Sheer deliciousness...

I've been fantasising about these since the moment the last one was eaten.

Deliciousness indeed.


Photo by me, the day after the wedding. When I gathered up all the little details that were missed on the day and photographed the bejeebus out of them. It's funny, but photographing food before you eat it makes it taste better. I swear.

In the grand culmination of all of the technical difficulties I've been having with this damn computer over the last month it has eaten my emails. Every single email that was in each of my 6 inboxes (I know, I know - no one needs 6 email addresses. I'm working on streamlining, I promise) is gone. Vanished without a trace. The sweet lady who wanted advice on making a birdcage veil, the woman from national geographic who admire our first wedding photo and wanted to know with what it was taken, the lovely blogger who wished me well from her fabulously exotic honeymoon destination, the twelve year old girl I met at our wedding venue who wrote us a love poem and whom I promised to send some photos too....

So, if you've emailed me in the last four weeks and I haven't replied it would be great if you could send it again. I love each and every one of you and the lovely emails you send me and the horrible length of time it takes me to reply to them is definitly not a sign that they are not appreciated, I'm just a bit slow at the moment.

I hate this computer. It's a big bastard.

A desert fete...

Yet another fabulous blog to share with you, A Desert Fete is the inspiration and adventures of Desert Bride, who left these wonderfully wise words from Ban.do in my comments box the other day....

they're not perfect, but they are fantastic,

and sometimes fantastic is better than perfect.

wouldn't you agree?

Desert Bride is getting married in, you guessed it, the desert in about two weeks time and it promises to be a lovely affair!


Image by Desert Bride.

Just for you.....

...some photos of what was undoubtedly the happiest forty five minutes of my twenty three years, from the moment I left the castle to walk down the aisle until we walked back up the aisle together to the sounds of Lou Reed's Oooh Baby under a shower of rose petals...

Photos by Red Haired Aunt, Youngest Cousin and The Best Man and Woman's Step-Mother.

Procrastinating

Hey there loyal readers who are still dutifully coming back every day to check if I've broken my wedding silence. And phooey to the rest of you, who are abandoning me like scared guests from a wedding where the bride has had one too many signature drinks and the groom was caught ogling the bridesmaids leading to a full on brawl on the dance floor.

A huge huge thank you to all of you for your lovely comments, emails and posts over the last two weeks, they have really meant the world to me and each and every one of you has made me smile so very much. I know you are all itching to hear about the wedding and I am itching to find the words to describe what was a truly wonderful week with some really hideous bits. Because unfortunately, due to a rather horrible experience with our venue on the day of the wedding which has left me distinctly traumatised, the traditional if slightly unimaginative 'It was perfect!!' just won't suffice when it comes to a brief but informative recap.

(Oooh, exciting aside - the phone just ran and I called The Boy 'my husband' for the first time! Shame it had to be to the police.)

I'm also completely overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of photos we have of the wedding, 2270 to be exact and we're still waiting for the professional ones. I just need to look at them and my brain threatens to explode.

So instead I'm going to distract you with my two new favourite wedding blogs.

Baby, Picture This is the blog of an English girl with lovely taste, a Jenny Packham dress and a flair for gorgeous photography.

Baby, Picture This's maid of honour's dress.
Photo by Baby, Picture This

The second is I Hate Planning My Wedding, a hilarious blog written anonymously by a woman whose family seem to be doing their very best to drive her completely mad and for whom wedding planning is a horribly battle pushing her further and further down the road to alcoholism. A woman after my own heart in other words. She truly cracks me up and satisfies that part of me that is really really pissed off with weddings and wedding venues in particular.


Not that I didn't have a wonderful time and the wedding wasn't utterly wonderful. I did, and it was. It's just that the venue let us down so spectacularly, behaved it such a shitty way to us, our friends and our families that when I think of the wedding those wonderful memories that include moments where I was happier than I could ever have imagined I would be are competing with memories that make me really, really fucking angry.


So, give me a little time. I will find the words, I will figure out the photos, I will share with you the delights and horrors of getting married. I just need a little longer. Thank you for your patience.


Oh, and the police have nothing to do with the wedding, the venue wasn't that bad. We woke up to discover our poor little car had been broken into. Glass everywhere, glove compartment rummaged though, embarrassing medications scattered all over the passenger seat for our distinctly unfriendly neighbours to giggle at. There was nothing worth stealing in it though, we have the crappiest car in the street. It's the only one that looks like instead of an alarm going off if you breath near it, the driver's door might fall off. Removing the need to bother yourself with smashing the window.

