Little Things

Our planning has kind of stagnated recently, and now that we're officially in 2011, I'm really feeling the pressure to get stuff done! We have gotten a few things done though...

1. Favors and cake topper - we ordered these a few weeks ago, and they have both arrived to my parents' house! My mom says the favors came out GREAT!

2. Dress fitting - I went to my first dress fitting on Saturday. On recommendations from people on The Knot, I went to Dora Baker, who runs a bridal dress alterations business out of her home here in Atlanta. She was very nice and helpful. She has to let my dress out a bit at the waist so that it will fall correctly before she can see what else needs to be done. I go back on January 20th to get the rest done (hem and bustle), and my dress should be ready for pickup on January 27th!

3. Bridesmaids dresses - ALL of my bridesmaids have finally ordered their dresses! This is a huge sigh of relief for me, since I had been really stressing about it. But it looks like they will all come in with a couple of weeks to spare before the wedding :)

4. Photo montage - Marcus and I went through a whole bunch of photos and finally narrowed down to 100 the ones we want in our photo montage (which will be shown at the rehearsal dinner). We will be mailing them to the videographer this week!

5. Maid of honor gift - I had already bought gifts for my bridesmaids a while back, but I FINALLY came up with a good idea for my maid of honor. I purchased her gift last week, and it should arrive sometime this week.

6. Invitations - this is an ongoing saga :-P My mom keeps changing her mind about things, and I was ready to kill her at one point last week. But we are OH SO CLOSE to finally being done with the invitations! We just have to send all of our spreadsheets to Marcus's dad (once they are completely finalized) and then they will begin printing! I really hope we get them out by the end of the month...

7. Marriage license - Montgomery County, Maryland (where we'll be getting married) is AWESOME, because their marriage license process is SO simple! We had to call their office to request a "non-resident marriage license application", which they promptly mailed to us. We have filled it out, and just need to sign it in front of a notary public. We were going to do that today, but everything is closed due to the snow, so we'll try again tomorrow. Once we sign it, we just have to mail it back along with the $55 fee, and we'll be all set!

So my to-do list is slowly but surely shrinking. Once we're done with the invitations, I'll feel a lot better. I think that's really the last BIG thing. After that, it's all details.

That's My Final Answer

I haven't been doing much wedding-related stuff lately, mostly on account of general life craziness. We have had a steady stream of gifts arriving at our door, and now have a growing pile of boxes in the middle of our living room, because there is no storage space in our apartment! We're going up to Maryland for July 4th weekend, so we're hoping to take at least some if not all of this stuff up then to store at my parents' house temporarily.

Today I did my first wedding errand in a few weeks: I went to David's Bridal with Pearl (one of my awesome bridesmaids). My mom had gone to David's Bridal in Maryland with Cara (another bridesmaid) and her mom a couple of weeks ago, and called me telling me that I needed to go to David's Bridal and look at the color I had chosen for the bridesmaids' dresses, because it looked COMPLETELY different in person than it did on the website. Also, a couple of my bridesmaids had asked if I could get color swatches for them so they could search for dresses elsewhere, since DB is kind of expensive. So Pearl and I went, and had great success! First of all, the color looked EXACTLY the same in person as it did on the website, so I don't know what my mom was talking about. So Horizon blue is now my FINAL decision for bridesmaids dress color! I also picked up a couple of swatches (at $1 each, and they are big enough to cut into several pieces, so I only had to buy two of them), so that is taken care of.

This weekend we are going up to Maryland for our engagement party, and I will have lots of updates when we get back! In addition to the party itself (which will be ridiculous, my parents are really going all out for this!), we are also meeting with several potential photographers and DJs, so hopefully we will make a decision by the end of the weekend! My mom also called me today to let me know that they are signing the contract for the florist today, and she has also pretty much decided on a day-of coordinator to hire. The pieces are starting to fall into place!