US meets UK

After our sleepover Mrs. Avocado graciously offered to wake up early go with me to get my manicure. I’m dangerous with my nails, which is why I waited till the morning of the wedding to have them done. I was starving and I desperately wanted a Bagel Bin Bagel and thank goodness for Avo, because otherwise I would have skipped breakfast saying I needed something healthy and there wasn’t enough time to make it. Avocado said it was okay to have a bagel, and so I did. So between the carb flood and the manicure I was beginning to calm down ever so slightly.

Why was I so on edge? I was already hyped from the night before, and on top of that the weather report called for rain. RAIN. I was in panic mode. In fact, I couldn’t stop getting upset about the weather. My reaction to stress is to cry and on your wedding day, it’s just a really bad idea to cry so much. I also felt sick.  Tears and nausea are not the best way to start the best day of your life.

All the guys met up with Mr.D to play 9 holes the morning of the wedding. The ladies? We all met at my mother’s house to hang out and be beautified by Mindy (hair) and Lori (make up). We ordered lunch, prayed for sunny skies, and BM Rachel and I rain out to get a larger pot for the cactus. Jenna woke up (she took a nap ’cause she’s preggggers!) after the British ladies had headed back to their hotel to finish getting ready. It was so nice to have all the women from both sides of the family there to get ready together. Enough talk though, here are some photos!

Mindy worked on my hair

Before the veil went on.

My make up is alllllmost finished

Hey Jenna! I seeee youuuuu

OZ MOH Beth

BM Rachel

and MD-MOH MB and my sister BM Regan

(All photos in this post from Jenna Cole/That Wife/Avocado)

Who will you have with you when you get ready?

Well, there would be so many wedding related things I would change.  I was scoping out a wb reader’s blog and she posted about this beauty.  I would have definitely gotten a matching pair of these rings from metalsmitten for our wedding bands!

(source)

Maybe I’ll still get one and wear it as a right hand ring, or a pendant.  Either way, I’m in <3

Where did you find your wedding bands?

to encourage you with what could be a new years resolution! Do you remember this post? Probably not - but it made a huge difference in my life!

This is what i looked like when I began training with Robert. In fact, that’s a week or two in, so imagine me larger than that. In fact, imagine me 20-30 pounds heavier like I was in England - but I’m not showing that picture.

Then, after two months of 3x weekly sweat sessions with Robert and my cousin Rachel, plus a pretty clean, mostly vegetarian diet (okay, I admit it, it wasn’t that clean- I stress ate way too often), and extra running/jillian michaels sessions I came to look like this:

(Evan Bishop)

In case you’re  a numbers person that  looks a bit like this:

7/2/09                                                                      8/27/09

157 lbs                                                                147 lbs

Chest 36″                                                             Chest 35.5″

Upper Arm 13″                                                     Upper Arm 12″ (an inch)

Stomach 36.25″                                                    Stomach 30″ (minus 6.25 inches!)

Hips 42.39″                                                          Hips 39″ (minus 3.39 inches)

Thigh 21.50″                                                        Thigh 18.5″ (minus 3 inches)

some of my caliper measurements

7/2/09                                                                       8/3/09

(I was running a tight schedule the day before the wedding and ran out of time to do them on 8/27)

Upper Back 30mm                                               Upper Back 25mm

Above the hip 26mm                                           Above the hip 23mm

Bicep 16mm                                                         Bicep 13mm

Tricep 29mm                                                        Tricep 25mm

Finding a personal trainer was one of the best things I did for the wedding. In fact, I’d say it was the best.  I had gained A LOT of weight in the past few years and didn’t really feel like myself.  Working out with Robert and my cousin Rachel allowed me to win back my strength and that was such an amazing mental and physical gift that I can’t imagine not having on my wedding day.  I literally cried on my last day because I was so thankful for the experience.

I’m sure I could have worked harder, and my result would have been even more impressive.  But I did what I could at the time within the time frame and I’m pleased enough with the result.  I *may* have backslide a bit and gained a few newlywed/newly-tied-to-a-desk pounds but I’ll be starting with Robert once a week to keep me accountable to my personal goals. I’ll let you know how my war with the newlywed weight proceeds.

So, if fitness is a new years resolution for you, I can’t recommend finding a personal trainer fast enough.  Find one you really enjoy spending time with, one that will make you laugh, but also push you till you cry (sometimes).

Is improving your fitness a resolution of yours?

It may take a village to raise a child, but I’m pretty sure it took a village to make our wedding happen. The assistance and donations of dear friends warms my heart to this day.

The Gift of Joy: Mrs. Tulip kindly sent me a package of hankies from her wedding, along with a very sweet card.  I used these as she did, displaying them at the ceremony for people to take.  There were so many I was able to select the blue/purple ones to fit the color scheme. I’ll include the final product in my details post.

The Gift of Beauty: Remember my hair-tastrophy? My generous friend Holly (and her husband Mike) picked up a gift card to a great salon as a wedding gift.  Which took me from Superhero to Saucy

(courtesy of Evan Bishop)

The Gift of Sight: A lovely eye doctor friend sent me a package of contacts (for free!) right before the wedding.  I had been unemployed since the December I moved to England, and hadn’t started a new job yet so I really couldn’t afford new contacts.  I can easily recall the feeling of elation when I opened the envelope.  Anyone in the hive that wears contacts, you know when you’ve worn a pair for twice as long as you’re supposed to - but then you put a fresh pair in! It’s like jumping into a pool, or skiing fresh powder, simply beyond refreshing.

