Would You Like a Website with your Wedding?

I have an announcement to make. We have just finished designing the awesomest wedding website ever.

...unfortunately it took at least 10 times longer to finish this project than we originally thought it would. But, we are finally. DONE. ...and now I can share it with all of you! I'm not going to give you the link -- call me paranoid, but our wedding website definitely has a lot of personal details that I'm not ready to put out there in this sort of format. (We made our site non-searchable on google for this reason.) I will however show you some of our beautiful site!

First some of the deets: The architect, being a designer by trade, of course wanted to design his own website. That meant that instead of going with one of the many services out there who can provide you with website templates and hosting (often for free), we designed ours from scratch using DreamWeaver, and we are hosting the site through the domain name that the Architect already had set up for his personal website. Don't ask me for tutorials. Unfortunately, DreamWeaver is a fairly complex program, and a lot of the formatting of the website was done by pure trial and error.

So, do I recommend designing your own wedding website from scratch using DreamWeaver? I'm not so sure that I do... that is, unless you are already a web design guru. The time commitment that it took to complete this site was no joke. Basically, the website has been the Architect's full-time job for the last two months. Really, I just woke up yesterday, and it was December... and I suddenly wondered where the last two months have gone and why the only wedding planning that has gotten done during that time has been to work on that "gosh darned" wedding website. Don't get me wrong, I am beyond thrilled with how it came out, but I'm just not sure that it was worth that much time and energy.

For your viewing pleasure, here she is... our baby. (I'm like a proud mama when it comes to this site):

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That's our homepage. If you blow up the picture, you can even see my favorite lily on the left-hand side. We also provide links at the top of the page that lead our guests to the stories of how we met and the Architect's proposal, event information, local information about the Bar Harbor region, accommodation info, bios of the wedding party, links to photos, directions for how to get to Bar Harbor, and registry info. Like I said... A LOT of work went into this. Here is the "About Us" page, so you can see the layout:

Click on the images below to see a higher resolution version

While the Architect designed the entire website, I had the pleasure of writing most of the text. See? This is why we make such a wonderful couple -- we have complimentary skills, which make us into a great team.

So now that the website is done, I can finally get back to the rest of wedding planning...

Did you ever bite off more than you could chew with a wedding project? Was it worth it in the end? If you designed your website from scratch like we did, do you have any good tips?

A New Bridesmaid Concept

So in my last post I alluded to the fact that my bridesmaids and I came to some decisions about dresses... After deciding that orange BM dresses were out, I got to thinking... I love the weddings that I've seen where the bridesmaids get to wear a little black dress (LBD) of their choice, and then accessorize with colorful shoes or a wrap. The effect is so beautiful... and also so practical, since every girl could always use another really great LBD in their closet. Unfortunately, black doesn't have much of a place in our brightly-colored summer wedding -- except maybe on the groomsmen. I'm still trying to fight this one out with the Architect, but it seems to be a losing battle. Afterall, the Architect is, afterall, an architect... and people in his profession just LOVE to dress like slightly hip vampires at all times (think: black trousers and a cool black turtleneck sweater).

But I digress... black was definitely not an option for BM dresses, and if we couldn't go with black, what could we do to ensure that the dresses were something that my girls might actually want to wear again in the future? Then it hit me... neutrals!! There are lots of beautiful dresses out there in beige and other neutral make-up type colors. I went ahead and checked out J. Crew's website (b/c really, where else would a preppy girl from New England go to look for BM dresses?), and I think I found some winners. My awesome bridal party seems to think so too. Enter, attempt #2 at choosing BM dresses:

Preettty! -- all of the dresses, necklaces, and shoes are from J.Crew and the bouquet is from theknot

We are now looking at knee-length J. Crew dresses in 3 possible colors -- going clockwise from the top left they are "barely peach", "champagne", and "light caramel"... and BTW, whoever has the job of naming the colors for J. Crew has pretty much the most awesome job ever. I'm a little worried that the champagne might be too close to white, and the barely peach might be closer to a pink than a very pale orange, so I have ordered fabric swatches from a very nice lady in customer service at J. Crew. I should be receiving my swatches sometime in the next week to make some final decisions on colors, and then I'll be all ready to send my girls out into the world to find their dresses. (No clone bridesmaids for me, so each of them will have to do a little legwork and figure out which dress styles they like the best.) Yay!

What do you think of these dresses? Did your choice of BM dresses go through more than one iteration before you finally figured out the look you were going for?

Do You Skype??

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As I've alluded to before... the Architect and I moved from our home in New England all the way across the country to California this past summer. This now officially means that we are planning a serious long distance wedding. From our new home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bar Harbor is a 6-hour flight (to Boston) and then a 5-hour drive up to Maine. Luckily we got a lot of the heavy lifting part of wedding planning done while we were still living in New England (choosing a venue, florist, wedding music, my dress, etc.), but now we are faced with the problem of doing pretty much everything else with one hand tied behind our backs. Everything and everyone related to our wedding is back on the east coast, and we are way out here on the west coast.

