30 Days of Memories: Day 9

My cousin Tonia just celebrated her 18th wedding anniversary to Steve. Ashinator and Digger were so super cute as the flower girl and ring bearer.

The bridal party got ready in a room with a fruit platter and my Grandma kept feeding Ashinator all the fruit she wanted, not thinking about what was going to happen to her gut with all of that fresh fruit. The fruit started to work their magic during the ceremony, and every so often, Ash would disappear with my mom to the bathroom and then sneak back into line. A few minutes later, she'd disappear and reappear again.

Luckily, it wasn't too distracting and it makes for a cute story.

TST/Wedding Dress Story

This week, I'm doing a two-fer:

Who Put Me In Charge of these People?

and Once Upon A Miracle

Texan MaMa has a fun little linky going on this week, and Rachel's TST is always a lot of fun.  After reading Texan MaMa's write up about her lovely wedding dress, it made me think of mine, which was well...we had a redneck weddin'.

RockCrawlinChef and I decided that we were going to have a totally low-key wedding.  And I mean, low-key.  I swore I was going to wear jeans and boots to the wedding.  How much more low-key can you get than jeans and boots?

About a week before the wedding, though, I started having second thoughts.  I didn't want to look at our wedding album in twenty years and regret not wearing a dress, so off we went.  I was actually looking for a sundress to wear at our reception BBQ (yep, we threw us a big ol' BBQ - as laid back as you can get), so we went to Old Navy, where I found the sundress for super cheap.  Ashinator wanted a dress to wear to the wedding, so we went to Ross.

Yes, I did.  I found my wedding dress at Ross for about $20.  Now it's not a traditional wedding dress by any means, but it was a white dressy-thing that would suffice.  And I could still wear my boots with it.

Now, like a true cowgirl who got married in her boots, the redneck wedding wouldn't be complete without climbing into the horse pen and getting a picture with the equine love of my life.

And as a little bonus, in case my $20 wedding dress from Ross and my cowboys weren't enough, here's our cake topper.

Which, by the way, cost more than my dress!

May 14th - Wedding Day

I can't think of a more perfect Wedding Day than ours! The sun came out and stayed out all day, which made it perfect for our "play day". Monster flew up from Arizona (God, I miss that kid) and we spent the morning at Fort Fun (http://www.fortfun.biz/) racing Go-karts and playing arcade games. I had a blast watching RockCrawlinChef and the kids race around the track - seems like all I got to do was watch because I always managed to get the "Sunday driver" P.O.S. car. I'm pretty sure I got lapped in every race despite the fact that I had the pedal floored! We could have stayed and raced all day, but our rumbling tummies finally won and we headed off to SmashBurger for lunch before heading up to Mom's for the actual wedding.

Spending the morning playing around certainly helped lower the stress level for all involved in the wedding. RCC had picked up his friend, Scott, on Wednesday and had given Scott the menu for dinner, so we knew that would be taken care of. My friend, Oonah, just happens to be a Reverend, and had agreed to do the Ceremony, which also decreased a lot of stress. Really, the only thing we had to worry about was getting our butts up to the Lodge and getting ready. Not so bad.

We had decided to have a small, family-only wedding, but our families are fair-sized, so we ended up with twenty people, all of whom were immediate family. RCC and I wrote our own vows and managed to stumble through them without too many tears. The only complaint that we heard later was that we'd "whispered" our vows and that no one else could hear them. Oops. Guess I forgot to project from the diaphragm. But RCC heard them and that's all that mattered.

The Ceremony was short, sweet, and to the point. All of the pictures that followed took much longer than the Ceremony itself. Yes, I did wear boots with my dress, but not my obnoxious blue boots, instead, I wore my very old boots that fit like a glove. Heck, I would have killed myself in heels and I at least wore a dress.

After all was said and done, I did have to go get a picture with the other love of my life, Estes. And, of course, the best way into the pen was to climb the fence rather than go under in my white dress, so up and over this cowgirl went. Estes deigned to have her picture taken with me, but literally turned her nose up at RCC when we tried to get a picture of the three of us. She posed with us for about three seconds and Ashee-butt wasn't quick enough with the camera, so Estes was done. Brat. But I love her anyway.
Scott (and RCC - couldn't keep him out of the kitchen) prepared an amazing dinner to finish off our perfect day. As with most brides, I'm pretty sure my wedding was the best one of all!

