I'm 24!

Its my birthday! And this is what my day is generally going to consist of - me smashing my face with cake!
mmmmm...Zilla loves cake!

Cheers!
Jen

Our Wedding: The Venue

Thought I'd post some more about the nitty gritty of our wedding..including one of the most important (and stressful) parts - our venue!

The venue was a huge headache for us. Ok, for me. I spent hours and hours searching for an amazing blog worthy venue. This was my first wedding planning task, so I hadn't really found my wedding planning sanity yet. I was at the whims of the Knot and grand expectations. So I searched and searched and found some awesome venues.

One was the Round Barn Farm in Red Wing, Minnesota. Oh my goodness - BEAUTIFUL! This would have been an instant wedding blog hit - it has a beautiful bed and breakfast house, with a nice yard and gardens, and then of course the round barn. The barn is awesome in and of itself but with a few sparkly lights and some warming light from candles it would be so cute and give off the perfect relaxed but beautiful vibe. Really just a gorgeous place. But too expensive and far away for us. If there is another MN bride out there who could use it, do it! And then write me and let me live vicariously through you!

OK...back from that little tangent. We didn't use the Round Barn Farm, but can you tell that I daydreamed about it and thought long and hard about to we could afford it? *sigh* Maybe for my second wedding to some rich ass dude.

After many site visits and online searching, we chose the Dakota Lodge in St. Paul. It has very clean, usable space. The price was right - no extra charge for a wedding ceremony - actually, no extra charges for much of anything. Cute outside space where we can get married under a mondo oak tree. Its in West St. Paul - a central location for all our friends and family. And they would let us use any caterer with the correct license! Great!

Plus that have that awesome virtual tour with such catchy music! ;)

So Dakota Lodge it is!
On Saturday August 28th. (Its coming so soon! Ahh!!)

All about a feeling

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou


What an amazing quote! And a great sentiment to remember while wedding planning.

The quote could stand by itself because I don't think I'm eloquent or insightful enough to prose along side Maya Angelou. But this is what I'm aiming for in our wedding - a feeling. A feeling of love and commitment and community that is based on me and my darling but that pulls in our family and friends. The words, the decorations, and all the details are only accompanying and accomplices in this. I hope they will add to the atmosphere and add to the given beauty of the day, but in and of themselves they won't create my 'dream wedding'.

Photo from helgasms!

My guns and sticking to them

Yesterday I was at my parents house, relaxing in the amazing Minnesota spring day, and talking about the wedding. We were just discussing some of the details when my mom says, "Al (my dad), did you talk to Jen about what you were thinking?" Dad, "No." Mom, "Oh, well you should tell her." Me, "Uh oh."

So my dad then goes to tell me that he doesn't think we should try to DJ our own wedding and how important it is to have a DJ to get and keep people dancing. And how the bride and groom shouldn't have to work to DJ their own wedding and blah blah blah. All valid points and concerns. But not what I wanted to hear. And it was totally cramping on my chill spring day! Geuze, mom and dad!

Of course as my dad is saying all this I'm beginning to think "Oh my god...what if hes right!? What if we have a horrible play list and no one is dancing and then we have to work all night to try and get the right music on so people dance and this is going to RUIN our wedding!!!! AAAHH!!" (or something generally along these freak-out lines.) But that only lasted a moment.

And then was followed by a moment of calm and clear thinking where I went on to tell my dad that yes, those are valid concerns. DJs do offer a lot and can make for a really great and hoppin dance floor, but I don't think it means that DJing our wedding is impossible or even that hard. DJing our wedding simply means that we have to put it more work ahead of time to make sure we have an awesome, versatile, all age friendly, and easy to maneuver playlist. So I said, "Dad, I'm glad you are thinking about this and trying to make sure everything works out well, but we want to try to do it ourselves. So I'd really appreciate your help in making it work. You can help us put together songs that you like to dance to and that you think other people would like, too."

