The days leading up to the wedding… (part 2)

When we got home on the evening of Thanksgiving, I had to pack because I would be leaving in the morning on Friday and not coming back until Sunday evening. I got everything together that I would need for the next couple days and we went to sleep. In the morning, I woke up and got ready for the day. Nicol came and picked me up and we headed to Bloomington to meet my mom, PJ, Madison, Sydney, and Devin to get manicures and pedicures. It was fun to spend some time relaxing with my family before the craziness of the next couple days began!

 

 

After we were done with our mani/pedis, Nicol and I headed out to pick up my dress at the shop where I had it altered. Then we headed to the Grand Hotel in Downtown Minneapolis to check in. Although most of the plans for Jason and my wedding were “untraditional,” we decided the one tradition that we would adhere to would be that we wouldn’t spend the night together the night before the wedding. We decided that Jason would spend the night at home and I would spend the night at the Grand Hotel with my best friends, Nicol, Lesley, and Madison.) So Nicol and I checked in at the hotel around 1:30 and had the massive amount of stuff we had packed to get ready the next day brought up to the room. Then we took off to run a couple last minute errands. I needed to find some lipstick for the day of the wedding and I also needed a clutch to keep some day of essentials in. Luckily, we found both pretty quickly in our trip to Macy’s. We stopped at the deli, grabbed some food, and headed back to the hotel room. 

The plan was to relax in the room for a little bit, eat our lunch, and watch a little TV. However, we didn’t realize how late it was and we actually only had a couple minutes to relax, eat our lunch, and watch TV as we had to get ready to head over to the Metropolitan for our rehearsal. We left the hotel at about 3:30 and got to the Metropolitan at about 3:45. Although the rehearsal was not the most exciting thing to do, with 12 kids in the wedding we had to run through it a couple times so that everyone would know their part in the ceremony. 

 

 

 

I truly believed that the rehearsal would only take 30 minutes when I planned out the timing for our reservations for the groom’s dinner, so I mistakenly made our reservations for 5:00. We showed up around 5:30 and the half of the guests for the groom’s dinner that weren’t at the rehearsal were already there. Also, I am pretty sure that I did not count the number of guests attending anywhere near correctly because we kept having to add tables and rearranging the room…which by the way, I HATED when I used to work at Buca and I had to deal with groom’s dinners! I guess I should have been more understanding, oh well! The groom’s dinner turned out really well, once everything was figured out. There were definitely A LOT of people there…we had the whole back room with the exception of one table!

 

 

When everyone was done eating, Jason and I got up and thanked everyone for coming and celebrating with us. It was also time to hand out the gifts that we had gotten for everyone participating in the wedding. For the adults in the wedding party, we decided that jewelry was an appropriate gift. We got Sean a watch and we had a necklace designed by the same woman that did my jewelry for the wedding for Nicol and Kirsten. I also had bracelets made for my three besties (Nicol, Lesley, & Madison) to match the one I would be wearing on the wedding day. The little girls in the wedding all got a small pearl necklace to wear with their dress. Then came the most exciting gift. The overall theme for the wedding was that Jason and I would be becoming “Team Jaglo.” Jason designed a logo for “Team Jaglo” and we had it printed on zip-up track jackets for everyone participating in the wedding. I have to say that they were pretty cool and they were very well received by everyone who got them!    

 

After Buca, we headed out to McGovern’s for a drink. It was a smaller group at McGovern’s…Brad, Cindy, Anne, Raj, Andy, Dan, Madison, Lesley, Nicol, Jason, and me. We hung out for a little bit and had a couple drinks, but I had said earlier that we should leave around 9:00/9:30 as I did not want to be too tired the next day. At about 9:30, Nicol, Lesley, Madi and I took off and headed back to the hotel.

