Mark and Katie's Stupendous Wedding Blog

Well, the wedding planning is picking up steam now that I’m done with work and school. We’ve decided on our menu for the reception, and are meeting with the decorator next week. I can’t wait to really come up with some great ideas to make the reception awesome! We are really lucky that the Country Abbey is such a one-stop shop!

We are so excited about throwing a great party for our guests, even though there is no way we can possibly invite everyone that we want to invite. I think that the invitation process is the hardest part of wedding planning, especially because our venue has a strict quota on the number of people we can have. This has really forced us to invite a much smaller number of people than we wanted to, which makes me really sad.

I am learning a lot about event planning through this process, and am really glad that I’m getting the experience. The good news is that no matter what, at the end of the day, Mark and I will be married!

As of today, we have 192 days until the wedding. Wow! I can remember when we first got engaged–it seemed like October 9 would never come, since it was over a year away! Now, with less than 200 days until THE DAY, I can’t believe how fast the time has flown.

In chapel the other day, the speaker mentioned how time goes by faster and faster as you age. I can definitely understand what he means. When I was in second grade, I felt that high school kids were the. coolest. ever. Those days, the year consisted of two seasons–waiting for Christmas and Christmas. Months seemed like huge units of time that were difficult to overcome, and “when I grow up” was more like an idea than an actuality.

Today, I am finally to the point where I can look back and say to myself, “that was three years ago???” I feel like a month is just the blink of an eye, and the barely-over-six-months time span that remains until the wedding will be over before I know it. I am definitely excited about this new phase of life, but I can also say that it does seem crazy to me that I am actually graduating from college, getting married and starting a new chapter. Crazy in a good way, but crazy indeed.

I know that this post isn’t too weddingy, but hey, that’s okay. In case you were craving wedding-related stuff, I can report that I have not yet found a florist. I know I need to do this soon, but I just haven’t found time to do it yet. If you know a good one in the DFW area, let me know!

“How is the wedding planning going?” I’ve heard this question so many times over the past months. While I am always happy to talk about wedding plans, here lately, the planning hasn’t been going full force due to the ever-present pressure of school. Wedding planning takes a back seat to the many hours of classes and work and homework that Mark and I are both dealing with. However, I am happy to say that progress is being made slowly but surely!

This weekend, I’ll be heading to Illinois with Mark in order to see his family, and also to take his sister Kiley and my friend Beth to get their bridesmaid’s dresses! I’m pretty excited about this little endeavor, but I must say that I’m kind of bummed about the fact that I won’t be able to buy a dress. That’s okay, though, I’ve got mine.

In other planning news, our original idea for a photographer didn’t work out due to a scheduling conflict, but we found someone else for a price that is still in our budget! We’re really excited about this, because booking the photographer is a major step! Yay for progress! The next thing on my agenda is flowers. I love flowers, so I want a florist who will do a great job working with me to create some amazing pieces. I’m hoping to find someone soon, but the semester is really starting to get busy, so I have to put it off for a little while. Okay, as I was typing that sentence, I realized that with exactly 220 days to go, I don’t have time to put it off. I guess I’ll have to take care of that by next week.

After flowers, I think the next thing I tackle will be…well, I’m not sure. There is still a ton of stuff I need to think about. I guess I’ll just have to take it one step at a time.

Right now, school is picking back up and wedding planning is holding steady…slow, but steady. I’ve had a few ideas about decorations, food, etc., but no major breakthroughs. We have eight months left till the big day, and a whole mountain of planning to conquer. Currently, we are trying to decide how to do the reception. I think this is where a good percentage of planning takes place. The ceremony is more important to me, but I feel as if the details will be easier to hammer out once I have all of the reception things nailed down.

Question: when you go to a wedding, do you pay more attention to the wedding decorations or the reception decorations? Personally, I notice the way the ceremony looks, and the way the reception tastes! I think that the romance of the ceremony helps give it atmosphere, but the reception needs a little help, especially during pictures when the bride, groom and family are occupied. Help us out by giving us your wedding opinions/ tips. I can’t guarantee that your suggestion will make it to the big day, but I can tell you that I will definitely be helped by it!

*NOTE: To comment, click on the title of this post, located above the post. click on the comment link at the bottom of this post. Doing so will take you to a new page with a comment form on the bottom. I know this layout is kind of confusing…maybe I’ll change it. We fixed our page so that its a little easier to find the comment button! Thanks to those who commented earlier!*

**Newer Note: I changed the theme to make it a little more comment friendly. Let me know what you think!**

*** Even Newer Note: I (Mark) fixed the blog so that its a little more comment friendly even with the old theme. Comment away! ***

Have a good day!

Today, I took a major step in the wedding planning process…I picked a wedding dress! Mom and I went to David’s Bridal and looked at several dresses. I tried on my favorite from looking at their website/catalog, and surprisingly, I didn’t like it. Well, for me, anyway. I still think it’s very pretty. Just not my style. The next one I tried on, I LOVED. I tried on a few more just for good measure, but I knew that it would be a pretty hard push to beat that one. The funny thing is, the dress I picked is pretty much the opposite of what I thought I wanted at first. However, it is awesome in about a million ways.

