And another month is coming to a close...

Well its the end of January, so I figure now is as good a time as any to go over my January checklist and create a list for February. In January I had the following list:

1. Assemble all of our invitations
2. Order rings  Mine is bought and in a safe, we're still looking for Austin's
3. Order tuxes for FI, GM and readers
4. Have dress altered
5. Decide on my accessories and the BP accessories.
6. Finalize room designs with our event coordinator, event designer and florist
7. Finalize any changes with my florist (I decided in the last two weeks to completely change our flowers...)
8. Address invitations going out to any people our parents are inviting
9. Get FI a passport
10. Book the honeymoon
11. Order cakes


All in all, I feel pretty happy with everything we got accomplished. No, I didn't get everything checked off, but did get a good start on the few things left on my list.


For February, I'm going to try to accomplish the following:


1. Order Austin's ring
2. Meet with florist to finalize changes (we have a meeting scheduled)
3. Get Austin his passport (he has scheduled to take off)
4. Book the honeymoon
5. Hair Trail
6. Dress fitting #2
7. Book day-of transportation

I need a break

I don't know what happened, but this week I started to get extremely stressed about the wedding. All I could think about was the fact that there was so much to do, so much to pay and almost no time to get it all done. I don't know why it hit me this week, but its been really starting to get me stressed and worried. I was starting to get burnt out.

Maybe it had to do with the fact that I've been working about 50 hours a week. Maybe it has to do with the fact that our new catering company started this week and I still haven't been able to meet with them about the wedding. Maybe it had to do with the fact that, due to stress, I've barely eaten at all the past several weeks. Maybe it had to do with the fact that people are always asking me about the wedding. Maybe it had to due with the fat that people are trying to tell me how to plan my wedding. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I've not told a lot of people that my family wants no part of this and will not be attending. Maybe it was just the fact that I was getting tired of feeling like it was just me.

Whatever it was, it was making me a wreck. And in turn, I was venting to Austin and there wasn't anything he could say that made it better.So we decided to take a little break from wedding planning.

Last night, I watched a movie until Austin came home from work. We had a fire going. We had a couple glasses of wine. We ordered Italian food. We watched the Stars win against the Oilers. All in all, it was a fantastic night.

I'll try to get a couple things taken care of today, but this weekend is going to be as much of a wedding free weekend as possible. And its going to be fantastic.

Check and Check!

This weekend has been a pretty productive weekend. Since I had Monday off for MLK, I decided to really get to work on all things wedding related.

Saturday, I was able to finally meet with a jeweler in order to discuss my day-of jewelry. It actually took a lot longer than I thought it would, but I'm very happy with what we were able to come up with. I know Anne is going to make me something fantastic, unique and totally me. Anne is also going to be making the jewelry for my Maid of Honor and Bridesmaids, so I'm very excited about that. I was having a hard time finding something that I loved and they would love and that would work with no luck. After a couple hours with Anne, she was able to come up with a couple great ideas! It should take her a couple weeks to make it up, and if its not what I want exactly, she'll redo it and try again. But I have complete faith in her. Bridal party jewelry, check!

I also went to my first fitting on Saturday. I went to A Bridal Blossom, the same boutique that a friend Ashley works at, in order to get this done. Since Ashely was working on Saturday, she was able to not only act as an employee, but she already knew my personality and how I wanted to look. And since she's going to be doing my hair on the big day, she was able to figure out exactly what she would do for the wedding. Nancy, the owner, was a huge help and was able to not only get everything pinned, but she came up with a fantastic bustle! The detail on the back of my dress had me worried about the bustle and I couldn't think of how to get it done and keep the details, but she did it!! Nancy also offers a service that we are taking advantage of: On the day of the wedding, she will be on site for two hours two steam my dress, the flower girl, the MOG and the bridesmaids' dresses. Now I don't have to worry about getting it to the INFOMART and making sure it still looks great. Nancy will take care of that for me! First fitting, check! Second fitting, scheduled!


Since I was off on Monday, I was able to sit down and get all of our invitations going out to the parents' friends addressed and assembled. Since both Austin's mom and dad are helping with the wedding, I wanted to give them the chance to get us a list of people they wanted to be there. Both of their lists consist of about 75 people. My big goal for January was to get everyone included on their lists an invitation ready to be sent out. We've got all of those invitations assembled, stamped, labeled, and the RSVPS have stamps. All that is left is to drop them into a mailbox at the end of next month! Parent invitations, check!!

