This weekend, Marcus and I traveled up to Maryland for my shower (which of course also included a busy weekend of wedding planning). We flew up Friday night, got in late, but still had time to discuss plans for the weekend before going to bed. Two of my awesome cousins from Israel happened to be in the States this week, so they ended up coming to my shower! It was great to get to see them.
Saturday, we slept in, then I went and got my hair trimmed for the last time before the wedding. Then we went over to the Bolger Center to choose where exactly on the grounds our ceremony will be. We found a really pretty spot, convenient to the parking lot and the building where the reception will be, so that went really well! I also got to check the mail - so at least we got one day's worth of excitement over receiving RSVPs! After that, we headed to my cousin's pom competition (she's a senior in high school, and is her pom squad's captain this year!). That was fun, although they didn't win. Then we went to Mama Lucia (an Italian restaurant) for dinner, where we ran into our florist randomly! When we got home, the adults went to bed, and Marcus and I stayed up talking to my cousin Noa until after midnight.
Sunday, we slept in again, then headed over to my aunt's house for my shower. I was a little nervous about the shower, since my aunts are crazy and you never know what will happen when they plan something, lol, but it turned out to be really fun, and it was GREAT to see everybody! We played lots of fun games, ate yummy food, and I got a bunch more awesome gifts. Overall, a great success! Meanwhile, my dad took "the guys" (Marcus, my sister's boyfriend, some family friends, and my cousin) bowling...I was SO jealous! After the shower, my sister and her boyfriend and my Israeli cousins all got on the bus to head back to New York. That evening, my mom and I spent a lot of time going through pictures to find a couple I was looking for for various wedding-related projects (one to go on the guest book table, and two for various parts of my sister's present). We also went out to dinner, even though we were still full from the shower, lol. Then we came home, watched a couple of home videos, and went to bed.
Monday morning, we got up a little earlier and headed to the florist. My parents had changed our centerpieces, so we wanted to see the new ones, and we ended up making a couple of changes ourselves. But I think everything is finalized now with the flowers, so that's good! Then we went home, ate lunch, and played cards until it was time to head to the airport. I also spent some time looking online for a barrette to use in my hair for the wedding.
It was a busy weekend, but a lot of fun, and things are getting much more finalized now! I can't believe there's only 6 weeks left until the wedding, it seems like we still have SO much to do!
Showing posts with label venues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label venues. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Photographers Galore
This weekend, we traveled up to Maryland again. It was originally supposed to be just a fun, relaxing trip for the holiday weekend, but of course we ended up having to meet with a million (ok, only four, but it felt like a million!) photographers along the way.
We drove up halfway Thursday night, got into the hotel around 11:30 (we made really good time!), slept for a few hours and got on the road Friday morning around 7:45. We left earlier than usual because we were meeting my parents at the first photographer's house in Reston (on the way up, but about the same length trip time-wise as just going straight to my parents' house, since it's farther west). We had NO traffic the whole way until we got onto the Beltway (of course), so we still managed to get there on time, at 1:00 pm. The first photographer was ok...she was nice, and my mom really liked her, but I thought she was kind of disorganized and all over the place.
After meeting with her for about an hour, we drove the rest of the way to my parents' house, had about 45 minutes to unload the car...
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, we also brought a whole bunch of our engagement presents up with us to store at my parents' house for now. YAY for no more giant pile of boxes in our living room!
So anyway, we had about 45 minutes to unload the car before we headed out to meet with the second photographer of the trip. We got to her house right on time at 4:00 pm. I liked her better than the first one, but my mom had the opposite opinion (of course).
After that, we went to a nice dinner at Bonefish (yum!), then headed back to my parents' house, where the third photographer (which was actually two people, a husband and wife team) arrived just as we did! We were running a little late and they were a little early for the 7:00 meeting we had planned, but it worked out just fine. They were much younger than the other two photographers we had met with, and my mom was concerned about their relative lack of experience (they had only been doing wedding photography for 6 years as opposed to the 15-20 years of experience the other two had). They were nice, and I liked them, but we decided we weren't really thrilled with any of the ones we met with that day.