Married...

photo by The Boy

It's nearly time...

We leave in the morning for The Wedding and the last week, and today in particular, has been a whirlwind of pack bags, write lists, pack boxes, wash dishes, empty dishwasher, finish wedding music, make wedding sign, wrap cake stands, make shopping lists, go shopping, buy shoes, email everyone, pay wedding elves, pick up dress, re-alter dress at home with sewing machine and help from The Boy, try to get rid of dodgy smell from dress, confirm times, freak out, write lists.....

But now that the boxes have been packed, the outfit has been confirmed, The Mother has bought a dress, boxes have been dispatched, projects have been finished and we finally picked a song to walk down the aisle to, I thought I would take a moment in the middle of it all to say goodbye and see you back here again soon. I had big plans for a week of scheduled posts but Dead Computer put an end to that, so all will be quiet on Peonies and Polaroids until next week when I return a Mrs. I thought I would feel all profound and meaningful in these last few days, but no, I just feel bloody tired, a little excited and a little can't wait till it's all over. I know, I know; Bad Bride but honestly, it's getting really bloody exhausting planning a wedding. And there are so many things I'm looking forward to about being married;

turning our house from a building site/storage facility into a haven of calm, a nest, a happy cosy place,

finding myself a little corner of that calm place to make my own, a place to nurture the creativity that planning a wedding has reawakened in me, a place to write and tell the stories that have been building up inside.

Watching films with The Boy. I mean The Husband. We used to go to the cinema weekly and it was a lovely time to spend away from the daily grind. We haven't had time recently.

Going for walks in our city, breathing fresh air and walking just for the sake of walking and not because there is a ribbon shop we need to get to.


Fixing my computer which has ever-so-helpfully been turning itself off every 10 minutes or so. Usually right in the middle of an email, post or comment. Happy days.

Washing. I need a shower.

Reading my dear friend's blogs and having time and the mental clarity to leave a trail of comments in my wake.

Using the new speakers The Boy has built for the wedding to listen to music together. Listening to music without thinking 'can I walk down the aisle to this?'

Dreaming of the future. Oh what dreams we have...

But tonight, and for the next few days, I look forward to seeing friends, hugging family members, saying the vows we worked so hard on and listening to our loved ones read us sweet words. Wearing red shoes and a beautiful dress, eating cake (delivered at 12pm) and food made with love by his family. Catching up with old friends and meeting new ones, laughing in the sunshine or maybe in the rain. Walking down the aisle, whether of grass or wooden floor, to a boy, a dear sweet boy who has been my world for 4 years, a boy who has held my hand and dried my tears, taught me more than I could ever thank him for and who agreed to marry me. Even though I sprung him with the most faltering, embarrassed proposal ever (a story I must finish telling you). The Boy, my boy. Forever.

Thank you all so much for all of the support you have provided over the last 6 months, I love you for it. You have truly kept me as sane as it was ever possible to be, given me confidence in our choices and a much needed dose of humour and perspective to get me through. Thank you!


We'll be back on the 18th and all being well, married!


(photos by unnamed but much admired photographers. Again, if you know who took them do leave a comment and I will source them when I'm back. And married.)

I was bad....

.... do you remember The Shoes? The ones I fell in love with online, the ones I begged friends and family members to help me buy, the ones that East Side Bride so adorably had delivered to her house, paid for postage for and waited patiently while a I made a huge mess of paying her back?

The ones that when I went for my first dress fitting I decided looked dirty?


Well I went to pick up my dress yesterday (it stinks of air freshener by the way, isn't that charming?) and I still didn't like the shoes. The grey still looked dirty against the white, they were just kind of blah and I was really struggling to walk in them. So I went a little crazy and bought these....

... I love them. They're so much closer to my original vision of what I wanted to wear. So fun, so happy so 'look at my shoes!' So bloody expensive I want to cry, but let's forget about that for a moment. I actually jumped up and down when we left the shop. That is the sign of a good shoe.


I can't believe all of the almost perfect shoes I disregarded because I wouldn't be able to wear them on the grass and now it looks as if it will be raining too hard for us to even set foot outside. At least now even if it's a grey day I won't have to look at grey shoes though!


Forgive me if my posting and commenting has been rather minimal over the last week. I do not like The Week Before the Week Before the Wedding. I hope that The Week Before the Wedding is better.