Today, I was able to book the rooms for the wedding party for the night before and of the wedding. Being the kind of person I am, I've decided to pay for the first night for the entire wedding party. Since a lot of people in the wedding party are taking the time to come to Dallas from Arkansas, I figure its one nice thing Austin and I can do for them. Wedding party hotels booked, check!

I have the best coworkers!!

It recently dawned on me that I do in fact have the greatest coworkers in the world! This correlates with the fact that I have one of the greatest jobs ever.

Working in property management comes with a lot of benefits of its own. People give us tickets to various events trying top help us like them, and I always get Stars tickets from people. I also have a great connection that gets me tickets at a fantastic deal. I know a lot of the heads of companies and talk with them like they're just another person, this leads to a lot of great networking opportunities. I meet a lot of people in the building, people know that if they have an issue, I'll do my best to get it resolved.

Then there are the wedding related perks.

First, I would like to say that there are some huge perks to working for the management company for the building that I'm getting married in. Like price. There are also some drawbacks, like knowing information about the (now former) catering company that I can't tell anyone and I can't act on. That can be a bit rough.

One thing I've noticed is that since all of my coworkers (all ten of them) know that I'm getting married here, they don't mind talking wedding details with me. The women (all three of them) here have even asked me about how things are coming, if I plan on doing certain things, how the planning is, etc. Even my boss is starting to get excited and will occasionally ask me about the details of the wedding.

I've also noticed that people seem to expect me to be on edge for the next couple months. As of today, I hit the four month countdown and I've heard a couple comments along the lines of, "We know you're going to be stressed because of the wedding. If you ever need to take a break, come into my office if you want and I'll try to help you with any wedding things you're worried about." So far, I haven't been too stressed while at work, but there's no telling if I can keep this up as the big day gets closer. Even the guys at work seem to be pretty understanding.

The women are also always excited whenever I get a package. Since we do have our registries up, everyone is expecting to see gifts arriving anytime now. They also know that I do like to try to do a little wedding planning when work gets slow, and part of this includes shopping for accessories for the wedding. A couple days ago, I ordered several pairs of shoes to see which ones I liked best for the wedding. As soon as I signed for it, they all wanted me to open it. With the help of two women here, I was able to pick out my wedding shoes!!

Not only are my coworkers excited for the wedding, they're also helping me plan!! How many other places let you do that?!

A few more things are done!

Austin and I decided to do a few wedding related things this weekend. Well, it was more I told Austin I was doing wedding stuff and he decided to help because he knows I'm starting to stress. We planned on picking out our wedding bands and the tuxes for Austin, the groomsmen, and our readers/ushers, addressing invites, stuffing invitations and anything else I could convince Austin to help me out with.

We started off by heading over to the same place Austin picked out my engagement ring, Dallas Gold and Silver. Since I really had no idea what I wanted as my wedding band, I thought it would be a pretty difficult process trying to find something I liked and something that would match my ring. We both thought picking out his ring would be pretty quick and easy. We spent about an hour looking at rings of varying styles that might match mine. Finally, we found something that I thought was perfect, luckily Austin agreed. Austin had a general idea of what he wanted and after about half an hour of looking at rings, he was able to decide what he wanted. Sadly, they just didn't carry what he wanted in his size. So we left them with his ring size, what he wanted, and they're going to keep an eye out for anything that matches what he wants.

Both of my rings, they look like they were made for each other!

We then went out to get pricing for mini wine bottles. We've been talking about including mini wine bottles on each table as favors to our guests. We've already got little boxes that we're going to tie with a blue ribbon and have little candies inside, but we thought the wine would add nice little bit of us since we both love wine. I also saw them somewhere and thought it was a great idea. Austin checked on the pricing at our local Goody Goody and it turns out we can definitely afford to get them! Yay! I've started working on the labels for our wine bottles ad I think I was able to get a good mock up done. There is a little tweaking that still needs to be done to it, but all in all it turned out well.

For the rest of our to-do list, we could do things at home. We had gone into Al's Formal Wear earlier when we were trying to decide what exactly Austin wanted to wear and had a pretty good idea for what tux we wanted everyone to wear. All we had to do was go online to reserve our tuxes and input everyone who would need a tux. Pretty easy.

Earlier in the week, I had found the jewelry that I thought would look great with the dresses that I had picked out for the bridesmaids, so I printed off a couple pictures and waited until ballet on Saturday so I could show them to Austin's mom and get her opinion on them. I picked out simple pearl earrings and necklaces from Amazon. Austin's mom approved and we're going to talk to her personal jeweler to see if she can make a custom piece for me.

The bridesmaids' earrings

The bridesmaids' necklace

What a week!

