We have been looking for months and decided to venture out with fresh eyes this weekend, as many stores have new fall lines out this month. Having decided to be open minded and basically try on every suit in the mall, we wandered around Copley Place and eventually found our way to Benetton for Men.  We were greeted by Matt, who really knew his suits and was delighted that we were shopping for our wedding. (He also informed us that he lives near our venue and might crash.) It was great to be helped by someone who wasn’t raising an eyebrow, and we were able to take our time and try out different looks. Matt was even kind enough to give us 10% off the entire suit as a wedding present! Ready to see what we came home with?

I can’t look at these pictures without smiling. I can’t help it. I think she’s cute. The shirt and tie will be different for the wedding, but she already has her accessories picked out…

The suit still needs to be altered (sleeves shortened a bit and of course pants hemmed), but the fit is already pretty great. Another excellent thing about the suit is that it will certainly be worn again to future functions. Sam has needed a great fitting suit for a while, and the wedding turned out to be the kick needed to get out there and find one. With just under 4 months left, it’s all starting to feel real now!

All photos by me.

Our ceremony and reception are taking place in the same room, which is essentially a blank slate with regard to the floor space. It took us an embarrassingly long time to realize that if we could set the chairs up in the traditional aisle format, we could set the chairs up any way we want! After careful consideration, we have decided to go with a round ceremony space.

Adorable graphic from msawesomeweds.

The red arrows indicate the TWO aisles, so Sam and I can both walk down the aisle toward one another at the same time. Visually, I’m in love with it. And it eliminates the question of who walks down last! (Translation: Who is the bride?) We also decided to each have both of our parents walk us down the aisle and take their seats when we reach the center. That way, we can walk the rest of the way alone and meet in the middle.

What does your ceremony look like?

We looked through a book to see our design options. Each type of design (scrolls, dots, flowers) was priced differently.  The pricing was explained to us in detail, but I have to admit that I wasn’t really processing it all because I wanted to taste some cake.

During the price per slice plus additional fees per flower conversation, we realized that our cake guide was referring to Sam as the groom. She wasn’t being lazy. She just thought Sam was a guy. It happens every once in a while. Aside from creating an awkward moment with our mothers, it wasn’t a big deal. There weren’t any pauses in our cake guide’s pitch, so we just let her talk. When she was finished, she started writing down the details of the event, including our names. Sam just gracefully answered “Samantha” when the form asked for her name. This is where it got weird. Our cake guide stuttered and asked if she had “said the wrong thing.” Well, technically yes, but no harm done. For a second I thought we were all set until I realized she now thought that we weren’t getting married and was confused about who Sam was. Then we all kind of got confused and stumbled through reintroductions. Awkward. This is the only time anything like that has happened since we started wedding planning.

Finally we ate some cake.  I wasn’t in love with any of the flavors, and the red velvet wasn’t red enough.  We took the pricing information and left for our next stop.

Bakery number 2 had amazing red velvet cake that we inhaled and forgot to take pictures of.  I wish we had photographic evidence of how red it was!  We ordered the cake, and we are giving my mother free reign on what it looks like.  Everything she has run by us has been pretty, and the cake is not a huge deal to us.  Checking things off the list is a great feeling right now, so CHECK!  We have a wedding cake.

From the beginning of the planning process, I have insisted that invitations are just not something that I care about. Of course, there are many aspects of wedding planning that I proclaimed not to care about 6 months ago (attendant attire, etc.) and have since developed surprisingly strong feelings about. To be completely honest, I still don’t care about the invitations. I care what people think about us and our wedding.

Part of this is standard wedding anxiety- the feeling (however valid) that people are paying attention to this rite of passage you’re taking and the party that goes with it, and everyone has an opinion. There is also some specific gay wedding anxiety rearing its ugly head here. Even with so much involvement from our very loving and supportive families, I still feel pressure to prove that our wedding is real, particularly to guests a few degrees removed from us. And, of course, nothing says “wedding” like a big square envelope with lots of postage on it.

All in all, our wedding is shaping up to be much more traditional than I would have expected. It’s a combination of us wanting some traditional elements that we didn’t initially realize that we wanted and also deferring to our parents on some things that just mean more to them than to us. I think in some ways, the overall traditional feel is making it harder to veer off the script here and there.

As I said, the decision has been made, and I do think it’s what is best. I guess I’m just surprised at the intensity of my feelings about something I never thought I’d bat an eye at. Has anyone else gone paperless? Were any of your guests confused/uneasy with the lack of a physical invitation?

Brian Teutsch’s flickr photostream

Muffet’s flickr photostream

Bread and CBG’s’ flickr photostream

stevendepolo’s flickr photostream

heliotrop3′s flickr photostream

We didn’t set an age limit with our guest list.  Even though I know some parents will choose to come kid-free to an evening wedding, I think the kids that do come will enjoy our pizza menu and hot chocolate fixings.