Saturday was our "down" day. We got up and went to the crepes place to have lunch with my friend Laura, and then didn't really do much the rest of the afternoon. That evening, we went over to the Bolger Center (our venue) to see it set up for an event. It was cool to see, and we definitely got a better idea of the size and space the room will have for our wedding.
On Sunday, we got up at 10 to go have brunch with my grandma and Bernie (mom's mom and her "husband" - they never actually got married, but they've been together for about 15 years), and then to visit my other grandparents (dad's parents). We came home at 3:30 to meet with the fourth photographer. Thankfully, we LOVED him, and my mom has already looked over his contract and approved, so we have our photographer! His name is Steve Canning, his albums are beautiful, and he's a lot of fun and easy to connect with.
After he left, the Schwartzes (family friends) came over for our annual 4th of July dinner, games, and going to my mom's office to see the fireworks. It was a great time, as always, and we were very sad to leave yesterday (Monday) morning.
Next on the list: CAKES! My mom has sent us links to the websites of several cake designers, so we need to look through them and figure out what we want. We'll be going up to Maryland again in late August or early September, and we will hopefully be doing cake tastings and maybe even our engagement photo shoot! Should be another crazy busy, but fun weekend.
We drove up halfway Thursday night, got into the hotel around 11:30 (we made really good time!), slept for a few hours and got on the road Friday morning around 7:45. We left earlier than usual because we were meeting my parents at the first photographer's house in Reston (on the way up, but about the same length trip time-wise as just going straight to my parents' house, since it's farther west). We had NO traffic the whole way until we got onto the Beltway (of course), so we still managed to get there on time, at 1:00 pm. The first photographer was ok...she was nice, and my mom really liked her, but I thought she was kind of disorganized and all over the place.
After meeting with her for about an hour, we drove the rest of the way to my parents' house, had about 45 minutes to unload the car...
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, we also brought a whole bunch of our engagement presents up with us to store at my parents' house for now. YAY for no more giant pile of boxes in our living room!
So anyway, we had about 45 minutes to unload the car before we headed out to meet with the second photographer of the trip. We got to her house right on time at 4:00 pm. I liked her better than the first one, but my mom had the opposite opinion (of course).
After that, we went to a nice dinner at Bonefish (yum!), then headed back to my parents' house, where the third photographer (which was actually two people, a husband and wife team) arrived just as we did! We were running a little late and they were a little early for the 7:00 meeting we had planned, but it worked out just fine. They were much younger than the other two photographers we had met with, and my mom was concerned about their relative lack of experience (they had only been doing wedding photography for 6 years as opposed to the 15-20 years of experience the other two had). They were nice, and I liked them, but we decided we weren't really thrilled with any of the ones we met with that day.
Saturday was our "down" day. We got up and went to the crepes place to have lunch with my friend Laura, and then didn't really do much the rest of the afternoon. That evening, we went over to the Bolger Center (our venue) to see it set up for an event. It was cool to see, and we definitely got a better idea of the size and space the room will have for our wedding.
On Sunday, we got up at 10 to go have brunch with my grandma and Bernie (mom's mom and her "husband" - they never actually got married, but they've been together for about 15 years), and then to visit my other grandparents (dad's parents). We came home at 3:30 to meet with the fourth photographer. Thankfully, we LOVED him, and my mom has already looked over his contract and approved, so we have our photographer! His name is Steve Canning, his albums are beautiful, and he's a lot of fun and easy to connect with.
After he left, the Schwartzes (family friends) came over for our annual 4th of July dinner, games, and going to my mom's office to see the fireworks. It was a great time, as always, and we were very sad to leave yesterday (Monday) morning.
