Ohmygosh! The wedding is in 3 1/2 months! There is sooo much to post about, but I am smack dab in the middle of the busiest time of year at my job, 12-13 hour days, early mornings, late nights… and all the rest of life to juggle.. But I’m taking a moment to post about our amazing engagement photos!

Two weeks ago (before the crazy started) Alex and I took a day off work to go down to Paramount Ranch and meet up with Lukas VanDyke. We had so much fun, we fell in love with the location, played with our nerf guns and light saber and got a chance to get comfortable with our wedding photographer.

At first I was a bit nervous, I’ve never really done a photo session before, so I didn’t know what it would be like. But in less than 5 minutes, I was completely relaxed and was just having a blast.

If there is one piece of advice I can give to anyone planning a wedding, it’s to get a photographer who is great at what they do, loves what they do, and is super personable and easy to get along with. Since before Alex and I met Lukas, he was interested in our lives, our wedding, in us as people! When we met him, we just talked and got to know each other for a good while before we got down to business. Lukas and Suzy (his adorable darling wife) are the only vendors that Alex and I have met with who have treated us like more than just an appointment, which is really refreshing. Not to say that our other vendors treat us bad, because that’s not the case at all! If anything, Alex and I have been really blessed (so far, knock on wood) with all of our vendors, but Lukas and Suzy have just gone that extra mile.

All that to say, the shoot was super fun, and it felt more like we were just hanging out with a really cool person (who happened to keep taking our pictures), than anything else.. and that really made all the difference.

I’m not posting all the pics on here, if you want to see our favorites, check out his blog post here. If you want to see all the pictures, or even buy a print or two, you can do that here.

The wedding is less than 5 months away, and it’s so weird to think that we are basically done with all the big parts of the wedding planning. All that remains are the small details that Alex and I love so much. Starting this month, we start to tackle those details, and I’m super excited because this is where I get to be crafty and creative!

One of those details is the wedding Guestbook. We went through several different ideas for the guestbook before we landed on the final decision.

First idea was to have people sign the back of a door. Growing up i had a door that I decorated, painted, wrote quotes on, it was my own little piece of artwork. Our idea was to have people sign the other side of it. So it would signify me closing the door to childhood, and opening it to my new life as a married woman. Sadly, the door got “misplaced” in recent renovations at the parent’s house… so that idea was lost.

Other ideas weren’t as grand as that one. We thought of having people take photo booth pictures next to cardboard cut outs of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood (the venue has those), having people sign a window, or just having a simple regular guestbook.

Finally, we decided on postcards. Since we’re naming each table after a different ghost town, I thought it would be neat if each seat had a postcard for the ghost town the table was named after. So the guests can leave us a little note on the back of their card.  We found a really cool box from Michaels that looks like an old fashioned suitcase. So we’re going to set that out at the table with either the favors or the name cards (not sure yet) for people to leave their postcards in.

I’m thinking after the wedding, we’ll either leave them in the suitcase box, and have it on display in our home, or I might buy a scrapbook with slip sleeves so we can take it out and look through it at any time. If anyone has any further suggestions, I’m totally open to them!

MeganAndAlexander.com

The wedding “wedsite” is now all up and running! I had to revise the design a few times until I was happy, but it’s all good to go now!

It’s got all the important information on it, details on the wedding venue, what to wear, about the wedding party and our honeymoon, and where we are registered.

So go check it out and leave us message in our guestbook!

The big parts of planning a wedding are getting done. Only a few more things left to do, and then we get to move on to the smaller details. As mentioned, we have our venue, our band, honeymoon spot and sent out the save the dates. We’ve also got our florist, photographer, wedding rings, my wedding dress, bridesmaids dresses, our rehearsal dinner spot, our ceremony musicians and Alex and I have each lost over 20 lbs. Wow. I’ve also just learned that I’ve got less than 3 weeks to design and print all the stationary for the wedding (long story.. but if I don’t want to pay for that stuff, I’ve got less than 3 weeks to do it all). So as you can see, I’ve been a busy little bride.  Lets see how much I can fit in one post. Might have to break it all up into a few posts.

Florist:
Crossing our fingers that it’s going to be Jacob Maarse. My parents, Alex and I met with Hank Maarse about a month ago and discussed everything that we want, floral wise, for the wedding. Sunflowers, daisies and wild flowers. Hank was awesome! He totally understood what look I was going for and had some great ideas! We discussed everything from having hay at the base of the band’s stage, to having wine barrels at the alter. We’re going to meet up with him at the venue in the near future so he can get a feel for everything he has to work with.