And our bartender will be standing by for the adults to add a little kick to their hot chocolate….

jekert gwapo’s flickr photostream

What other toppings/add ins would be fun?  How should we serve this all up without creating a big sticky mess?

When we started looking for wedding bands, my parents offered me their engagement diamond to incorporate into my ring. It kept falling out of my mother’s ring years ago, and she always planned to have it reset, but never did. Eventually she got a band of inset diamonds instead. (She works with her hands, and the solitaire was never practical!)

So, we went back to the jeweler who worked on Sam’s cuff links to have my parents’ stone reset into a ring for me. I really liked the look of a double band, since I am only planning on wearing one ring. I ended up going with a double band halo design to fit the oval stone.  What do you think?

When my ring was ready, Sam came with me to pick it up and select her ring. These were some of the top contenders…

She totally surprised me by picking a shiny band of rose gold! I thought for sure she would want brushed white gold. I think she surprised herself a little too. It looks great on.

It’s a men’s design on a smaller scale to fit her tiny finger. When we initially started looking for rings, I thought they should match, but now I really love how different they are. I am thrilled with both rings and so happy to be able to incorporate my parents’ engagement diamond.

Oh, and I almost forgot….

When I brought the diamond to our jeweler, I also had the original setting. She explained that the setting could be sold toward the price of my ring. So, I paid my 50% deposit and left the setting with her. When I relayed this to my mother, she informed me that there was more broken gold jewelry where that came from! I ended up bringing an embarassingly large ziplock freezer bag full of broken jewelry to the jeweler for scrapping. We were delighted to find out that it covered the balance of my ring AND the price of Sam’s ring!

So, folks, don’t rule out “Cash for Gold” as a wedding theme!

All personal photos.

As a couple who has lived together for almost five years,  we have a pretty clear picture of what the day-to-day will continue to look like after our wedding in December.  But, every once in a while, I get a glimpse of what the not so day-to-day stuff will be like with Sam.  In these moments, I feel like I know how we will handle the big stuff together when it comes at us in the future.

For me, these moments of clairvoyance usually involve a sick cat.

Upon our arrival, our new kitty friend was whisked away by the veterinary staff, and I had a chance to catch my own breath.  The first thing the vet said after she had spent some time with him in the back was, “He’s had a hard life.”  His teeth were broken (likely as a result of some type of trauma), his neck was covered in scabs and the deepest of his wounds was severely infected.  Once his breathing was stabilized (Poor guy just hyperventilated from stress like me!), his infected wound needed to be addressed.  Because of his poor condition, anesthesia was a risk, but still the only real option to get the wound cleaned out, remove the dead tissue and insert a drain.

So, Pretty Boy was taken back for surgery, and we retired to the waiting room to watch HGTV and wait for some news.  Waiting is hard, in kitty emergency rooms and in life.  But we watch first time home buyers decide between three properties within their budget, and comment on which ones we like best, and time goes by.

It it moments like these when I can’ t help but realize that I hit the jackpot with Sam.  She cares every bit as much as I do whether this cat that we have never met before today makes it through the night.

We’ve been in this waiting room before, and we will be in it again.  We have left laughing with relief and a doped up kitty in a cone, and we have left with an empty carrier and tears in our eyes.  These nights are sort of a really intense, condensed version of good times and bad, sickness and health, and of course for richer or for poorer (expensive sick kitties!)- the moments when I know that she is the person I want to do everything in life with.  And whatever comes, we will figure it out together.

Oh, and guess what?!  Pretty Boy made it through surgery and is now resting comfortably with us, getting soft food, painkillers and antibiotics.  His drain  has been removed, and once his Frankenstein stitches come out, he has dental surgery for his broken teeth, and his fur grows back, he will be a much prettier Pretty Boy!

Pictures of our feline family by Sam.

I looked around online at a bazillion potential venues and emailed maybe 10.  Some were waaaaaay out of budget.  Some took a really long time to get back to me, and I forgot about them.  We ended up visiting two and a half potential venues.

Stonehurst (the half) wasn’t open when we popped by so we evaluated it based on the outside and crossed it off the list.  It’s a very cool building, but a great deal of the beauty lies in the grounds, and we just would not get the whole effect in December.  The area where guests drive up and enter is also kind of around the back, so you never really get the pretty view of the whole manor that is shown on the website.

I had really high hopes for Stonehurst, to the point that I was kind of considering the actual visit just a formality.  The pricing was great, and I just loved the rustic look of the building in their online pictures.  But, in person, it just didn’t excite me.