Hurry Up and Wait

We're down to the wire now; just two days left of work and then it's the final push to the wedding and reception. Yesterday was very much a "hurry up and wait" kind of day; we've done pretty much everything we can in preparation for the reception and now we have to wait. There will be a ton of stuff to do starting Wednesday, but not a thing that we could have done yesterday. For someone who just wants to wade in and get her sh*t done, it was a long day. So instead of working on wedding/reception stuff I washed dishes, did laundry, changed sheets, did more laundry, packed (as much as I could) for Hawai'i, and did more laundry. We watched three movies yesterday - bedtime couldn't come soon enough just so I could get up today and do something that will help while away the time until the party begins.

I know a lot of brides are at the panic stage right about now, but we've managed to pace ourselves pretty well and things are looking good. Now, if Wednesday would just get here so we could get started...

Bridal Shower

I've never really been one for "Showers" - just the word, in conjunction with Baby or Bridal, conjures images of sitting around, looking at people I don't know, and playing stupid Shower Games - so when the girls at work asked if I wanted a Bridal Shower, I hesitated before I said yes. But I did say yes. The great thing about the people I work with is that they are very similar to me; they offered to throw me the shower, but then asked if there was anything we could do at the shower to help get ready for the Reception, rather than playing stupid games! Yay!

So the dreaded Shower turned out to be a lot of fun; I got to see my girl, Staci, and her babies (I'm getting ready for mine to leave, and she's just starting), my aunts, grandma and cousin, my future MIL and SILs (not that I don't see them twice a week anyway), Cindy (who I hardly ever see anymore with Kai gone), friends from work and my mom and sister.

It seems that it's much easier to get caught up and re-bond when everyone's working on a project together rather than sitting around staring at each other playing stupid games. We made the cream cheese mints for the reception and got the bud vases ready. All we'll have to do is add water and flowers to the bud vases.

The cake was beautiful and inadvertently answered our question about how we were going to put Gerbera Daisies on our wedding cake (wrap the stems in florist tape to keep the stuff from oozing out - we were looking at the hot glue gun sealing option), and the gifts were amazing. I've got to hand it to my sister, Not A GunDiva, her gift included the sacred words "Victoria's Secret". Can't go wrong with wedding night lingerie (and honeymoon lingerie).

A big THANK YOU to Annie and Cindy for organizing a fun Bridal Shower - it's wonderful to have friends like you!

If I was a grill, I'd have this grill's babies!

I fell in love with this grill 6 weeks ago at Sam's Club and knew we had to have it for the reception. It's very basic, just eight burners, two propane tanks (sold separately), 10,000 BTUs, 1001 square inches of grill space. Nothing fancy at all. Except that it can cook 64 1/4 lb hamburgers or 126 hot dogs at a time! And it collapses down to be semi-portable. It doesn't take long at all to collapse down and get ready to move, but it does require two strong people. The dang thing weighs well over 100# (without the propane tanks) and putting it into the truck or taking it out can be a bit of a chore, but one that's well worth it. Once it's collapsed down and in its cover, it looks a lot like a casket in the back of the truck *grin* - actually, it feels like we're loading and unloading a casket, too, when we move it. But I love it. And we've used it twice already. It's big trial is the Fort Collins 9Health Fair this weekend when we have to feed 200 people off of it; burgers, hot dogs, and veggie burgers. I'm sure it's up to it...and once it's broken in from the Health Fair, we'll be firing it up for the wedding reception just three weeks later. Jeez, I already feel like we've gotten our money's worth.

Four Weeks from Today

It's kind of sobering how quickly time moves when you're not paying attention. For weeks from today, I'll be Mrs. RockCrawlinChef. I've been measuring time, as I do every year, in 9Health Fair time. From February until the end of April my life revolves around the Health Fair, so I've been thinking about the wedding in Health Fair time as in, "two weeks 'til the MCR fair, then the FC fair, then a weekend off, then the wedding stuff". Suddenly, though, the MCR fair is in two days, which means the FC fair is in eight days, then a weekend off, then Monster comes home, RCC's birthday/Mother's day, two days of work, a girls' day, wedding, a day to prep, and reception.

Where the hell did the time go? I thought we had plenty of time.

