Some BIG Checks (finally)!

The ongoing Invitations Saga is finally over! This morning, I took the invitations to the post office and dropped them off to be hand-canceled and mailed. I am SO relieved to finally have them out. Now we wait for responses. I'm jealous of all the people on The Knot whose RSVPs are coming to them - my mom INSISTED that our RSVPs go to her, so instead of getting to check the mail excitedly every day, I just have to wait impatiently for my mom to email me updated lists of who has responded. I also have mixed feelings about the RSVPs...while I am very excited to be done with the invitations, and excited to get responses and finalize the fact that people will actually show up (lol), part of me is worried, because I know that some people won't be able to come, and I will inevitably be disappointed by some of the "no"s. At this point, it's still POSSIBLE that each individual person we sent invitations to could say "yes"...but once they RSVP "no", that's it. I'm weird, lol.

Another big check - last weekend we took our ketubah to Michael's to figure out framing. We weren't sure how we were going to do it, because we want to display the ketubah during the reception (so we wanted it to be in a frame for that), but we need to have it out of the frame to sign it at the ceremony. Well, the lady at Michael's was VERY helpful, apparently they do lots of ketubahs, and she suggested that we go ahead and get it framed, and just leave the glass out of the frame so we can sign it IN the frame, and then after the wedding we can get the glass put in. Brilliant! So that's what we decided to do. While at Michael's, we also purchased a couple of 8x10 frames for our baby photos that will be displayed on the guest book table at the reception.

Since the last time I posted, several things I talked about have been completed also! We got the marriage license, no problem, so that's ready to go. I also attended all FOUR of my dress fittings, so now my dress actually fits me, and is nice and crisp and clean (she cleaned it for me as well). It is back in my possession now, hanging in my closet until the wedding.

We also finished compiling a CD of classical music to be played while our guests are arriving to the ceremony location. We will have live musicians for the ceremony itself, but since we wanted a mix of classical and Jewish music, we decided to hire musicians to play the Jewish music (they are Klezmer musicians actually) and make a CD of classical music to be played before the ceremony begins.

A week from tomorrow night, we will be flying up to Maryland again - this time for my bridal shower. I'm excited to see everyone who will be there! And of course, my mom has our whole weekend fully booked with other wedding-related stuff, too. I'll be getting my hair cut for the final time before the wedding, we'll be going to the florist to finalize some stuff, and we'll also be going to the venue to decide on the exact spot where we want to have the ceremony (the grounds are HUGE, and they say that you can do it anywhere on the grounds). I'll definitely be posting again when we get back from that trip, to write about the shower and also other stuff we get done between now and then!

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.

Finding "The Dress"

I am not a "girly girl". I own exactly two dresses, and I usually wear jeans or jean shorts and a t-shirt or sweatshirt. And my t-shirts are all large (even though I am not a very large person). I absolutely refuse to wear skirts (hate them) or any low-cut tops (feel extremely uncomfortable in them and am constantly trying to pull them up, even when they're not supposed to go up any farther). My mom loves to tell the story that, for my Bat Mitzvah, she dragged me to literally EVERY store in the DC metro area (yes, we went all the way down to Tysons Corner, haha) looking for a dress I would wear and found...nothing. Finally, my aunt Lyz, who lives in NY, called my mom and said she found a dress that she thought I would like, and she would mail it down to us, and if I didn't like it, we could just mail it back. Well, that was the dress I ended up wearing! It was a dark red, crushed velvet, long sleeve, mid-calf-length dress (my Bat Mitzvah was in late December), very plain, and a "regular" (by which I mean like a t-shirt) neckline. I loved it!

So I knew that I should start wedding dress shopping early, because who knows how long it would take me to find something I actually liked! I started by browsing online, looking at known designers' websites (Alfred Angelo, David's Bridal, etc.). Pretty much everything I saw was either strapless (which I absolutely refuse to do, I would feel like it was falling down the whole time!) or very low-cut. I knew there HAD to be dresses out there that were made for people like me, who don't wear stuff like that, so I kept looking. I ended up browsing on The Knot, where I found one dress that looked promising. I clicked on the link to the designer's website, and discovered that it was a whole line of what they called "modest" dresses! They had a link on the website where you could find stores in your area that carry the line, so I did that. However, when I started going to the websites for the stores, I discovered that almost all of them had either closed or the website didn't exist! The only one that was still open was a place called The Yellow Rose. I looked through their website and liked what I saw, so I emailed Julia, the owner, to set up an appointment to go try on dresses.

I posted a facebook status asking who wanted to go dress shopping with me, and got a lot of responses initially. My sister even wanted to fly down from NY to go! (I talked her out of it though.) But gradually as the day got closer, people dropped out, and it ended up being just me and Shosh who went.

I wasn't sure what to expect. We went on a Saturday afternoon, and I was worried that it would be really busy, having read horror stories on The Knot from people who'd gone to David's Bridal and the like on weekends. But as it turned out, we were the only people there! It was just me, Shosh, and the owner (it's a VERY small shop). I tried on a total of 9 dresses, although only 8 of them made it out of the dressing room (one made me look pregnant, and I said NO WAY!). The fact that this store had 9 dresses (and I'm sure they had more than that even) that I was even willing to try on made me feel like I had made a good choice in looking there! Anyway, the last dress I tried on, I liked immediately. I thought it was a little too "poofy" in the skirt, but Shosh said they can take out some of the crinkly stuff that makes it poofy (I forget the name of it, haha). I ended up wearing the dress for about 20 minutes! I even walked over by the door so we could see what it looked like in natural light (since our wedding ceremony will be outside, weather permitting, I wanted to make sure I wasn't totally washed out, since it's a white dress).

I ended up texting a picture of me in the dress to my sister and my mom (well, actually to my dad so he could show it to my mom, my mom doesn't even know how to check her voicemail on her cell phone, let alone text!) and asked my mom what she thought, since she was paying for the dress. She said (typical buzzkill that she is) that she thought I should sleep on it before making a decision, and didn't I want to shop around more? I said HELL NO! I HATE shopping, especially the kind where I have to try stuff on, so if I found something on the first trip, WHY would I want to subject myself to MORE? She still wasn't convinced. Julia, the shop owner, said that she would give me the dress for $599, even though the list price was $668. My mom asked how long that offer was good :-P Julia said through Monday, so I told my mom I would sleep on it and we told Julia we would decide by Monday.

Of course, after I slept on it, I still wanted the dress! So my mom called Julia and paid for the dress over the phone, and I went and picked it up that Wednesday after work. It's now hanging in my closet until it comes time to go get it fitted! Julia also gave me the business card of a seamstress she works with often, who apparently used to work for David's Bridal, so she knows her way around wedding dresses.

My sister was PISSED that she didn't get to be there for the moment when I knew it was "The Dress". She made me promise that I would give her her own private dress-modeling session at some point, so I agreed to that. She did say that it looked good on me in the pictures, though!

The dress is a scoop neckline ball gown with silver and white beading on the neckline and waistline of the bodice and at the bottom of the train. It has "petal" sleeves, which are basically like cap sleeves. This is me in the dress:

Isn't it pretty??? :-)