What a week this has been! Not only has work been a complete mess, but working on the wedding is finally starting to get me stressed out.

When I got back to work on Tuesday, I quickly decided that never again will I take off two and a half weeks. I had mountains of work piled up on my desk to sift through as well as new projects that cropped up while I was away. We also decided to get rid of our interim food service company in the building early Wednesday morning and had to scramble to provide food to the tenants in the building. For those that didn't know, four inch heels and a suit are not the best combination when you are going to be running around the building, hauling boxes and serving 500 sandwiches to hungry people. After that was taken care of, I had to work with a couple coworkers in order to find a food service provider that would be able to start the next day. I'm a little proud to say that we were able to get this taken care of and now have someone here to provide service until our new company can get set up.

I've also started to get a little stressed out about the wedding. I've started to put all of our invitations together and I'm working on printing out all of our labels for our invitations which has caused me to realize just how quickly things are going to come together. We're going to be sending out our invitations at the end of February, which means I want to have everything ready to be taken to the post office by the middle of February. I know that may seem a little silly of me, but I'm a bit overly obsessive and want to make sure nothing goes wrong. I've also started to worry about all of the little things that need to be done (favors, out of town bags, bridal shots, etc.). I keep trying to remind myself that we have all of the big things nailed down and I don't need to worry, but I can't help it! I worry.

Its a new year!

I've been taking a lot of time off from wedding planning lately and as soon as the clock struck midnight and it was a new year, there was only one thing I could think of: I'm getting married this year!

I've already started working on my checklist for this month and I've been able to check off a couple of things from my checklist and its only three days into the month!!

So far I have been able to complete the following things from my to-do list:

1. Assemble all of our invitations About 90 of our 150 invitations have been assembled
2. Order rings
3. Order tuxes for FI, GM and readers
4. Have dress altered   I have an appointment set up to have my dress altered on the 15th of January
5. Decide on my accessories and the BP accessories.
6. Finalize room designs with our event coordinator, event designer and florist
7. Finalize any changes with my florist (I decided in the last two weeks to completely change our flowers...)
8. Address invitations going out to any people our parents are inviting
9. Get FI a passport   Paperwork is printed out and he's started working on completing it
10. Book the honeymoon   We've narrowed it down, we want to go to an all inclusive resort in Cozumel!
11. Order cakes   I got this taken care of already!!

Well, the holidays are over

In the past two weeks, life has been pretty crazy. Since I realized I had about three weeks of vacation time that I had to use before the year's end, I've been able to take off most of December. I thought this meant that I would be able to spend a lot of time relaxing and enjoying the holidays. Who knew that I would be busy pretty much every day?

I spent most of my time with Austin's mom over my long vacation trying to help her as much as I can. She always does Christmas big at her house, and I knew that she could use an extra hand to get everything in order. I also had to go make sure that all of our gifts got wrapped up (and finish up the last of Austin's shopping). Once I knew all of that was taken care of, it was time to start celebrating!!

Christmas Eve is always spent with Austin's dad's side of the family. We had a wonderful dinner with Austin's uncles and aunts and his grandmother. There was a lot of family there and it was a lovely evening. As always, we did participate in the white elephant gift giving. There is a $25 limit on gifts and every person participating has to bring two gifts (that way everyone receives two gifts). The rules change every year, but its basically the same: Everyone picks a number, you choose a gift when it is your numbers turn, you can swap or keep your gift. We ended up with Jon Stewart's "Earth: The Book", John Grisham's "Ford County Stories", a neck/shoulder massager and a season of Seinfeld. Austin's dad also got us a couple of gifts after everyone had left. He got us our pan set that we registered for, a decanter and a couple of movies. Austin also got a couple of shirts from Brooks Brothers.

Christmas day is always spent with Austin's mom and her family and friends. We went over to her house around 9:00 in order to help her finish up the planning for her Christmas dinner that she plans. This year was smaller than years before, only 20 people this time. We were able to get the meal finished and plated by 1:30 and it went beautifully. Austin's uncle, the owner of Blue Goose, Big Shucks and Aw Shucks, gave us plenty of gift cards that should last us for several months. His mom and step dad gave us a lot of small gifts including candles, bath stuff (for me obviously), and new patio furniture. I also got something I've wanted for quite a while, a KINDLE!!! Austin got something much less cool, a new tv.

All in all, I think it was a wonderful Christmas. We spent a lot of time around great family and wonderful friends. This was our third Christmas together, but I think next year will be even more exciting since it will be our first Christmas as a married couple.