Luckily, the wedding itself is very small, just RCC's family and mine and very informal. The reception is just a glorified BBQ, but still, there's a lot to be done! The kids haven't even started on the slide show, we haven't mapped out the backyard to figure out where everything goes, I haven't even picked up RCC's ring yet! (But I did get the phone call that it is in, I just need to go get it - that will probably be best left until the last week so I don't lose it somewhere in the commotion).

Thank God for good friends and family who are helping out. Ann is helping round up tents and planning the bridal shower. Oonah is creating the wedding ceremony itself. RCC's friend Matt is planning the bachelor party. Amanda's mom, Donna, whom I've only met once, gave me a great tip on where to get flowers. Scott, Cindy, and Ann are gearing up to help get everything set up for the reception...the list goes on and on. RCC's friend from culinary school, Scott, is flying out to do our cooking and Mom is making the wedding cake. No wonder it's been so easy to let time slip by and not worry about anything.

Wow. Before we know it, the whole thing will be over.

Hectic, hectic life

Wow. It's been a long time since I had thirty seconds to sit and blog and so much has happened in the last almost-month. Let's see if I can't condense it down:

• Went shopping with RockCrawlinChef to look for a cake topper. Couldn't find one anywhere, and we went into stores I didn't even know existed! Finally gave up and decided we'd look on-line. Jackpot! At our second or third site, a topper jumped out at us as THE topper. It's absolutely perfect. We couldn't have designed one better. Unless, of course, we could have figured out how to fit Estes and Allie-bird, too. Took F-O-R-E-V-E-R to arrive, but it finally got here and it's even better in person!
• Spent an entire day with RCC addressing invitations and making our own guest book for the reception. We had a great time playing with our custom stamps - did you know you could make your own stamps? Sure, you pay through the nose for them, but they're so worth it. Of course we over-estimated how many we'd need, and now we've got sixty left-over postcard stamps. Guess who will be sending out lots of postcards this year?
• Finally caved and registered at Bed, Bath and Beyond. We had no intention of registering anywhere, but plenty of whining from my friends and some pearls of wisdom from family convinced us to "just do it." So...we set off for the store, thinking it would only take a short time to do all the registry stuff. Wrong. Over two hours later we staggered out of the store, completely shopped out. Well, at least I was. RCC, however, can shop for a very, very long time without whining (unlike me). I had no idea that you had to have 12 formal and informal dinner settings; to me formal means clean "real" plates, and informal means paper plates. I was thinking that once the kids moved out, we'd be happy to have four place settings. But 12 is proper. Who knew? We did register for some really cool stuff that we so DON'T expect to get. Except maybe the Margaritaville frozen drink maker - that would be really cool. Oh, and the Kitchen Aid whatchamacallit. That would be really cool, too. In all honestly, I'd pull the list from the registry and take it on over to Wal-Mart and save myself some money :)
• No one's going to believe it since I've been so stead-fast in getting married in jeans and boots, but I broke down and bought a dress. Not a wedding dress, but a nice, white sundress to wear at the wedding (Ross, $19.95 - what can I say, the price was right). I couldn't have bought new jeans (which would be more functional) and a nice shirt (again, more functional) for that price. Don't know what I was thinking and I may still revert back to the jeans and boots after I come to my senses. Actually, I do know what I was thinking. I was thinking that in 20 years when I look back at my wedding pictures, I don't want them to look like "just" a picture of the two of us; I do actually want wedding pictures.
• I also bought a sundress for the reception. Please don't faint dead away at the thought of me in a dress twice in one week. Though the reception is totally an informal BBQ, I thought it would be nice to not look like my typical sloppy self. And I can take the sundress to Hawai'i in case RCC and I end up wanting to go someplace that requires something other than shorts and flip-flops.
• Best news for last...well, best for me anyway. We moved Estes up the hill yesterday. Even though she's physically a farther distance from me, psychologically she's much closer since she's with Mom and Bill's horses and I don't need permission to go out and see her. I can just hop in the car and zip up to the lodge to spend some time with my baby girl. Of course, time is something I'm sorely lacking for the next few months, but I'll do my best to get up there at least once a week to see her. The Estes move will get it's own blog, I'm sure. 'Cause, as Deejo says, we horse people are crazy and can only talk about our horses.