My bridesmaids are no exception. While my sister (and lovely MOH) is conveniently living out in California, the rest of my bridal party is back east. I definitely miss my girls. It has been difficult to keep in touch across 3,000 miles of country and 3 hours of time difference, so this past weekend we decided to have a group Skype session so that I could catch them all up on what's been going on with wedding planning. I don't know if you all have ever used Skype before, but the program is ingenious! It's really easy to make free phone calls from your computer to another friend's computer, and the sound quality is crystal clear. It also has a great video-chat feature, as long as your computer has a webcam. The architect and I tested out the video feature a couple of weeks ago, and it was like we were in the same room with each other. I can only imagine how great this is for people in long distance relationships, since actually seeing the person you're talking to is so much more satisfying than just hearing their voice.

Unfortunately Skype's video feature doesn't work for group chats, but my girls and I still managed to have a great (audio only) conversation, and I caught them up on all of the wedding happenings of the last couple of months. This was also a great time for us to talk about dresses, and I think we may have come to a consensus (which doesn't involve orange). I'll tell you more about that soon...

So... do you Skype too? Have you turned to technology for keeping in touch with your wedding party? Since our Sype telecon worked out so well, I think we're going to make them a regular occurrence as the actual wedding date draws nearer. Oh, and BTW, we are now less than 8 months away from our wedding date. Wheee!!!

When Parents Act Like Children

From the time that the Architect and I got engaged, we knew that we were going to have a big hurdle to overcome in our wedding planning process. While we want our wedding to be an awesome party for all of our closest friends and family, there is a small detail that gets in the way. The architect's parents are divorced.

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Now this isn't the friendly kind of divorce where after many long years the parents have learned to be "friends" again and appreciate each others' quirks. This isn't the kind of divorce where the parents put on a happy face and just grin and bear it through events that they both should be present at like college graduations... or weddings. This is the nasty kind of divorce, with court hearings and custody battles. The architect's parents have not had a civil conversation with one another since their divorce, almost 20 years ago, and I'm pretty sure they haven't even seen each other in the last 10 years.

Now, along comes our wedding into the mix. The Architect is on good terms with both of his parents, so both his mom and his dad will certainly be attending the wedding. Naturally, the Architect is a little stressed out b/c his family dynamics are going to be placed on center stage for the entire weekend of the wedding. We would like to be sensitive to the wishes of both of his parents throughout our wedding weekend. Afterall, we know that it is going to be extremely stressful for them to have to see each other at wedding-related events. Still, we also sort of kind of wish they would just GROW UP a little bit and be mature adults when it comes to the need to see each other. Afterall, their son is getting *married*. If there was ever a day that called for putting our differences aside, this is it.

There are a number of things we are planning on doing to ensure that the wedding weekend goes smoothly for all involved parties. There are also some outstanding issues that we have no idea how we're going to handle.

• When it comes to drawing up the seating chart we will be placing the Architect's mom and dad at different table that are far away from each other.
• When it comes to making hotel reservations for our wedding, we will be making sure that the Architect's parents end up at different hotels from one another... and we will also try to assure that the two hotels are far away from each other.
• We will not be participating in the lovely wedding tradition that is the anniversary dance. While I have absolutely loooved anniversary dances at other friends' weddings, we do not want to be highlighting the fact that my parents are still happily married after 30+ years, while the Architect's parents are decidedly not. (Both of his parents are in serious long-term relationships, but neither has ever remarried... ya' know, b/c a nasty divorce can make you never want to get back up on that horse ever again.)
• ...and just in case things get ugly... we will have our groomsmen on alert just in case anyone needs to be *ahem* politely asked to leave the wedding festivities
  

One of our remaining problems has to do with the rehearsal dinner, which will be fairly small and hosted by the Architect's mom. Seeing as this will be a fairly intimate affair, and she is paying for it, the Architect's mom doesn't want the Architect's dad to be invited. My initial reaction is that it's fairly bad manners to not invite the father of the groom to the rehearsal dinner, but I also understand where the Architect's mom is coming from. Basically, we have no idea how we're going to deal with this little issue quite yet, so suggestions are certainly welcome.

Do you or your fiance have divorced parents? Is their divorce causing issues with your wedding planning? Do you have any good advice for how to deal with parents when they don't act like the grown-ups that they are supposed to be?