Next on the list: CAKES! My mom has sent us links to the websites of several cake designers, so we need to look through them and figure out what we want. We'll be going up to Maryland again in late August or early September, and we will hopefully be doing cake tastings and maybe even our engagement photo shoot! Should be another crazy busy, but fun weekend.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
The Venue Hunt - Part Two, or, My Mother is Still Insane
So we got back from our weekend trip all excited to have chosen our venue. We got back late Sunday night, and got up and went to work on Monday (March 15). Around 10 am, while I'm at work filing billing documents for one of the secretaries, my mom calls me. She says that she's thought more about the venue thing, and that she really thinks that now that we've gone to look at places together, she has a better understanding of what we're looking for in a venue. She thinks most of the places we looked at weren't really the kind of places we should have been looking at, so she wants us to go look at a few more places before we make a decision. At that point, I completely lost it. I'm a very routine-dependent person, and I had just spent the previous 22 hours or so getting comfortable in the mindset that we had made our decision and that our wedding would be on April 3 instead of April 10. Now she was telling me that she wanted to re-open that discussion (at least one of the new places she wanted us to look at was only available April 10, not April 3), and on as little sleep as I had gotten that weekend, I just couldn't deal with it. I called Marcus crying, and he suggested that we tell my mom that she should talk to him about wedding stuff for a while, because clearly I needed a break from her. So that's what we did.
Fast forward to the end of March. We went down to Florida for Marcus's cousin's wedding, then immediately from there up to Maryland for Passover. My mom had made us appointments while we were there to go look at 2 more potential venues, and then to re-visit the one we thought we had decided on the last time. While we were very impressed with the ceremony location at one of the new venues, we ultimately decided that it wasn't worth the price difference (it was significantly more expensive) and the inconvenience (it was actually in DC proper, which would have caused some issues with getting people to and from the location, rehearsal dinner, etc.), and stuck with our original choice. So our wedding date and venue were FINALLY set in stone!
At that point, Marcus emailed the rabbi at his family's synagogue. His family is very involved with their synagogue (his mom was actually the President of the synagogue at one point!), and my family doesn't even belong to their synagogue anymore now that my sister and I are both gone, so we had asked Marcus's rabbi if we could fly him up to Maryland to officiate at our wedding. He had agreed, as long as he was available on the date we chose. Luckily, he was indeed free on April 3, 2011, so our rabbi was officially booked!
When we got back home, we emailed Marcus's dad and Rochelle (Marcus's dad's wife). They own a printing company, and had offered to do all of our save-the-dates, invitations, thank you notes, etc. for free! While we were in Florida that weekend, we had visited their printing shop and looked at paper for the invitations and started designing our save-the-dates. Now that we had officially set our venue and date, we emailed back and forth with them for a few weeks putting the finishing touches on the save-the-dates.
Also during this time, we were getting our guest list together. We had my parents make a list of my family and their friends, his parents make a list of his family and their friends, and Marcus and I made a list of our friends. At my mom's suggestion, we started with a LONG list of everyone we would invite if we had no limit, and pruned it down from there. We both have large extended families, so my mom set a goal of getting the final attendance (not the guest list, but the number of people who actually come to the wedding) at no more than 200 people. My sister (who is my maid of honor) had the brilliant idea to use a Guest List spreadsheet template in Google Documents to keep our guest list, their addresses, numbers, RSVPs, gifts, etc. in one place where we could all access and edit it!
By the end of April, we had finalized our preliminary guest list and gotten our save-the-dates! We decided not to send them out until after May 14, because several of our friends were graduating from various programs and moving, so their new addresses wouldn't be valid until after that date. We had also already started getting engagement gifts! Now we have a growing pile of huge boxes (with gifts still in them) in the middle of our living room, because there is no storage space in our apartment, so we have nowhere else to put them! We've been very good about writing thank you notes as the gifts come in, which I'm hoping will keep us from having to write a whole bunch of them at once later on.