I’m very excited about it, but I can’t reveal it here until after the big day. After all, Mark comes around here sometimes.

I was sitting at my house after a busy Christmas day thinking about how cool it is that our wedding is coming so quickly and I decided I wanted to figure out how many days it will be.

My first thought was, what would Katie do? Katie would work smart and take the simple route like any normal reasonable person. She would probably figure out how many days until the wedding and then count down one day every day until the wedding.

Well, I am far too forgetful and far too unreasonable of a person for that and require tools such as calendars and computers to help me remember to tie my shoes in the morning so I decided to do what all self respecting programmer types would do at this juncture. I wrote some code to help me with my problem and now I’m sharing it with you. Think of it as a Christmas present that I’m sharing.

If you click the link below, it will tell you how many days until our wedding. You can also drag this link onto your bookmark  bar in your web browser and click the button anytime to find out how many days until the wedding.

How long?

It should be noted that this uses your computer’s clock so if your computer’s clock is wrong, the count-down will be wrong too.

That’s right. I am a nerd but I’m a nerd counting the days!

Ok, so I know it’s been a while since we’ve posted on here, but man, what a busy month October was! Between school, life and wedding planning, there hasn’t been a whole lot of time for blogging!

As Mark mentioned in a previous post, we decided to check out another venue besides the chapel at DBU. Well, we did, and it was a perfect fit! We are getting married at The Country Abbey, a wedding chapel in Justin, Texas. As much as we liked DBU and all it had to offer, we found out that the Abbey was a better fit for us. For one thing, it was smaller–since we don’t plan on inviting enough people to fill even a qaurter of DBU’s beautiful but massive chapel, we felt like the proportions would be all wrong. At the Abbey, we can have a smaller number of guests, but still fill the place. Another reason we switched was the type of ceremony we wanted. The chapel at DBU is so magnificent that it demands a ceremony full of elegance and formality. Mark and I prefer to have a more casual event. I would feel like there was a major juxtaposition of styles if we had stuck with DBU. All in all, I would have loved for it to work, but I am definitely happier with our new place.

Speaking of our wedding, we have decided to make it really fun and personal. One of the ways we want to do this is with cupcakes instead of a traditional wedding cake. Although I’m a huge fan of the way traditional cakes look and taste, cupcakes are definitely more my style. Besides, no one ever said cupcakes can’t be beautiful! There are more fun touches that I’m really excited about, but if I tell you all of them, you won’t be very surprised when the wedding actually arrives! Let me just say that we’re drawing a lot out of our interests and personalities…and that it’s going to be awesome!

Wow! I think its safe to say that I never realized so much went in to wedding planning before! Over the next few weeks there is so much, even this far out, that needs to be done.

Whether its researching for the honeymoon, taking tours of venues for the ceremony, or just figuring out the invite list, it seems like each and every item requires its own bit of special attention. I’m glad that my fiancée isn’t like a lot of others and actually wants me to be an integral part of the process of planning our special day. I think planning for our wedding is going to give us some good insight into what its going to be like to have to make fast-paced important decisions as a team, and to be honest, I couldn’t pick anyone better to be my teammate than Katie!

I’ll try to keep everyone updated but, as you all know, Katie is much better at keeping up with this sort of thing (blogging). This weekend we’re checking out another venue, hopefully we’ll have some cool things to report when we get back!

Well, we are currently looking into changing our wedding location. While I liked the idea of getting married here at DBU at first, I think that with my budget and the style of wedding we want, we need to to find somewhere else. I’ve got my eye on a place, and we’re touring it Saturday, so we’ll see how that goes.

I’ve been super busy with school work, so wedding planning has had to take a back seat. So far, though, I think that that isn’t a bad thing. I mean, we’ve got a year or so until the wedding, so I have plenty of time for ironing out the details.

Mark and I got a chance to take a tour of the new Pilgrim Chapel at DBU, where we’d like to get married, last week. The facility is gorgeous in general, but the chapel itself is breathtaking! It is so elegant that it doesn’t really need too much dressing up to be wedding ready. Every last detail has been thought of as far as the appearance of the chapel goes. The reception hall is very regal, with presidential looking decor and a fabulous view.

The bride and groom’s rooms for pre-wedding prep are amazing as well, with space and much needed outlets abounding. The groom’s room is even equipped with comfy leather chairs. Meanwhile, the bride’s room is the perfect place for a bunch of girls to get all dressed up!

I know that the wedding is still over a year away (October 9th), but I can’t help getting excited when I think about it. It is a daunting task, planning a wedding, but I am still looking forward to meeting the challenge. Actually, the chapel isn’t even confirmed as the location because of the fact that you can’t actually claim it until one year in advance. That gives us a few more weeks before we pounce!