An East Side Wedding....

I just wanted to wish a world of love, luck and happiness to Nomi, who is getting married today in British Columbia....

...it seems like no time at all since I was six months ahead of our wedding, just starting a blog and I found another engaged girl who was getting married six days before, who had started a blog the same week and was full of style and sass.

This time tomorrow that girl will be a Mrs!

Congratulations girlie, may you and H Town have a riotous day of love, sunshine and cocktails.

A letter to the bride....

....From 2000 Dollar Wedding bride, Sara....

Dearest Bride-to-Be:

The 12-18 months of wedding planning will pass in a matter of hours or days. When it’s all said and done, the photos will be the primary artifact remaining.

My wish for you—when you look back at those photos—is for you to think:

Look at how relaxed I was. Fully present in the moment. Basking in it. Soaking it in. I was not saturated in stress.

My shoes and dress were comfortable enough for dancing. My beauty radiated out of me; it was not applied to me.

I got to spend quality time with my friends and family. I was myself, not a show. In fact, I was my fullest expression of self.

I do not remember whether the invitations were letterpress or whether the flowers at the ceremony were the same ones at the reception.

The wedding favors or the fanciness of the food did not make memories. The sincerity did. The connection did. The time together did.

It did not matter whether every last detail conformed to the signature colors. Instead of saying, “What a beautiful bouquet,” the guests said, “What a beautiful love.”

This is my wish to you, dear brides, as you pore over wedding magazines and read daily blogs. Some of it matters. Most of it does not. Casting your net in the wrong direction will most surely mean you miss the things you most dearly want to catch.

May your wedding be just one sincere, authentic, happiest day in a long line of many.

This is my wish to you.

All my best,

Sara

What words of wisdom.

Breath, and relax.... (a note to self.)

A little of this, a little of that....

Well I'm back at a computer The Boy assures me is mine. It doesn't look like my computer and it doesn't smell like my computer but it's sitting on my desk and there's a smudge of what looks like chocolate on the screen so I'll take his word for it.

The last couple of days have been shitty, what with the computer saga eating up 2 whole days out of the 7 left before we leave for the wedding, spending another day getting photos printed before realising that I'd left half of the files I needed printed on the dead computer, another day spent buying a guillotine, returning guillotine because it was crap, buying new guillotine, getting home and chopping two rather large pieces out of the end of my finger with second, slightly less crap guillotine and getting blood all over our programs and rendering my right hand completely bloody useless for the rest of that night until 2am when it stopped throbbing long enough for me to get out of bed and finish the programs.

The weather has been getting worse and worse and rain is forecasted for the next fortnight. Heavy rain, with big black clouds. And wind. It turns out I do care if it rains. Mostly because our indoor back up plan will add £600 to our wedding budget, £600 that will have to be paid with our wedding present from my Grandfather.

But these small irritations pale in comparison to the horrible news I received this morning. One of my dearest and oldest friends, our witness and the one person who has shown unceasing excitement of the tears, grinning and hand clapping variety when it comes to our wedding won't be able to come to our wedding due to a truly terrible family bereavement that has her flying to New Zealand on Friday with no idea of when she will be home. No family bereavement is good but this one was utterly shocking and heartbreaking and I'm so very very sad for her and her family. Getting married without her there is almost unimaginable. The Boy and I briefly entertained thoughts of rearranging the wedding, but that is just unfeasible. It's her birthday on the day we get married and her absence will be sorely felt.

Ok, so on to something happier, our flowers. We ordered the gorgeous garden roses from The Real Flower Company but seeing as we could only afford fifty they are very much accent flowers. The real bulk of our floral arrangements will be made up with flowers we are buying from an online wholesaler. It's a bit of a nail biting experience as stock changes weekly and you can't pre-order things so we had to wait until this week to choose what we were going to order. The company is also pretty crap and haven't replied to any of my emails, have weird contradictory information on their website and generally do not instill confidence in me, so we may end up with 50 roses and whatever we can get from the supermarket.

This is our final selection, providing everything is still available when we place the order tomorrow....

(the roses are from The Real Flower Company and just used to complete the 'vision'. )

We're going for a country garden look in enamel jugs. This should hopefully work for that. And it should smell good too. And yes, there are peonies! I wasn't going to bother with them as we'd already ordered the roses as a substitute but The Boy insisted. Apparently he's grown to love them. And they remind him of me.


