I'm home! It's wonderful. I love my family oh so much! And I miss them when I'm away at school. I was convinced that when all my homework was over and done with, I'd have tons more time, more than I'd know what to do with, in fact!

False. I do not have any more time. However, I'm not sure where it disappeared to.

Probably the same place my other sock went. Home is like that.

I got home May 1st and started work on May 3rd. I figured that after 5, I would be free to focus on all the wedding-related tasks that are vying for my attention. Instead, I come home tired, and just want to chill with the rest of my family. Unfortunately, chilling with the fam in front of an NCIS turns into an NCIS marathon...and next thing you know it's 11:00 and Dave's calling. And I accomplished nothing. Except 3 rows on my super cute lace knit hat.

Basically I've accomplished nothing.

Now I've been home for 3 weeks. I got our invitations sent out the first week. Actually, there was a minor fiasco that went along with invitation sending, wanna hear it? I knew you did!

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you probably know that I designed our invitations myself. In case you missed them, here's a link to the post about the invitations and RSVP's, and here's the thank you cards.

Naturally, if I'm going to put that much work into my stationary, I'm not going to neglect the packaging! I planned on designing a cute envelope design when I got home and printing all the addresses on in a super-cute font to match the invites.

Unfortunately, when I got home, my computer crashed 3 or 4 times, and in the process of being fixed, became a vegetable (the operating system was removed, and the new one didn't work. Thankfully, it works now!). So, I lost my precious Adobe programs and had to design my envelopes in Microsoft Word. Not exactly the best graphics program.

When I finally got the graphics arranged in a passable manner, I tried to print our addresses. Unfortunately, I forgot that our printer is possessed by a paper-eating demon, which proceeded to eat several of my envelopes. By now it's about 11:30 pm, the day after I wanted them sent out.

I had just resigned myself to handwriting all 130+ addresses by myself, when dad saw me and felt sorry for me. So, he volunteered to print them at work for me the following day. I set up the documents as best as I could at that late hour, and sent them with him.

The next day, I received several calls from my family, trying to reach me. I finally call my dad back, and he explains to me that he didn't realize that the proper font wasn't installed before he started printing. He had printed about half the envelopes in some large, sans-serif font. Did I want him to continue?

I took a few cleansing breaths, and explained how to download the proper font, so that at least some of my envelopes could be saved. But, as was the habit of this particular project, it didn't work. His computer wouldn't let him unzip the file, so we were stuck with the large Ariel-style font. I told him to go ahead and print them.

So, at this point, we had 6 envelopes printed in the right font, about 20 that I had handwritten, and about 100 printed with this alien font. Mom and I stuffed and stamped them, and we sent them out the next day on our way to Virginia for my cousin's wedding.

After a whirlwind 3-day trip to Virginia (an 11 hour drive, one way), we came home, and I went back to work. The first few days, I was so beat after work that I couldn't do much more than sit on my bum when I got home. I slowly started recovering, and started realizing that I was getting married in 5 weeks, and still had more tasks to do than I could imagine.

That weekend, my Dad's side of the family threw me a bridal shower! It was lots of fun. My grandmas from both sides came, as well as all my aunts on that side, and most of my female cousins. The house was all decorated in pink and green (the colors of our  wedding!), right down to the ham salad sandwiches! I tell you what, when my Aunt Mary Jane throws a party, she throws it right!

Thankfully, they didn't deliberately try to embarrass me. However, the second game we played, "Bridal Jenga," got a little embarrassing. A lot embarrassing. They-talked-about-sex-in-front-of-my-grandmas embarrassing. Apparently the game, which was a regular Jenga game with questions written on about half the blocks, was made by one of my cousins for a bridal shower for a college friend a number of years ago. Some of these questions would have been awkward in that setting, but not the end of the world. However, when your grandma pulls the block that says, "Name two places (outside the bedroom) that you would like to have sex," and you and your grandma both are supposed to answer it...yikes!

I plead the fifth.

Overall, it was really fun! Showers are, by nature, rather awkward, what with getting all those gifts and such, but I had fun. And it was nice to see so much of the family again. I've missed a lot of family events being off at school.