Getting Our Drink On

The Architect and I absolutely love spending a Saturday night heading out to a new bar, trying a couple of fancy cocktails, and splitting a couple of appetizers. Given our love for yummy cocktails, we of course wanted to feature some signature drinks at our wedding. We will be having an open bar at our wedding, since it (sort of) fits in our budget, and we would absolutely hate to make our friends pay at a cash bar -- but we still have the option to put together a short cocktail list with some of our recommendations. (And of course this also leads to the possibility of cute cocktail menus. More DIY projects, here I come!!) We immediately picked out 3 cocktails that we both enjoy drinking, which automatically made the list. We would still like to add one more signature drink -- something on the more girly / fruity side. Since I like to drink like an old man, I'm not much help in the girly drink department. Here is our current list:

"The Dirty" -- A dirty martini. We like ours with Grey Goose vodka (yes, we are vodka snobs like that), extra olive brine, and garnished with blue-cheese stuffed olives.

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"The Stormy" -- A dark and stormy made from dark rum and ginger beer (no, not ginger ale, ginger beer). The more ginger flavor the better.

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"The Cheeky" -- A Pimms cup (Pimms and ginger ale) garnished with a thin slice of cucumber and a strawberry.

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We would like our last drink to be called "The Fruity". This drink should appeal to those who like a lighter sweeter fruity cocktail, since we feel that we're lacking that in the rest of our cocktail list. Any good ideas out there??

Not Orange

When it comes to my wedding -- and life in general -- I am having a total love affair with the color orange. (I hope that doesn't count as cheating on the Architect!) Orange is the main color for our wedding, my power point slides for work have a sleek modern look in orange and gray, and I even wear a fair amount of orange. Luckily it works with my complexion. However I've figured out over time that this isn't the case for everyone. I get a lot of comments like: "Wow, you look good in that orange sweater. That's a color that I just can't pull off."

Since I totally love wearing orange, when I picked it as one of our wedding colors I was so excited about having bridesmaids in brightly-colored orange dresses like these:

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All of my bridesmaids are so nice of course that they said that they would be 100% on board to go along with any bridesmaid dresses that I decided on. However, I could sense that maybe they weren't exactly jumping with joy over the idea of wearing orange dresses... and in my sister's case she expressed these sentiments more vocally (isn't it great how sisters do that?). My sister may have equated an orange dress to being forced into wearing something like this:

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I would be really really sad for my bridesmaids to hate their dresses, so I decided that it was worth it to go back and re-examine some other bridesmaid looks (and colors) that might have more of that rewearability factor. (Is that even a word?)

What do you think? Are you considering your bridesmaids' opinions in choosing their dresses? Would you be happy to wear orange as a bridesmaid, or would you take it as some sort of cruel punishment?

Our Dirty Little Secret

Ok internet... I'm going to let you in on something. It's our little secret though, ok? Only a few select people are already privy to this information...

The Architect and I are already married. Legally, that is. We are still viewing our wedding next summer as the "real deal", and we will not be wearing rings or referring to one another as "husband" and "wife" until then.

So here's what happened. Last winter, while we were still living in Boston, I took a job that was to start this past September... in California. That's right, 3 time zones away on the other side of the country. The architect and I planned out the entire move. He would move across the country with me and either find a new job or transfer within his firm to their west coast office. ...And then the economy took a nose dive. All of a sudden there was no work for architects, and the Architect's firm was no longer willing to transfer him to the west coast.

We REALLY didn't want to have a bi-coastal long-distance relationship, so we ran some numbers, and figured out that we could make things work while the Architect searched for a new west-coast job. So this past summer, we packed up our entire apartment, and headed off in the Architect's car towards the wild west. ...But first we did the responsible adult thing and made sure that the Architect would have health insurance while he was not working. I found out that I could add him onto my insurance at my new job for free(!) ...no employee contribution to speak of... *IF* we were married. So we made the logical decision and decided to tie the knot.

Our official wedding was held on a beautiful Monday morning at city hall. The only people in attendance were ourselves and the Justice of the Peace. (Massachusetts doesn't require any other witnesses to be present.) We didn't exchange rings. We just said some vows and signed on the dotted line. Really, we tried to make our official ceremony as anticlimactic as possible, so that the wedding that we were planning was assured to be the main event.

Still, the official ceremony was a big deal. Afterall, we were pledging our lives to each other and signing the document that would make us husband and wife in the eyes of the law. To commemorate the event I again wore the short white strapless dress that the Architect had bought me for our engagement. (Pretty much there was no way that I was going to buy a new dress for a ceremony with no guests that would be over in about 5 minutes.) After the ceremony was over we took a couple of pictures and then headed out to breakfast at our favorite brunch spot before we both headed off to work.

*Photos by our justice of the peace

So there you have it. Our very played-down no-frills "official" wedding took place just over a year before our actual planned wedding date. I am thrilled that the Architect now has health care just in case, and I cannot wait for our wedding date next summer when we make things official in the eyes of all of our loved ones.

Did you have your legal wedding ceremony at a different time from your actual wedding? What caused you to make that decision? Did you celebrate your legal ceremony in any special way?