Photographer:
Back when I first started planning this little wedding of ours, I happened upon a blog that belonged to a photographer named Lukas VanDyke. Lukas VanDyke Photography is a Los Angeles based husband/wife photography due. I immediately fell in love with their style and composition, and was utterly jealous of everyone who had their wedding pictures taken by them. Lukas and Suzy have such a natural eye for finding beauty, and photographing it in a unique way that I have not seen before. The way they capture the details (I’m all about the little details), and emotion in every picture just blows me away.

About two weeks ago Alex and I met up with Lukas and discussed our vision for the wedding, and as we left the meeting, we turned to each other and said “It HAS to be him!” His vision matched ours, he had some great ideas, he was super fun and really easy to talk to and he actually cared and showed interest in our lives. Alex and I are really excited about having them as our photographers.

So this post is already a bit longer than I like posts to be, so I’ll post about the rest tomorrow.

Save the dates are FINALLY done and being mailed out tonight (hopefully). Since I’m a graphic designer, I’ve decided to take on all designing aspects of the wedding myself, starting with the Save The Dates.  Why not? How hard can a simple 4.25″ x 6″ postcard be to design? Harder than I thought. I swear if this is going to be the mess we have when it comes to the wedding wedsite, the invites, the programs, table cards and menus, I need to get started yesterday on designing everything! I know there are places you can pay to do those for you (for cheap.. the wedsites are even free through TheKnot.com) but I am WAY to much of a perfectionist when it comes to design, and I really wouldn’t be happy letting another place do our design.

Thank God all the hard work paid off, after 6 or 7 complete revisions and 2-3 more minor adjustments, I came up with a design that made everyone happy. Below are the designs that we didn’t go with, I’m not posting the design we decided on until a week or so after we mail them out.

Design 1:

This option was mine and Alex’s first favorite design. Designed to match the letterpress style of the old west, using fonts that matched that era. We were going to have a rubber stamp made of the design and stamp it on to oatmeal colored card stock, to make it look more rustic and have a bit of a unique flair.

This design was quickly vetoed by my dad for not being elegant enough.  It’s not the typical type of Save the Date, and at first Alex and I were a bit upset because we had gotten a bit attached to the design. But we eventually got passed that and I went back to the drawing board to come up with something a bit more wedding-like.

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Design 2:

This was the next design I came up.  It still had the rustic feel to it, but included our wedding colors as well as our wedding flowers and the lanterns we are obsessed with for decor.  I added a little bit of a more formal font for our names while still trying to keep the same feel as the first design we loved.

This design was vetoed by Alex shortly after I sent it to him. At first he loved it, and after a little bit he said it felt too 50′s for the theme. I still don’t really see it, but sometimes designers are blind to their own flaws in their designs. Maybe it was a mix of the colors, the font and the flowers at the bottom? Not entirely sure. So I didn’t even bother showing it to my parents, and just started work on the next design.

The next design was our final design. Everyone loved it, no one had any issues with it, it was perfect, yay!

Below are a few other designs I came up with (before Design #1) but vetoed myself, because I didn’t like them.

As the end of January approaches, planning has regained speed. Alex and I are getting ready to send out our Save The Dates within the next few weeks, tomorrow I am going dress shopping (I’m down 14 lbs since last month, YAY!), next weekend we’re meeting with our florist/decorator to start on that bit of our adventure, and today we finished up our registry with a visit to Target.

The wedding registries were among the first things we started, and it feels good to have them finished (for the most part.. we are attending an event in March called “Sip & Scan” for Macy’s..).  Up until a couple weeks ago, Alex and I were content with just doing it all online. But  my friend (and future bridesmaid), Ashley, mentioned how she and her husband went to the stores they registered at and used the scan gun, and suggested we do it as well.  At her recommendation, Alex and I went out today and had quite a lot of fun. We took turns scanning items and felt like kids set loose in a candy store. There is just something so fun about walking down the isles going “I want this one, and this one, and this one”. So, to all my friends who are engaged and getting ready to do their registries, let me pass on the same advice I received, don’t just do the registry online, go out with your fiance and have some fun!

Choosing a honeymoon spot was proving to be a difficult task.  Alex wasn’t sold on the Alaskan Cruise idea, I wasn’t wild about anything tropical, most places in Jackson Hole are closed in September, New Orleans was too much of a party city and everywhere else was too expensive.

A little over a month ago I got a call from my mom saying she had found the perfect place for Alex and I to honeymoon.  She was browsing vrbo.com and came across a listing that she emailed to me right away, and the moment I read about the little town of Jerome, I knew that we had found our place.

Established in 1883, Jerome is an old mining town 30 minutes outside of Sedona, Arizona.  In 1915 the estimated population was 2,500 residents.. today there are roughly 350 people living there.  This quaint historic town contains quite a few art galleries, a winery, old King Mine and Ghost Town, Jerome State Historic Park, Jerome Historical Society Mine Museum and quite a few restaurants that Alex and I are eager to check out.