I felt so growed up! Instead of freaking out and letting my insecurities get the best out of me I thanked him for his thoughts and then asked him to get behind our ideas and put his energy into what we want to make it work as best as we can. *high five, me!*

(Of course then I went home and spent additional time freaking out and asking the mister if he was sure we were making the right choice in trying to do the music ourselves and going over all my insecurities again. But it was only temporary!)

Today I sent my dad the wonderful post from A Practical Wedding on How to DJ Your Wedding With An Ipod. I hope it helps him get on board. Because I don't want to spend the extra 600 bucks for a DJ when I feel that it is totally doable to provide our own music. And DJs do not guarantee anything. I've seen some great DJs who definitely rocked the floor, but I've seen some total duds who looked like they just graduated from DJing children's birthday parties. Hired DJs are hit or miss... so why not save some dough and take a crack at it ourselves?

So that was my growed up wedding planning moment. I hope to see more of those in the near future!

(Photo from Lori Elizabeth)

Mama Dearest

Mama "We should have a lot of color. The room is so big and white that it needs a lot!"

Me "Yes! I'm all about loads of color!"

Mama "Which color is going to be your main color?"

Me "Um...all of them?"

Mama "You need to pick one main color and then accent with your other colors."

Me "No, I like all of them and I can't pick just one!"

Mama "You are already pushing it having three wedding colors."

Me, frowning and shaking head, "Speaking of that...I think we should have more. I want them ALL!"

Mama's turn to frown and shake head.

(Bless my mama. She takes some time to nudge out of tradition, but in the end she always supports me in what I want to do.)

Wedding Insecurities

After my last post on budgets, I was contemplating why weddings (and their budgets) are such a tough and touchy topic. I've come up with a few thoughts... 1) They are events that take your personal life and broadcast it publicly. 2) Expectations galore! (Um..I designed my wedding when I was eight. Hows that for building expectations?) 3) Tons of money is wrapped up in the WIC and our insecurities. Our willingness to pay to calm those insecurities makes the WIC happy.

But my last realization has to do with where weddings meet feminism (and they meet quite a lot).

Our culture has this crappy habit of looking down on anything related to what is considered women's domain. Showing emotions? Weak! Enjoying your decorations and flowers? How frivolous! Being in any way "girly"? Well, apparently we all fail from our girly births.

Brides are stuck between a rock of trying to meet traditional and often ridiculous expectations and the hard place of trying to be a chill bride who isn’t “too interested” in her wedding for fear of being judged or being called the dreaded B word. And its near effing impossible. Oh, I'm supposed to put together this super elegant, traditional, mondo party without going all crazy bridezilla on your ass? yeah, right. One more person telling me that whatever isn't “formal enough" or that I "have" to do something and I will mutate into a giant, city-destroying lizard and poop on their head.

So F all that biznass!

I'm gonna plan like mad for months and enjoy it! I'm gonna spend a load of money and not go into debt! I'm going to search etsy for hours and ooh and aaah at all sorts of pretty things! I'm going to spend significant amounts of time on *gasp* my wedding blog! And most importantly of all, I'm going to invest myself and care about the the beginning of my marriage to the person I love - and that's our wedding

With that, I'll end with something to make you smile:

Taboo Talk: Budgets

There has been some great discussion in wedding blog land about budgets. Another Damn Wedding has a fabulous post that mirrors my feelings exactly, and Meg at A Practical Wedding speaks sanity and gives amazing advice - as always. Both ladies are spot on.

I think we are all (myself very much included) guilty of judging other weddings - whether this be the magazine weddings that are worth the total of my undergraduate education or the blog weddings that are ridiculously DIY/DIT and amazing and cost a few months rent. We are constantly comparing and judging.

And in the end everybody loses.

By judging and comparing our weddings to other weddings, we slowly lose focus on whats important, and it becomes a race to impress. Our wedding must be full of stunning details which are totally unique and we must have a memorably delicious cake with details to match our perfectly coordinated theme... but we don't want to be one of those crazy Knot brides (oh, Knot, how we love to pick on you!) so we must craft it all ourselves for super cheap (preferably vintage) and you better hope you have talented family and friends willing to help or how else are you going to look calm and cool in your beautiful, artsy photographs that are going to make everyone jealous on Facebook?

