Ben and Rachel’s Wedding Blog

Ben and I were super productive today getting wedding plans taken care of – it was awesome!

Ben woke up early and booked our flights for our HONEYMOON!  We are going to San Juan, Puerto Rico for 8 days in mid-January.  We opted to take a week between the wedding and the honeymoon to rest, open presents, and pack.   We’ve talked to a lot of people who encouraged us to wait a week – which makes sense.  I’m already stressing about the wedding and its still 3 months away.  I think if we went right after the wedding, I’d be so worked up I wouldn’t be able to enjoy beautiful Puerto Rico!

We picked Puerto Rico because it had all the things we wanted to do, wasn’t too far away, and was surprisingly affordable!  Ben and I really wanted to do something eco-friendly, adventurous, and cultural on our honeymoon.   Neither of us are big beach people, although I’m sure on an island we’ll spend a little time there!

In Puerto Rico we plan to see Old San Juan, buildings hundreds of years old, even castles!  There is a rainforest less than an hour from the city where we want to hike for a day (and maybe do one of those ziplines).  We want to go on a kayaking trip to a bioluminescent bay – which glows because of thousands of plankton that are kind of like lightning bugs and light up when you swim or float by them so the whole bay glows around you.  How cool is that!?!  Also in Puerto Rico, Bacardi Distillery and lots of rum

We are planning on forgoing staying at an all-inclusive resort or standard hotel and instead staying in a Guest House near the ocean.  We’ll basically have our own apartment for a week (and its WAY cheaper than a Holiday Inn!).

After getting so many big honeymoon plans out of the way, we left the apartment and got going on invitations.  We dropped the files for the invitations off to the printers yesterday and went in first thing this morning to see the proofs.    They look really good, I”m very happy with how they turned out.  The printer was even impressed with my design!

After stopping by the print shop, we hit up a couple office supply stores to find envelopes, return address labels, ink for our printer, and paperclips (story to come later…).  It took a while to find the right color yellow, YES YELLOW!, for the envelopes but luckily, and surprisingly Staples had just what we were looking for.

I wanted to find a fun way to keep all the invitation pages together so I’ve been looking for cute paperclips and while at Staples, they had a ‘mix and match’ section with different shapes sizes and colors.  Ben and I spent a good 10 minutes sifting through hundreds of paperclips so I could find 150 black ones to use.  I think thats a true test of love, he just smiled and shook his head and helped me sort through them all!  We laughed most of the time we were sorting and I told him its a story we’ll tell our grandkids one day… how crazy Rachel made him find black paperclips in a vat at Staples and Ben did it because he loved her…

So with the invitation parts all ordered or bought, we checked it off our list and moved on.  We had an afternoon meeting with Rabbi Rooks to put together our wedding ceremony.  We talked to the rabbi for an hour about the different parts of a Jewish ceremony, what they all mean, and how we can fine tune the traditions to reflect our personalities and what we want in a wedding.   I’m really excited about it all – there is so much tradition in a Jewish ceremony and a lot of really neat elements that I’d never heard of before.

We talked to the rabbi a lot about how when you marry someone you also marry their family.  We are trying to find unique ways to make members of both sides of our families to be a part of our special day.   I’m really happy to make it not just about the joining of the two of us, but also all the people we love.

So after checking quite a few things off our list today, Ben and I went on a date!  He took me to a DELICIOUS sushi restaurant.   It was some of the best sushi I’ve had in a long time.  We had one roll that had salmon inside and then rapped around the outside and the sushi-man used a blow torch to sear the top of it!  We also had a roll that was minced yellow tail, flying fish roe, cream cheese, jalapenos, and a spicy sauce and the whole thing was DEEP FRIED!  It was so weird and interesting and pretty delicious.  I picked out all the jalepenos in mine because it was TOO HOT!!!

Side note: the sushi place had a boat called “The Titanic” that was $100 and it was HUGE.  Someday…. just someday…. I want to find several people and conquer it!

After dinner, we went downtown to the waterfront where this is a big park right on the river that holds a free outdoor concert once a month in the summer.  We layed on a blanket and listened to a couple bands play and enjoyed the sunset and city lights.   Our wedding photographers Will and Alyssa stopped by to hang out and drop off our contract (so another thing checked off the list!).

I feel A MILLION times better about wedding planning after today.  We’re almost at the 3 month mark and after today its starting to feel really real and like its coming soon.  I am beyond excited to get married to Ben!  We’re going to watch our potential DJ next weekend at wedding at our venue so we’ll get a good look at his style and what a wedding looks like there.  I’m planning on going to Hobby Lobby sometime this week to start working on table decorations and figuring out what I want to do for favors.  Busy busy busy for the next couple months.  On Friday we’re putting together the invites so mail will be coming soon,  hope to see you all at our wedding!