I'll try to post again later today to talk about my adventures in finding my dress, sending out our save-the-dates, and a few other details. Then we should be all caught up!
Fast forward to the end of March. We went down to Florida for Marcus's cousin's wedding, then immediately from there up to Maryland for Passover. My mom had made us appointments while we were there to go look at 2 more potential venues, and then to re-visit the one we thought we had decided on the last time. While we were very impressed with the ceremony location at one of the new venues, we ultimately decided that it wasn't worth the price difference (it was significantly more expensive) and the inconvenience (it was actually in DC proper, which would have caused some issues with getting people to and from the location, rehearsal dinner, etc.), and stuck with our original choice. So our wedding date and venue were FINALLY set in stone!
At that point, Marcus emailed the rabbi at his family's synagogue. His family is very involved with their synagogue (his mom was actually the President of the synagogue at one point!), and my family doesn't even belong to their synagogue anymore now that my sister and I are both gone, so we had asked Marcus's rabbi if we could fly him up to Maryland to officiate at our wedding. He had agreed, as long as he was available on the date we chose. Luckily, he was indeed free on April 3, 2011, so our rabbi was officially booked!
When we got back home, we emailed Marcus's dad and Rochelle (Marcus's dad's wife). They own a printing company, and had offered to do all of our save-the-dates, invitations, thank you notes, etc. for free! While we were in Florida that weekend, we had visited their printing shop and looked at paper for the invitations and started designing our save-the-dates. Now that we had officially set our venue and date, we emailed back and forth with them for a few weeks putting the finishing touches on the save-the-dates.
Also during this time, we were getting our guest list together. We had my parents make a list of my family and their friends, his parents make a list of his family and their friends, and Marcus and I made a list of our friends. At my mom's suggestion, we started with a LONG list of everyone we would invite if we had no limit, and pruned it down from there. We both have large extended families, so my mom set a goal of getting the final attendance (not the guest list, but the number of people who actually come to the wedding) at no more than 200 people. My sister (who is my maid of honor) had the brilliant idea to use a Guest List spreadsheet template in Google Documents to keep our guest list, their addresses, numbers, RSVPs, gifts, etc. in one place where we could all access and edit it!
By the end of April, we had finalized our preliminary guest list and gotten our save-the-dates! We decided not to send them out until after May 14, because several of our friends were graduating from various programs and moving, so their new addresses wouldn't be valid until after that date. We had also already started getting engagement gifts! Now we have a growing pile of huge boxes (with gifts still in them) in the middle of our living room, because there is no storage space in our apartment, so we have nowhere else to put them! We've been very good about writing thank you notes as the gifts come in, which I'm hoping will keep us from having to write a whole bunch of them at once later on.
I'll try to post again later today to talk about my adventures in finding my dress, sending out our save-the-dates, and a few other details. Then we should be all caught up!
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
The Venue Hunt - Part One, or, My Mother is Insane
We decided to have our wedding in Maryland because my grandpa broke his hip last fall and he and my grandma both aren't really able to travel anymore. Once we had made that decision, my mom was in full planning mode (as usual)! She invited me and Marcus, as well as Marcus's mom and her wife, up for the weekend of March 12-14 to go look at potential venues and try to make a decision. We all did some research online and came up with a list of venues to go look at. Then, my mom sent us The Schedule:
As you can tell, the date we originally wanted was April 10, 2011. Unfortunately, the venue we ultimately ended up choosing wasn't available that date, so we had to push it back. It turned out for the best though, because apparently April 3 is better for most of our wedding party than April 10! Also, there were addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, last names, and flight numbers that I've removed to make The Schedule blog-appropriate!Tentative Agenda for Weekend of March 12-14, 2010
Thursday, March 11 2010
8:29 PM – Pick up Nancy and Lettie at BWI.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Visit restaurants for Rehearsal Dinner:
Café Mileto, Germantown, MD
Venue is available Saturday, April 9, 2011. This is Tara’s first choice. We eat dinner there often, and I had Eliot’s 50th birthday dinner there and catered his 45th birthday part from there. Manager is available to meet with us any time on March 12, 2010. Call before we go.