What else is there to do there? In the surrounding areas Alex and I want to take a first class train ride on Verde Canyon Railroad, have a twilight dinner on the Dolly Steamboat, have a Chuckwagon dinner at Blazin’ M Ranch,  and Montezuma Castle…

If anyone has been there, or near there and has suggestions for places to visit, sights to see or things to do, let us know!

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I haven’t neglected the blog, we’re just in that weird stage of the planning where we’ve done the immediate stuff, and now were waiting a few more weeks until we can start planning the other bits. We’ve got the Venue and the officiant, the venue comes with catering, we’ve got our band, and my dad says he’s lined up our photographer and florist. I currently have a few rough drafts of the Save the Dates (I don’t want to post them yet because I want to surprise people with them in the mail), and we are working out Honeymoon details (that will be my next post I believe).

I wanted to take a minute and get a bit personal, though. Almost 2 years ago, when Alex and I first started dating, we both weighed quite a bit less than we do now. Alex was on unemployment, so we didn’t have a lot of money, so basically he was eating once a day (when I got off work). I was still doing weight watchers, and was at that tough spot where I was 10 lbs away from my goal weight and couldn’t do it. Somewhere along the way, we started packing on the pounds. If it’s eating too much fast food because of money being tight, or just getting in that stage where you’re comfortable with each other and lose control..it was probably a number of things that added up.

The bottom line is, we both want to lose 50lbs before our wedding. I want to look back at my wedding pictures and remember how amazing that day was, and not hide them away because I hated the way I looked. I want to be excited to go dress shopping (when right now, I’m dreading it), I want to be comfortable in my own skin on my wedding day and I want to be healthy enough to live a long full life with the person I love. And I know Alex feels the same way.

With 10 months on the clock, I think we are more than capable of dropping the lbs, if we stick to it. We have 42 weeks until our wedding (I counted), that’s 1.19 lbs we need to lose a week (if we round up to 1.5lbs a week, that gives us 33 weeks to lose the weight, and 9 weeks to maintain).

That’s a rather manageable goal if I do say so myself. I feel like our best bet is Weight Watchers. I looked into other diets out there, and decided to stick with Weight watchers since they’ve worked for me in the past, and they were just ranked the #1 weight loss diet by US News. Since mine and Alex’s schedule doesn’t allow for us to go to any of the nearby meetings, we’re going to use the online tools. I spent some time playing around with it yesterday, and they have a pretty big online community, message boards, blogs, challenges you can join and get support from. It’s pretty neat!

We are officially starting on Monday. That gives us the rest of the week to get the bad food (Halloween Left overs) out of the house, and “point friendly food” in the house.

Alex and I decided pretty early on that we didn’t want me to walk down the aisle to the traditional wedding march.  Nothing against it, but we like making things unique and our own.  Last night we were up til a little after midnight discussing  all our ideas.

At first Alex wanted something classic like an oldie, or the Beatles.  I feel like the Beatles are a bit over done (not that I dislike them, it’s just a bit cliche for me) and oldies don’t really fit the theme.  After spending a few minutes of googling, and looking at possible Country songs, we were getting nowhere and turned to joking about using songs from the 80s (like the song from the Karate Kid Glory of Love, or the imperial march).

Then it hit me, so many amazing movies out there have great and powerful scores.  Alex is a huge fan of film scores, and we’re both movie buffs, I honestly don’t know how we didn’t think of this before. I’ve embedded a few youtube videos below to the ones we liked the most.. we’re keeping with the western theme here by choosing western films.  I really wanted the Serenity opening song to work, but it’s too fast I think.  Anyway, we’re still deciding, so we’re open to any other suggestions.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Soundtrack (My personal favorite)

3:10 to Yuma Score

On Wednesday night Alex and I (mostly me) sent out the e-vites for our Engagement Party.  I offered to design real invites for my parents, but they felt that an e-vite  would be best.  So I hopped on Google and searched for “electronic invites” and came up with Evite.com, pingg and punchbowl. I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about any of the options available on those sites, and was about ready to just design my own and write the coding for people to submit RSVPS, when I found cocodot.  And on that site, I found the perfect e-vites that were not only elegant and stylish, but they let you edit the card to say and layout exactly how you want.  I was sold.  So around midnight on Wednesday I sent out around 30 e-vites to friends and family inviting them to my parent’s house for drinks and dessert.  So far we have 16 people (12 people and 4 plus ones) who have accepted.

If you have the e-vite sitting in your inbox, please let us know if you are coming or not so we can get an accurate head count.  I have about 6 people who haven’t opened their evites, so I’m assuming I sent theirs to an old address.  :)