That night (Saturday), Dave came up to visit with Wes and his new bride, Shele. They were up for around 24 hours, to visit their grandparents who are home from the mission field for about a month. I spent all day Sunday with Dave, and got home late that night. Monday I was back at work.

Weekends here are NOT relaxing. Just saying.

This week, I decided that doing wedding planning in the evenings wasn't going to work, so I told my boss that I needed Friday's off, starting immediately. I worked Monday through Wednesday this week, then stayed home sick/played hooky with my bestest buddy yesterday. (I was actually sick, she played hooky. And we ate mint oreos and watched the best movie ever made: Anne of Green Gables).

Today I contacted several people in an attempt to chase down information I need for planning this big shindig we have coming up in less than a month.

Oh yeah, did I mention that? This week Wednesday was the one-month mark. Freak out time!! Ahh!! So much to do, and no time to do it!!

So, right now my biggest things to tackle are the cake (with me being out of the state for school, the cake got overlooked until it was too late and all the bakers in the area are booked full for June, so we're gonna make it ourselves), flowers (we're making our own bouquets using silk flowers, but I haven't decided yet what they should look like), ceremony decorations (which, by the way, I could still use suggestions for!), ceremony music, reception layout/decor, makeup, photography, music, hairstylists, shoes (which I don't have yet! eep!), and probably about 100 other things that I'm forgetting.

Oy vey. Buckle up kids, this should be fun!

And to think, at the end of this, I'll be a wife. That totally hasn't sunk in yet. Not sure it will for another year or so. That's about when I'll wake up when I finally get the chance to stop.

So, one of the biggest wedding trends in the past several years is having a photo booth. The first ones to become popular were those sit-down booths that print out strips of pictures, like they have in the mall. While I thought it was a fun idea, it seemed like a waste of money to me because renting those things are not cheap! But then different kinds of photo booths started showing up on my wedding radar.

These were homemade, personalized to the wedding itself, and run by a friend with a digital camera. Some were as simple as a piece of colorful fabric draped over a dowel to make a backdrop, and some were as fancy as to reproduce a wall, complete with wallpaper and picture frames, with several of the frames cut out so guests can look through them! Some even went so far as to add a couch in front of the wall to create even more dimension. Here's one I love:

I think what I like best about this particular one is the old family photographs hanging alongside the open frames. I love the idea of incorporating wedding photos of our loved ones into our own special day to celebrate marriage.

My daddy has a woodshop at home. When I showed him this idea, he loved it and said we could work on making one for our reception. My future sister (in-law) has volunteered to shoot the pictures for us.

Beyond just having a photo booth set up, we're excited about the idea of using the precious pictures of the guests as our guest book. I must say, I'm not impressed with the idea of a "sign in sheet" for guests, especially because I already know who they are and where they live! I wanted a more creative guestbook anyway, and this would allow it to be so cute!

We've been tossing around the idea of how it would work to create the guest book in advance, and give each person/couple/group a place to sign with a blank on the page where their picture would go, then after the wedding, developing the pictures and pasting them in next to their respective comments.

What do you think? Lots of fun? Or too much work?

So, the idea of a day-after photo shoot (day after the wedding, or in our case, a week or two after) is totally appealing to me for several reasons.

One, it'd be way more relaxed than on the actual day (and knowing me, I'll be totally stressed out the day-of!), allowing for sillier, more relaxed, natural poses.

Two, it's another excuse to put on my awesome dress!

Three, because it's after the wedding, I won't have to worry about my dress, which will allow for more unconventional locations for photos (some people go as far as to "Trash the Dress," which usually turns out looking pretty cool, but I'm not so brave...or so fond of water).

Four, it's just so darn cute!

There are lots of pictures that I've seen that I love resulting from this type of shoot, but one in particular stands out to me:


This photo, taken by Jasmine Star, is amazing! It has set my mind racing as to all the fun things you could do with a "Playing House" themed photoshoot. We could do it in our new apartment, and just do fun photos of things married people do. I saw another photographer had pictures of a couple, she was knitting and he was doing something else (Dave and I already do this). Then there's the pictures jumping on the bed, or sitting on the porch or eating cookie dough without baking it. Wouldn't that be the cutest shoot ever??