Tragara Ristorante, Bethesda, MD
Venue is available Saturday, April 9, 2011. This restaurant is the fanciest and most expensive of the three. They have a separate party room. Manager is available to meet with us any time. I’m supposed to call a few days in advance to set up a time on Friday, March 12, 2010.
That’s Amore, Rockville, MD
They’re “soft holding” the venue for us for Saturday, April 9, 2011. They have a separate party room. I’ve been to a Bat Mitzvah and a retirement party there, and they do a very nice job. I spoke with Max. We’re supposed to go there between 2-6 PM on Friday, March 12, 2010 and ask for Max. If he’s not there, either Jenny or
Celeste can help us.
10:40 PM – Pick up Tara and Marcus at BWI.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
10:00 AM – Ceresville Mansion, Frederick, MD
Venue is not available the afternoon of Sunday, April 10, 2011. It is available that evening, and it is available the afternoon of Sunday, April 3, 2011. They can do an outdoor ceremony and indoor sit down dinner for 200 guests. We will be attending an Open House, which runs from 10-2. I spoke with Allison. They will not do even a soft hold of the date without a deposit. Someone at work told me that they’ve been to a wedding there and that you can hear the cars passing on the road during an outdoor ceremony.
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM – Antrim 1844, Taneytown, MD
Venue is available the weekend of April 9-10, 2011. It is an estate with 42 guest rooms spread out in different buildings on the estate. They have many locations on the estate for an outdoor ceremony and can do a sit down dinner in a single room, both for 200 guests. (There are additional hotels available in nearby Gettysburg, PA and Frederick, MD.) Rehearsal dinner could be held there, as well. Another option would be to just have the wedding there and use hotels and have the rehearsal dinner closer to home. This venue is about an hour from our house. I spoke with Mike. They have a soft hold on the date for us.
We’ll have to grab a quick lunch en route.
2:00 PM – JW Marriott, Gaithersburg, MD
Venue is available Sunday afternoon, April 10, 2011, but they cannot accommodate an outdoor ceremony with 200 guests. They can do indoor ceremony and outdoor cocktail hour for 200 guests. In addition to the wedding date, they are currently holding hotel rooms for us: Friday night–5, Saturday night-25, Sunday night-25. I spoke with Barbara. They have a soft hold on the date for us.
5:00 PM – Inn at Brookeville Farms, Brookeville, MD
Venue is available Sunday afternoon, April 10, 2011. They can accommodate an outdoor ceremony and indoor sit down dinner for 200 guests. They have a soft hold on the date for us.
Dinner, relax, debrief.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
10:00 AM – Bolger Center, Potomac, MD
Venue is not available Sunday, April 10, 2011. It is available Sunday, April 3, 2011. They can accommodate an outdoor ceremony and indoor sit down dinner for 200 guests. They have hotel rooms available on site.
3:41 PM – Nancy and Lettie fly out of BWI.
7:29 PM – Tara and Marcus fly out of Dulles.
When I showed The Schedule to people at work, they finally believed me that my mom was crazy! We all had a good laugh over the "dinner, relax, debrief" part, and I have one friend who still jokingly reminds me all the time to "relax and debrief"!
That weekend was just as crazy as it sounds! It was pouring down rain all day Saturday, and Lettie (Marcus's mom's wife) had fallen and sprained her wrist and ankle on Friday, so going to look at 4 venues was quite the challenge. We made it through, but we didn't really like any of the venues we had seen. When we went to the Bolger Center on Sunday, we fell in love with it! Marcus and I talked about it, and we wanted to sign a contract with the Bolger Center right away, but my mom wanted us to sleep on it first. When we left Sunday evening, I thought that we had definitely decided on the Bolger Center, and I was so excited to move on to the next stage of planning!
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