Wine Glasses and Baby Bottles: engaged

Okay, okay, this is old news, but since I never update this blog it's the first time I've really talked about it since we got engaged 6 months ago. I just finished up student teaching and am officially a licensed teacher (woohoo!), so now that I'm spending the rest of the year home with Bear I should have a little bit of time to wedding plan.

M started asking me yesterday about destination weddings, but I didn't have much to say at the time because I was exhausted from being up a good chunk of the night with Bear. I'm still somewhat open to the idea but part of me still wants the traditional hometown wedding. Either way we will most likely be getting married at the courthouse next month (shhhh, it's a secret!) for insurance purposes:)

I already have an entire board on Pinterest full of wedding ideas, but I'm horrible about transferring them from the internet into my real life. Unfortunately, wedding planning isn't exactly appealing to me. I'm the furthest thing from a DIY girl, I hate making phone calls, I'm the worst decision-maker ever, and I just hate planning in general. If I had it my way I would pay someone to do everything, show them all the shit on my wedding board, and only worry about showing up the day of. Unfortunatley I don't see things happening in that exact manner, so until I sort out the magical wedding planner thing, I'll have to actually get off my ass and do SOMETHING. Here is goes..

The reception venue I like most doesn't book until March, so we can't even set a date yet, but we are thinking it will be sometime in April 2014. There is a beautiful outdoor space downtown where my parents live on the lawn of a historic home where I'd like to hold the ceremony:

And no, I'm not going to have a harp. Also, I reeeeeally want these brown folding chairs for the ceremony, but I haven't found a vendor in the area who has them:

My mom already has lanterns similar to these that were used for my sisters wedding, which we will probably use to line the aisle and then use later on as centerpieces:

I'm thinking we'll go with warm, romantic tones with touches of gold for the bridesmaids and flowers:

I'll probably end up having around 10 bridesmaids because I'm really popular, so instead of putting everyone in the same horrible dress I'm going to choose around 20 dresses and let them pick whichever they like. Here are a few of the options:

All of the dresses are from J. Crew, Ann Taylor, BHLDN, and Nordstrom. I'll probably have them pair the dress with some gold shoes to bring in a little more of a glamorous vibe that the reception area has.

Flowers will be the same tones:

If we go through with this idea the reception will be held two blocks away from the ceremony site in the ballroom of the theater downtown:

Lobby (cocktail hour)

Ballroom

The theater rents the mahogany Chiavari chairs seen in the last photo, so we will be using those (can you tell the chairs are important to me?). For centerpieces I'm thinking we will do a mixture of the lanterns and something like this:

So that's what I've got so far. Again, we could end up scrapping this all and doing something completely different (see, horrible decision-maker). We have to decide by March though, so I suppose we should get to figuring that out!

And of course, here is a picture of Bear before we went out shopping today:)

It's been waaaaaay too long since my last post. In my defense, life has been crazier than ever. We just got back from vacation, I'm scrambling to get everything ready for when I start teaching this fall, and we just found out that Bear has some pretty bad food allergies:( Oh, and did I mention we are ENGAGED?! Crazy, right? M proposed on vacation, which I was totally not expecting. I'll post more about all of these things later, but I wanted to at least get some pics up of our fabulous vacation.

We went to South Haven, MI, a beautiful little town right on Lake Michigan that we visit every summer with my family. We bring a couple boats and rent a place on the canal. It was pretty hot this year, so we didn't get to venture down to the beach as much as I would have liked, but there was lots of fun pool time and it was nice just to see all of my family. Unfortunately Bear slept horribly pretty much the entire trip. It was like having a newborn all over again because he was up almost every hour at night. I'm not positive, but I have a feeling part of it was due to his allergies. He's on a couple medications now and is sleeping much better. Phew!