WW: Starting Over?

After a not so restful sleep Friday night and a startlingly loud phone call from my father at 9am that literally left me feeling like I had been hit by a truck...Jason and I met with Fr. Ed over at the CC+C.

Basically once we got engaged and my dreams of a small Key West wedding were overruled by us wanting all of our family to be there, we started making a few important decisions:

1. We would get married in a church. It isn't necessarily crazy important to either me or Jason that we MUST do this, but we decided we would. His parents are very involved in their church and my mother and grandmother are very churchy people as well. So, instead of having a fight with them or disappointing them by saying we didn't want to get married in a church (which I'm not saying in any way that we have strong feelings against it), we decided straight off we'd do it for our families.
2. We would get married in NY's Capital Region. Let's face it, we both live an equidistance from where we met (at school) and we weren't going to make just one side travel all the way to the other side. Plus, traditionally it would be in my hometown and the last thing I wanted was a big Long Island wedding.
   
3. We would invite all of our families. Again, this hearkens back to the fact that we are trying to make it easy for them to come. Halfway between our two families is a familiar place, so that's what we chose. We don't want to not include certain people and we want to be able to invite all of our first cousins and friends.
   
4. No babies. We are both firm in this, and luckily there really is only one person in our family right now who has a young baby so this isn't an issue.

Other than that we were really open to things. I mean obviously I have some things that I want, ie a slightly more casual feel to the wedding. I don't want it to be stuffy and traditional, but I don't want it to be flipflops and jeans either. I want to wear a tea length dress, not that I'm against floor length, but I think I'd prefer it. I wanted a Sunday wedding instead of Friday or Saturday. And we both really want to make it as stress free as possible.

We spoke with Fr. Ed and he seemed amenable to marrying us which is great. I'm not the hugest fan of the CC+C as a venue for our ceremony. The biggest drawback is that it is a cultural center so different religions use the space. Which in the big picture doesn't matter at all to me, but the floor is concrete and has all these really strange markings and characters on it. If we could cover up the floor with something, I wouldn't mind the place at all in fact. It'd be really super easy to get guests to and that time of year there is ample parking.

So we'll see about that. I still have a few churches in the area to call, but I have a feeling we'll be falling back on the CC+C.

After our meeting there, we drove up to the new Athletic Village that was just built on campus to see what it was like. Wound up running into my parents doing the same thing and caravanned over to the Barn.

I love Pat's Barn. It is perfectly rustic and modern at the same time. I visited with Laura and Julibean awhile back and was dead set on having our reception there. They both agreed it would be perfect. My parents liked it too.

But they shared in Jason's concern that it was probably too small for our reception. Apparently our families really are just that big in numbers. So we talked about it and we're going to say goodbye to the Barn methinks. Jason was having trouble conceptualizing the space anyway, apparently it was a little too far out of the box for his tastes.

Now we're looking into a few country clubs and the like in the area. I think we've found a really great one that is well priced and we might have a connection through a friend to it. Plus it's only 10 minutes away from Troy so it might just be the perfect location. I'm going to go visit next weekend.

Slowly but surely we're making progress. At least the guest list is done. I already have a concept for the invitations and I'll probably buy enough material to make 200 of them, just to be safe. I want to get as much done as possible so it'll be easier later.

In the meantime I still have to redo my portfolio and website and start searching for jobs in Virginia. And you know...eventually move there.