Flower girl basket

And here's the flower girl basket:

Sorry the pic's dark... It'll be much cuter in the light of day. I wanted the basket to be a Nantucket basket to bring home the whole New England idea...

Invite package

So I finally took some pix. Here are the invitations:


And here is the bundle of extra info cards (hotel info, RSVP cards, map):

Colors on the gentlemen

This past week, I spent 6 hours shopping for wedding things. I'm not kidding. I shopped for hours for ties for Bill, Ryan and my dad. The good news is I got lovely light blue ties and . :-) Decision made, for better or for worse. They will all be in blue suits, which will go well with the light blue bridesmaids' dresses.

What a weekend!

Paul, Alice, Ryan and I went down to Pennsylvania this weekend because Paul's and my shower was on Saturday at Scott and Liz's house. Liz, Maggie, Jannine and my mom did such a great job of making the party special -- from little pina colada-flavored wedding bell candies to printing out pictures of us and hanging them from windows with ribbon to making such a wonderful spread of food (it really was the talk of the party!). Maggie picked up her mom on the way down, and so Maria came from CT for the shower. It was just a really wonderful gathering of family, both actual and adopted.

The party had special significance to Paul and me, as it turned out, because on Thursday evening we found a new respect for life (specifically mine). Let's just say getting a new car is a more immediate concern than it was last Wednesday. I'm was in the car alone and I'm fine -- a few scratches and bruises -- but I was extremely lucky on many fronts.

At any rate, it was a wonderful party and a great time with family. Thanks to everyone who came and made us feel so special and loved. It really touched our hearts.

Extra invitations

If your invitations to your spa day with the girls, rehearsal dinner, bridal brunch, gift opening party, whatever, don't match your invitation stationery, you're supposed to send them separately. I wish I could tell you I thought that much ahead. The real story is that I couldn't be bothered with the extra invitations in June when I was making the invitations.

That, of course, means that at this point I'm pretty much in the "get them made and delivered and move on to other stuff" mode. They're cute, but not cut-out. They don't match the invites to the wedding and it seems that every person got another set of invites. For instance, only the bridal party and immediate family and the wedding helpers are going to be included in the rehearsal dinner (otherwise it would just turn into the pre-wedding reception), only the moms and bridal party are in for the spa day (before the rehearsal -- kind of like my ideal version of a bachlorette party, since I've never really been one to go clubbing and get wasted), and all out-of-towners are invited to the bridal brunch the morning after the wedding. The gift-opening party is just immediate family, basically, because who else would even want to watch us open gifts, if even they do?!

So I made my lists (it helps to be a hyper-organized type of personality when planning a wedding!) and printed them all out yesterday afternoon and stuffed each envelope last night. Why did I do that when I really have enough to worry about this weekend, what with the wedding shower in PA this coming Saturday? Well, that's why. I'd like to hand-deliver each of the invite envelopes at the shower. For those who won't be there on Saturday, they'll get the mailed version, which will go out sometime next week.

Let's call it not so much "not planning ahead," but rather "a touch of personal attention" -- delivering the extra invites a few weeks late. I guess that's kind of the normal timeline, I just wanted to do it asap so people could plan their hotel requests appropriately.

Frames in progress

For favors, I'm making a frame for each person (the place cards will be in them). Well, I put a first coat on 34 of them today. It feels good to make progress. 2nd coats of paint coming, well, whenever I can. They take a day to dry and some of them will probably need 3 coats of paint. Then the fun part -- decorating them! I've been stocking up on decorations for them for months.

I'll post pix when some are done. I hope they'll all be different -- it'll keep it interesting both for me and for the people getting them!

Big step

On Saturday morning, I stood in line with about 39 of my closest friends at the Framingham P.O. so that I could get the invitations' stamps hand-cancelled so that they wouldn't have to go through the machine that does it and thereby be flattened. The guy at the counter let me do it myself, which was a win-win and now they're off. Actually, most of them are already delivered, which is nice. I've already gotten compliments from my mom and from my brother Brett (thanks, B!) on them.

Now to wait for the RSVP cards to come back!