It was at this point that Sam felt compelled to tell me that I should be prepared for the possibility that every place would be prettier on their websites than in real life.  We decided to book appointments at the next two places quickly, before I had time to build them up in my head and set myself up for a letdown!

Next up was Massachusetts Horticultural Society.  Again, I loved the pictures on their website.  However, the area where we would be holding the wedding is just a plain white room.  This is awesome if you have a very specific color scheme and vision for your decor.  It’s basically a blank slate upon which you can execute any theme you choose.  But we don’t have much room in the budget for decor, so we really wanted a venue that can stand alone.  In order to make it look as pretty as the pictures shown, we’d have had to hire a lighting company, and order tons of rentals.

All that being said, this is a really great venue!  The woman we met with couldn’t have been nicer, and the pricing is very reasonable.  We might even book with them for a future Spring fundraiser for Black Cat Rescue.

Later that same day, we visited Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, and we both loved it.  So much so that we booked it, and it gets its own post!

Photo from The U.S National Archives’ flickr photo stream.

Writing about wedding traditions is turning out to be much more difficult than I anticipated.  I thought dividing up the various topics and tackling them one by one would help, but it feels like everything is just so masterfully interconnected.  The wedding script is so intricately written, and I think that’s what is so constricting.

So, cake….

(Wasabi has nicely covered the history behind the ceremonial cake cutting, so I’ll jump right to my own cake issues!)

At first, we weren’t going to have a wedding cake at all.  It fell into the category of things that we don’t have particularly strong feelings on either way, so let’s just do whatever is cheapest.  Dessert is important to any gathering, but I figured wedding cake would be an unnecessary expense when a simpler dessert would likely taste just as good, if not better.

As it turns out, having a wedding cake is very important to my mother.  Since I’m not anti-wedding cake by any stretch, just in favor of saving money, I had no problem with her gifting us a traditional wedding cake (as long as it’s delicious, and I do trust her taste in cake).

So, we’re having a wedding cake.  Everybody’s happy.

Fast forward to a later conversation at my parents’ house about hiring a DJ (another post entirely…) where I casually mention our preference to keep it simple and skip things like cutting the cake ceremoniously and feeding it to each other.  Cue everyone talking at once about what makes a wedding and what people expect to see at a wedding and “think of the guests”.  Oh won’t somebody please think of the guests!  Apparently our guests won’t be entertained if we don’t stand up and feed each other cake in front of them.

I’m not really sure how other people feel about this stuff, but when I am a wedding guest, I always feel like I’m politely smiling through most of the ceremonial stuff at the reception and looking forward to the dancing and general partying.  So for our wedding, I figured we’d go heavy on the dancing and general partying and cut the rest.

So what do you think?  Will our guests turn on us if we skip the cake cutting/feeding?  And I wonder if that’s really the question I should be asking, because I’m pretty sure the answer is no.  I guess the real question is how much should I be letting others (our families) dictate how we approach our wedding.  I don’t think the answer is not at all.  But I don’t want to get caught up in approval seeking, and defending every little decision is getting exhausting.  Cake is just the beginning.  There is more emotional territory coming up, like the aisle walk and parent dances.  Is anyone else struggling to find a balance with family involvement?

Okay, so dress shopping was really fun.  Much more fun than it looks like in the picture!  I can’t bring myself to post my actual dress just yet, so here’s a peak at my aunt and my bridesmaid/bffl/high school prom date, Brian watching me try on dresses.

I wouldn’t say that I was nervous about dress shopping, but I was a little unsure of what to expect.  I mean, I’ve been dress shopping plenty of times, but there’s something about wedding dress shopping that can be a bit intimidating.  Honestly, I was anticipating having to cross out the word groom on forms and field awkward questions from pushy consultants.  I know, such an unfair stereotype about wedding dress consultants!

But, my family and I went to a total of six stores, and not one person uttered the word groom.  So that was nice.  Everyone was pretty focused on the business at hand, and we jumped right into the satin and lace.  Although I did strategically say “Samantha” instead of “Sam” a time or two to make sure we didn’t get any upsetting reactions.  I didn’t want to sign a contract with a shop that I didn’t feel comfortable with.

I ending up finding my dress on the first trip out, but we were very thorough and made sure to explore all our options before committing. After a few weeks of looking around (and repeatedly looking at my dress on the designer’s website), we went back and bought the dress that I fell in love with on the first day.

Also, I LOVED the consultant who worked with me to pick out a dress.  She had great opinions, and was more than patient while my mother, aunt, prom date and I bickered over satin buttons.

HUGE check off the giant list of things to do!  Now we wait (until August!), which is hard for me…

Did any other dress people brave the boutiques and find themselves pleasantly surprised?