**deep breaths**

All we can see of these magazine or blog weddings are pictures - still images of one day in someones life who we know nothing about. Perhaps some captions or a story that tell us how they put it all together. But what do we know about the couple? their lives? their love? their wedding!? Damn little - that's what we know.

As I said, I'm completely guilty of all of this. I judge and compare and lose my mind in the details and design. For me, a lot of this has to do with the immensely personal nature of weddings. I'm an introverted Minnesotan, and I feel like I'm really putting myself out there with our wedding. Not only are we publicly declaring our love and commitment, but our wedding is a showcase of us as a couple. Our style, tastes, eco-ethics, religious beliefs (or lack there of for us), class (which Accordions and Lace wrote an excellent post on), generally where we 'fit in', how traditional we are, etc. will all be on display. How are people going to react? What are they going to think of it all? Will they judge us? Some scary prospects.

But the same fact that can make it scary is what makes is sane. Weddings are personal and we have to make personal decisions about ours. We all fall at different points on the range of budgets, how traditional we are, etc. And in planning our own, we have to find the confidence to stand by our personal decisions and feel secure enough as a person and as a couple that we made the right decisions. It won't be perfect, but it will be ours. Not matter what the Knot says.

Note: In the name of full disclosure, I'd like to share that our budget is going to fall roughly around 10,000. I believe that putting real numbers out there to go with all our pretty pictures helps take away the taboo and helps us understand better what weddings cost. I wish I had had examples of real wedding budgets before we started planning. I had no idea what 10,000 would get us. So. There is my number.

How Typical

Before we were engaged, I was reading wedding blogs and starting to think about our wedding and about getting married. Then we got engaged and my organized, list-making, control freak self went into overdrive and became engrossed in Wedding Land. I read wedding blogs daily, had many many Google documents full of ideas, links, and photos, and started to fill my wonderful and nerdy wedding binder. My brain was wedding grand central.

During this time, I was lucky enough to find some sane resources (A Practical Wedding is my wedding savior!) to help me muddle through many wedding issues. I came to terms with spending thousands on one day. I understood that weddings can actually mean something more than just pretty details if you let them. And I began to pull myself away from the various pressures and all the various labels (WIC, indie, alternative, vintage, 'green') so that I could determine what I wanted.

Unfortunately, I think I left my Mister behind in this. I didn't share the important parts of my Wedding Land journey like I should have. And he wasn't really that interested to begin with. He is usually pretty happy with the way things are while I continually want to analyze, dig deeper and make things better - like our relationship, the wedding, our to-be marriage.

So yesterday we had a bit of a fight. Well, it was probably more like a break down on my part. The story goes like this. The Mister wanted to elope. I wanted a big, fun party. I didn't want a ceremony but he did. In the end we are having a big, fun party that looks like most other weddings but should represent us very well as a couple. I am paying for half of the wedding and my parents are paying for the other half. The Mister's work situation has left him with not much money in the bank.

He is still stuck on the cost of the wedding and since he isn't paying for it, feels like he needs to forfeit his opinions and input. I understand where he is coming from, but I need to feel like he is invested and interested in the day. I need to feel like he is looking forward to the wedding that I'm spending so much time, money and effort on.

We made the decision together to have the wedding we are having - but I feel like its all me. And that only adds to my wedding insecurities and makes me feel like I'm the dreaded bridezilla who is getting my way while her groom sits helplessly by. And it only adds to my insecurities that we are spending too much or that the wedding is being blown out of proportions or that I'm just not doing this wedding thing 'right'.

Last night involved lots of tears and mood swings from sadness to despair to anger back to bleak sadness. We talked it out a bit, but I think we'll need to talk more. Tears and running noses doesn't make for a very good discussion. But I think we both understand where each other are coming from and now we just have to move forward in a new direction. So that we can have a wedding where we are both invested, interested and active participants.

*phew* Ok, I feel better to get that off of my chest! Thanks, blog land.


Photo from

http://www.flickr.com/photos/swirlingthoughts/ / CC BY-NC 2.0