Ben and Rachel’s Wedding Blog

I think I’ve finally come up with what I want to do for table centerpieces.  After much internet searching, meeting with florists, and crafty imagination, I have come up with a really cool idea.  It seems like I can get a lot more for a lot cheaper by doing it myself instead of relying in a florist to do it for me and charge $40 a table for what I can do for $20!!

I want to have a couple little white vases with yellow billy balls and possibly another small yellow flower in them.  Then in the middle of the table, a vase or wine bottle that I’ve spray painted either black or yellow with white and yellow bigger flowers in it like gerber daisies.  I also saw a cool idea where they used the painted wine bottles to hold table numbers by sticking the corks back in and attaching the papers to that.

Here is the collection of pictures that I plan to meld into one idea!

I found out those cute little white vases are from IKEA and I can buy TONS of them easily!  They’re only $2 each!  The wine bottles will be free thanks to help collected from my mom and her friends.  I’ll just need to get them, soak off the labels, and spray paint.

I’m still looking to find out where I’ll get the flowers.  Since I’ll have a florist for my bouquets, etc.  I may be able to have her order them but it could be a lot cheaper online through stores like fiftyflowers.com.

I’m looking forward to being crafty and putting it all together!  Spray painting 50 wine bottles should be fun… I’ll be sure to take pictures!

Our potential DJ was doing a wedding at our venue tonight and invited Ben and I to stop by to see him work.  It was really neat to see the place all dressed up with lights and music!  In a couple months, that will be us!

When we walked in “Love Shack” was blaring and he had everyone on the dancefloor clapping along.  He then led them all in a conga-line around the room and got 90% of the wedding guests out on the dancefloor (which is pretty darn good!).

When we got home, Ben and I started talking about our “do not play” and “must play” lists for music at the reception.  Surprisingly, we agreed on quite a few more popular songs that we just don’t want to have any part of our big day… the chicken dance, the macarena, fergilicious, etc.

Its going to be hard for me to just trust the DJ and not give him 4 hours worth of music and say – here, play this!  Hopefully, I’ll be having such a great time at the wedding and won’t notice if he accidentally plays a country song.

What I think I will do is make a list of songs for before the ceremony and between the ceremony and dancing that are more of Ben and my style and then play some pop music people will dance to for later.

What do you want to hear?  Leave a comment!

At this time last week, Ben and I were stuffing all 127 of our wedding invitations to send to you all.   The good news so far is that everyone is coming!  We’ve gotten a handful of RSVPs and everyone is in.   While I know probably everyone won’t be able to make it, it so exciting opening the mail every day and looking for the yellow postcards.  I am getting more and more excited for the big day – its less than 3 months away!

We hope to hear back from everyone else soon.  Be sure to vote online for your favor and dessert choices – we really do want to know what you think!

I met with a florist on Wednesday to talk about flowers and table centerpieces and it was fun.  She had a really good grasp of what I wanted and gave me a lot of great ideas.

I’m hoping to met with another couple florists to see what kind of ideas they have and then make a decision in the next week or so.

The picture to the right is over the arrangements the florist I met with Wednesday came up with.  Pretty cute, huh?

I found this video tour of our wedding venue online, check it out!

I just got a call the my wedding dress came in today! I have to head to work right now but I’ll pick it up tomorrow – YAY!

We are now less than 3 months from the big day and there is still a lot to do…

• Sign contract with DJ (we are seeing him at wedding this weekend to make sure we like his style!)
• Choose florist and design table centerpieces
• Decide Cake to Pie ratio for reception (help us pick - vote here )
• Decide on favors, order and put together (vote!)

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• Meet with rabbi to finalize ceremony order
• Buy wedding bands

Those are the big projects for the next month - I’m sure we’ll be plenty busy! 

If you’re coming to our blog for the first time, WELCOME! Take a look at the progress we’ve made so far by reading through past entries and get information about our wedding weekend from the tabs at the top of the page. 

We’ll continue to update regularly until the wedding and hopefully after with pictures of the big day and our honeymoon in Puerto Rico!

After 3 looooong days, the invitations are FINALLY done!  My designs turned out great and they are so fun.  I’ve definately never seen anything like them and they’re exactly what I wanted.  Ben and I are not traditional wedding types, so why should our invites be?  We spent a couple hours this afternoon and they are now ready to be mailed out tomorrow.  Look for a bright yellow envelope coming soon.

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!

How cool is that lemon bouquet?!  And I love the tall white flowers…

We are so lucky that we have such talented friends who are going to make our wedding extra special.

We met our wedding photographers Will and Alyssa Paro at a Jewish Community Center event and they own their own business.  We’re more than happy to have them take our pictures for the wedding because they have really great style!

Check out their website: www.vivalaveritas.com

Here are some pictures that aren’t theirs, but I’ve found online that I want to replicate for our wedding:

The picture on the stairs is actually our friend Devon from here wedding – I LOVE that picture and am so jealous.  I hope ours turn out that great!