From left to right, top to bottom they are...

White Mischief roses; Sarah Bernhard Peonies; Agapanthus; no idea, the name on the website is in Dutch; pink Lisianthus; Agapanthus; white Lisianthus; Delphinium; no idea, little daisy things; purple Lisianthus; no idea; English Miss roses.

(images from Flowers4Florists and The Real Flower Company)

it's all been too much...

...the late nights, the unreasonable demands, the incessant changes to projects previously deemed OK, the constant verbal (and threats of physical) abuse. They've taken their toll on my darling computer and it is no more, ceased to be, expired and gone to meet its maker. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, rests in peace. Its metabolic processes are now history. It's off the twig, it's kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. It is in short, an ex-computer.

I am sitting here on The Boy's computer, bottom lip a-quivering, while he tries to revive mine. It's very kind of him to let me use it but it feels all wrong, like borrowing someone else's false teeth, it just doesn't fit.

There is no good time for that extension of your being to pack in, but the week before your wedding? Fucking great. There are countless things to be printed, countless images to use while arranging hair, flowers and decorations all stashed away on it. Emails to be answered, wedding elves to correspond with, sanity-restoring blog buddies to be connected to....

Dear computer, I know I've been pushing you a little hard, trust me I feel it too and if I could give up I would be sorely tempted, but I need you, I love you, please come back to me.... please.....

I'm a Practical Bride because....

-

....Meg says so.

Inspired by Modern Bride magazine's recent advertising campaign ("I'm a modern bride because my wedding costs the GDP of an African nation" ... "I'm a modern Bride because I'm wearing six different dresses"...) Meg of A Practical Wedding ran a contest - I'm a Practical Bride because.... with her two wedding bibles as prizes - Miss Manners on Painfully Proper Weddings and One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

Meg had 114 entrants and a whole world of answers. But little old me, along with Dearsay and Broke-Ass Bride won!


I loved Dearsay's explanation of why she is a Practical Bride; her wedding to Lauren won't be legally recognised in DC and her answer was a perfect blend of humour and social and political commentary....

I'm a practical bride because I bought a power of attorney before I bought my shoes.

I can't believe that gay marriages aren't legal in all parts of the United States. There is so much that we take for granted in the UK.



Broke-ass Bride's answer cracked me up. So sweet yet hilarious....

I'm a practical bride because I believe the day is only 'perfect' if we end up married. To each other.



As for me...

I'm a practical bride because I really and truly hope that our wedding won't be the happiest day of our lives.


It might seem strange to some; we are brought up to believe that a wedding day is The Goal, that your wedding should be magical, perfect, everything you've ever dreamed of. And that's fine, it's fine to want a perfect day (what scares me is how people define perfect. Does the word unattainable mean anything to you?). It's fine to want your wedding day to be what you dreamed it would be. But seriously, it's a party. You really want a party to be the happiest day of your life? You don't dream of bigger, better, more meaningful days? You don't have goals beyond 'get married, have wedding, wear nice dress'?

We do. There are things The Boy and I want so much more than a wedding, things that we may or may not achieve, things that we yearn for with all of our hearts and if those dreams come true then that may or may not be the happiest day of our lives. But even then, I'm not willing to draw a line under our happiness and say nothing's going to beat this day, it's all down hill from here on. How sad that would be. I plan to live for quite some time, I plan to live with The Boy for quite some time and I hope with all my heart that there are bigger things on our horizons than a wedding day.

Here's to a lifetime of happy days my love.

We're confused....

Wedding presents.

Do you open them when you receive them or do you open them once you're married?

I know you're not supposed to thank people until after the wedding at which point you send out a card with a picture of yourself on it (because nothing says gratitude better than 'I love this picture of myself so much and I thought you would too'.)

But that seems rude. Surely you should thank people as soon as a present arrives? But if you're not supposed to open it then do you just thank them for 'the present' as opposed to whatever the present is?

Or do you open it and thank them for the 'whatever it turns out to be which is a complete surprise because you most certainly didn't accidentally click the link on your wedding list website that tells you what people bought you and also tells you not to touch said link'?

Or do you not open it and pretend you don't know what it is even though you do? Do you thank the giver at the wedding? Is that rude? Does that embarrass them and put them on the spot? Do people expect to be thanked with a slightly disturbing greetings card?

Help.

(I should add - the confusion is in relation to gifts that have started arriving in the mail, not presents that people bring on the day!)