We drank some wine, ate some leftover pizza and talked for a while. Jason called around 11:30 when he got home to say goodnight. Around midnight, Nicol, Lesley, and Madi started to fade pretty quickly and they all fell asleep. I, on the other hand, was pretty excited for the next day and was not able to fall asleep right away. I decided to run a bath to help me try to relax. I grabbed a glass of wine and my iPhone and watched a little bit of the movie version of Rent while relaxing in the tub. After about ten minutes, I realized that I was pretty exhausted and decided to go to bed…the next day was going to be a big day!!!

 

The days leading up to the wedding… (part 1)

The wedding was planned for the Saturday after Thanksgiving as you may have read in a previous post when we explained why we chose the date. This meant that in addition to the traditional rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding, we also had a Thanksgiving dinner two nights before the wedding. Most of both Jason and my families live in Minnesota, so we always spend holidays with both families. While we love having the opportunity to spend holidays with both families, the negative side of it is that we have a limited amount of time to spend with them on holidays. Because of the wedding, we were going to have more family in town than previous years so Jason and I came up with the brilliant idea of doing a combined Hamilton/Jaglo Thanksgiving. Jason’s aunt Kay was gracious enough to let us hold the festivities in the party room of her condominium, so we had a room large enough to hold the 50 or so people that ended up coming.

It was a ton of fun to have both families together, and I am not going to lie, it was so nice to not have to leave one Thanksgiving celebration to get over to another. Being that Jason and I have been together for seven years, a large number of our family members have already met each other. However, there are some family members that haven’t met and the Hamilton/Jaglo Thanksgiving was a great opportunity for those that hadn’t met yet to meet and for everyone to spend some time together on a smaller scale than the next couple days.

Thank you so much to everyone for making it easier for me and Jason…we had a great time and it was a great preview for the next couple days!!!

(sorry no pics...oddly, I didn't take any!)

T minus 11 days...

So…T minus 11 days until the day that we have been planning for the last 569 days (no, I didn’t count out the days…I have an iPhone and guess what? “There’s an app for that!”) I have been getting kind of nervous the closer we get to the big day…not nervous to be married, but nervous for the actual wedding. All of the big stuff has been done for a while…let’s not kid ourselves, 569 days is PLENTY of time to plan a wedding! But now that we are 11 days away, all of the tiny little details are creeping up on us and it feels like there is still a ton left to do.

So I have my wedding binder with everything we could possibly need detailed over about 36 different spreadsheets. I have copies of everything saved on my home computer, my work computer, and I always e-mail myself a copy of anything that I update just in case something happens to the copies I have saved elsewhere. (Hey - I never said that I was a sane person…) So most would say that I am pretty prepared for the wedding, but I still had that nervous feeling.

Last night, after Jason picked me up from work, we decided to stop and have dinner at a Chinese restaurant on our way home. The wedding binder, which has been permanently attached to me for the last couple weeks, was updated during dinner with some more tiny details that needed to be documented. After we were done eating dinner, our server brought us our fortune cookies. Here is what our fortunes said:

 I started to feel a little less nervous after reading those!

Engagement Photos!!!

We booked our photographer, Preston Palmer, in July of 2008 and one of the things included in our package was an engagement photo session. A lot of people use the engagement session for a picture for their save-the-dates, but since we used a photobooth picture, we weren’t sure if the engagement session was all that necessary. We were engaged in April of 2008, so one would think that our photos would have been taken around that point. However, if one thought that, one would be wrong. For anyone that knows me well (or reads this blog,) you would know that “Operation Skinny Bitch Bride” would need to be nearing completion in order to have my picture taken for two hours straight! So…we waited to have them done until October. The first date we had scheduled was Monday, October 12^th. If you remember that day, you will remember that there was a big snow storm. Not great for outdoor engagement photos…so instead, Jason and I went to Happy Hour at Pop!! and had the bartender take an engagement photo for us.

We rescheduled for October 23^rd, and guess what? It rained all day, so we ended up at Pop!! again for Happy Hour…different bartender, but same willingness to take our “engagement photo” of the day.

