welcome any advice in the meantime.

Or, should I just go whole hog and become Princess Consuela Banana-Hammock? 

Projects I won't be doing

As a cheap and  fairly crafty person (of the good-with-a-glue-gun sort, not sketchy) I'd like to make as many wedding details as I can without giving up every ounce of my spare time. Right now I'm planning on making table numbers, paper flower decorations for the candy buffet, and I've already finished the jewelry for my lovely bridesmaids. While I might add a couple of things along the way, these are projects I can definitely finish in 11 months.

During times when I should be working/cleaning/packing, I prefer to surf wedding sites for decoration ideas. Under headings like DIY (do-it-yourself) I find some useful ideas and several hilariously unnecessary projects. Here are my top 3 favorites that won't be featured at our wedding:

1.) "Tears of Joy" packets. These will end up on the floor or in your guests' noses. Then how will you feel about their cost?

2.) Personalized bridesmaid hangers. For that moment when you can't remember which dress in your closet is for the wedding.

3.) Customized "Do Not Disturb" wedding signs. How else will you keep random people from wandering into your hotel room, besides the self-locking doors?

Any other wedding details that, from the guest's perspective, I can cross off my list?

Favors, of the yummy variety

As one who usually wears pocket-less dresses to weddings, I rarely remember to grab favors off the table at the end of the night. Cookie cutters, bubbles, etc. are cute and I notice them when I sit down, but that's usually as far as we go.

The exception? Edible favors! Sure, nobody NEEDS more food after dinner and wedding cake. But those hours of slightly aerobic dancing make me reach for the little candies or homemade cookie every time. As a result, Vader and I will be offering edible favors to our guests in two forms. The first, a candy buffet. They're pretty, they're delicious, and they completely legitimize my five year old self's urge to chow down on Swedish Fish. 

While we hope to Maine-ify our candy buffet as much as we can, we were looking for a way to make our favors more personal. Enter Vader's love for all things beer, my love for DIY projects, and our kitchen floor's love for sticky messes. We've decided that we will make a few different kinds of beer (at the moment we're thinking a fruity ale, a flavored stout, and an interesting IPA) and put them out for guests to grab at the end of the night to remember the wedding fondly. 

Since it had been 3+ years since either of us had brewed beer, and none of it had ever tasted particularly good, we decided we had better start practicing so as to prevent our guests from remembering our wedding while running for the 'loo. So far we have brewed a summer ale that is bottle conditioning and a Russian imperial stout in primary fermentation. Perhaps I'll update once we've tried the beer in proper form (i.e. not warm and flat from the carboy). In the meantime, here's a glimpse into our project until next July!

The kit

 Vader and our very advanced wort chilling system

 Closet/Beer Factory

Photos

In front of a camera I have impeccable timing. Nearly every staged picture I've been in features one of two reactions. The first reaction looks like this:                                           

Many an elementary school picture featured a smiling, nicely dressed, eyes-jammed-shut Sarah. It seems the best way around this is to take the picture just slightly before I expect it to happen. I'll be meeting with our photographer closer to the wedding to ensure that he plans for LOTS of extra shots of each posed picture plan. As part of our photography package we will get digital copies of every photo taken, giving Vader and I excellent blooper material for perusal after the wedding. 

My second go-to photo reaction is to make silly faces that usually involve opening my mouth very widely (read: many, many chins). Here are some of my best faces I'd rather not replicate on my wedding day:

While I'm sure a few of these will creep into our traditional photos (I can only imagine what face I'll pull during the cake-feeding pictures), I'm hoping to keep my goofiness to a minimum in the formal photos. Instead, I'm planning on being as ridiculous as possible in the....

PHOTO BOOTH! I'm incredibly excited that during our reception guests will be able to don silly costumes and take hilarious pictures to then paste copies of into a book for Vader's and my viewing pleasure. It's hardly new at wedding receptions, but who doesn't like cramming into a small box and taking the silliest pictures you can think of with the assistance of a couple of cocktails? 

And finally, here is exactly what I'd like to not look like on my wedding day, though I'm sure it will come through at some point:

$$$

Vader and I have just returned from the beautiful wedding of two of my great friends, and we had an awesome time. It's fueled a lot of talk in the past few days of what we'd like our wedding to look like, which has brought us to even more awareness of cost.

Weddings are expensive. Throwing them is expensive. Going to them is expensive. Being in them is expensive. When I first learned the average American spends $27,000 on a wedding I scoffed. "Pshaw," I said, "I can do it for WAY less. I'll just skip all the fancy extras and it will be very affordable."

As it turns out, that $27,000 figure does not come from things like hiring a calligrapher, working with a wedding planner, or serving palate-cleansing sorbet between courses. It comes from the fact that food, service, and rentals cost so much, in addition to the fact that anything "bridal" costs 200% more than the non-bridal variety.

There are a few "luxuries" (the word is used very loosely here) that we are committed to. We want the wedding inside, because rain plans are generally sub-par and the idea of waving flies off my food is disgusting. We want the wedding catered, because coordinating the rental and setup of food, tables, chairs, etc. can cost more than everything done at once. Finally, we want to have everything ready to go (with the help of the caterers) before the wedding so our family and friends can enjoy themselves without also committing to days of manual labor.

Because we're paying for the wedding mostly ourselves, Vader and I need to be frugal with wedding expenses where we can. I've spent a lot of time over the past year and a half searching wedding forums for mention of affordable vendors, DIY projects that actually save money, and daily deals related to wedding needs. It meant a lot of weeding through pages of forums and reading reviews of each suggested vendor, but it also means our photography will cost about 1/3 to 1/5 of traditional wedding photography packages and our invitations will not cost more than my dress.

We understand that the decisions we've made about the wedding will make it more expensive than others, and that there are ways we could have spent less. We could have had a backyard wedding, or a Sunday brunch wedding, or we could have eloped. None of these seemed like us, however, so we're going ahead with the Saturday evening indoor wedding. The frugality we have employed thus far and will continue to use should help us stay under that $27k figure, though nowhere near as far below as I had originally hoped.

Vader and I are thankfully similarly committed to wedding spending. We want to have a good time and we want our loved ones to have a good time. Yet, our life together will continue after the wedding and we would very much like to not blow our (admittedly brief) life's savings on a big party*. Someday not TOO long after the wedding we'll want to buy a house and start a family, all of which appropriately costs much more than a wedding. Though likely years away, our goal is that next August we can hit the ground running toward our next enormous life expense. Oh, to be a kid again when money came from the tooth fairy and grown-ups had it all figured out.

*This reminded me of that Friends episode where Monica finds out how much money Chandler has and starts pushing to spend every penny of it on their wedding. Chandler continually refuses to blow it all on a party and Monica points out that if he continues to call their wedding a party he may not be invited. Look it up if you haven't seen it in a while!

At this point we have made many of the money decisions we'll have to make for the wedding, but will continue to extensively research more affordable options for our remaining choices. Our shared next goal is to work on minimizing the expense of attending our wedding (and associated shenanigans) for our overwhelmingly graduate student wedding party.