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!