 

We were starting to think that the pictures were not going to happen due to lovely Minnesota weather. We did discuss possibly canceling them all together and just having a photo session with Preston when we got back from our honeymoon, but we decided that it could be a good idea to do them before the wedding for a couple of reasons. #1 We would be able to get comfortable with having our picture taken constantly, as we have been told this might be something that happens on November 28^th. #2 We could get comfortable with our photographer, so we are a little more relaxed with him on our wedding day. #3 Our photographer could figure out what our best angles are so that the wedding day pictures turn out well. #4 We could have hundreds more pictures of us together to obsess over and try to decide which ones we should have printed! We ended up scheduling them for my birthday, October 26^th. It was a bit chilly, but it turned out to be a very bright and sunshiny day...perfect for an outdoor shoot!

We decided that since it is tradition to go to Happy Hour on days that we have engagement pictures scheduled, we shouldn’t mess with tradition and we headed to McGovern’s before we met with Preston. Sadly, the bartender was not as proficient with the magic of the iPhone camera as the bartenders at Pop!!, so we ended up having to take our own “engagement photo” in the mirror behind the bar.

We met up with Preston at Irvine Park and started the process…his instructions were to pretend that he was not there, always walk next to each other, kiss a lot, and have fun…so that is what we did. We hung out in Irvine Park for a while and then headed down to the train tracks and the river for more pictures. We felt like total doofusy goofballs, but we had a really good time! We got really comfortable with our photographer and we are super excited to have him capture our wedding day. Click here if you would like to look through the 335 photos that were taken (there are favorites folders set up, if you only want to look through the really good ones.) Otherwise, here are some of our faves from the day…the picture quality is not the greatest because I basically copied and pasted them, but you can get the idea even if the picture is not high resolution, right?

 

 

  

Jason's Bachelor Party!

Kellee tells me, “I have to do a blog posting about the bachelor party.”

I told her “What happens in Northeast Minneapolis stays in Northeast Minneapolis.”

After a few moments of Kellee staring with great intensity, I finally said “Fine, I’ll do a blog posting.” (That’s kind of funny if you read the post about the marriage proposal)

Let me start by giving a big thank you to Jordan for talking me in to having bachelor party and for getting everything together. Without him it would not have happened. Jordan and I, after much deliberation, finally picked Elsie’s Restaurant, Bar & Bowling Center as the place to start and then after that, we were just planning on the night to unfold and lead us where it will, like all the best plans.

You may ask yourself, “Really, bowling? You guys are a little old to have your party in the bowling alley?” And I would have to answer, yes we are a little old but there is nothing like bowling to get a group of people who don’t know each other to bond into a lean, mean party machine. We managed to bowl three games and drink a few pitchers without serious injury.

Exhausted from our rigorous games, we were hungry. As any good bowler will tell you, three games in a row will build a man-size appetite... or at least that’s what the good bowlers told us. We decided to head over to Mayslack’s for a hardy dose of meat sandwiches. The massive sandwich is made up of a stack of garlic-enhanced 8 hour roasted beef with onions and banana peppers on a rye bun. The sandwich is delicious going down, but the next morning your breath and/or burps are not pretty (sorry Sheila.) After stuffing yourself silly on a stack of meat, what every good American needs is the soothing sounds of rock and/or roll. Lucky for us, we had two bands to help with the digestion of our meal.

At this point in the evening things start to get a little fuzzy so you will have to pardon my lack of detail. The first band, “The Full on Quench” was rocking some good covers but I could not tell you what their sound (as the kids say) was, but they certainly helped to ease the gastrointestinal discomfort. Then after a short break we were energized by Cocaine (the band,) stepping right out of a 80’s metal video Cocaine (the band) blew our minds. Then we did some walking, then there was dancing in a bar, then we left and took a photo in front of a funeral home, then there was Grumpy’s bar and some serious discussion of wives and marriage that went over my head. And then I was asleep on Sheila and Troy’s couch and Jordan was asleep on the ottoman. The next morning, all smelly and groggy, we all went to breakfast together “May the circle be unbroken...” at Elsie’s.

A big THANK YOU to every one who made it out. Man did I have a good time…one of the best!!! I love my friends.