The Gift of Calm: Oh gosh, who gave me this? My bridesmaids kept me calm fo sho, but my mother also surprised me with a pedicure the day before the wedding. It was so amazing to take the time out of the day, to stop running errands, to not be in my non air conditioned car in the heat of August and just relax.

The Gift of Shelter: An ultra-nice Weddingbee reader (BucknellBride) messaged me to offer her white golf umbrellas for the day.  This solved the issue oh cover from the house to the tent where dinner was held.  The umbrellas gave me great peace of mind, and she assured me that they were lucky.  Every wedding she had lent them to was rain-free!

The Gift of Giggles: Avo-freaking-cado. Mrs. Avocado and I began our friendship over gchat while I was in England.  She was at home working on her classes, and I was in England blogging.  Since we were both home during the day we now had someone to chat to. So imagine my delight when she said she could attend our wedding! She arrived at my parent’s house the night before the wedding and we stayed up way too late giggling like children.  There was even a point where my mother knocked on the door and told us it was time to go to bed.  I almost checked the clock, but Avo stopped me. She didn’t want me to end up like Chandler, with a countdown till I had to wake up.  So we decided we went to bed at 10pm, even though she arrived at my house at 9:30pm.  I have to say, not knowing what time I went to bed was one of the best decisions I made.

Did your wedding take a village, or did you have it all under control?

Do you know what today is? It’s my Weddingbee One Year Anniversary! It’s true!

On this day, 365 days ago I began to blog along with the hive.  I was engaged 5 months and had moved to England 15 days earlier.  Looking at back at my first post I couldn’t stop laughing, if only I had known! I joked about folding a million paper flowers, and cutting wine bottles, and creating place holder corks; all projects that would become miniature labors of love. Not to mention all the invitation related projects that I can’t believe I added in along the way!

Looking back from that first post I had so much to learn and share about immigration, name changes, and ultimately deciding what country we’ll reside in (still working on a few all of those). A year ago I had no idea I’d be celebrating our union without my Grandmother, or the profound effect her passing would have on me. Who could have imagined I’d “meet” such wonderful women to invite to our wedding?

I’d also like to confess that it wasn’t for lack of pro pics that I’m starting my recaps now.  Our photographer sent a disk of photos within a month. I hadn’t started because I just wasn’t ready, it’s the same reason I put off watching the Glee finale on Hulu. Once I finish, my tenure will be over, but unlike Glee our wedding won’t magically restart in April and I won’t get to keep blogging consistently with you all. I needed to savor it all just little bit longer, please consider this my apology for not being ready to recap juuuuust yet.

So, to kick off my recaps I’ll begin with a bang.  Here is my favorite photo from our wedding, it captures all the joy of our wedding in a single frame.  If I’m ever feeling low, I just glance over at the framed photo and it buoys my spirits.

Is there a photo you enjoy the most from your wedding, or was it a tough choice?

When I first imagined what my bachelorette party would be, I assumed it’d be a low-key, pajama and game night with a scavenger hunt.  But my friends had other plans, and they were brilliant!

A friend of my MD-MOH let us use her house in federal hill for the night, so anyone who wanted to sleepover could. We went to dinner around the corner and then, my OZ-MOH organized a fantastic scavenger hunt complete with props - who doesn’t love props?

She also complied scrapbooking materials and each girl made a page with personal joke references and sweet comments.  Several people were on picture duty so I’d be left with tons of photos for the scrapbook(and general remembrance). OZ-MOH also had name tags for everyone (I have a diverse group of friends who had only met at the shower) and acquired pink/purple necklaces for each so we all matched.

We hung out for a bit, scrapbooking and socializing till we were ready to go on the hunt.  This is probably my favorite photo that resulted form the scavenger hunt.  There is a bar in Fed Hill called “Mad River” and the clue was “take a photo of an angry body of water”, so the girls made angry faces by a puddle.

The losers (who were already slated to lose since they created the hunt) were my MOHs, so they rocked these ridiculous wigs.

The next morning we trudged over to Little Havanas for their brunch with endless mimosas and bloody marys.  No one was really in the mood for more alcohol though, so we mostly had a lot of water, with alot of emergen-c. Our favorite quote of the night/day came from our waiter “Are you guys okay with your pitchers of water and vitamin packets…or would you like to order actual food”?

It was a fantastic night/morning and I’m grateful I have such wonderful friends. Although it wasn’t what I expected, I had the time of my life. It was a very similar feeling to the bridal shower, in that I was overwhelmed by the heartwarming friendships I share with such amazing women.

A final word of advice, strangers are going to offer you way too many free shots, so you should practice saying “oh thank you, but I just can’t” now.

Was your bachelorette what you expected?

Usually, if you’re an international couple, and you’d like to stay together after you get married you have to file for an AOS.  This stands for “Adjustment of Status”, we need to adjust Mr.D’s status from fiance to spouse! But wait you say, “I thought you guys were married, I’ve seen the photos!” But for the US government a marriage certificate from a municipality just isn’t enough.

You’ve been with the D’orsays through the K1 Fiance Visa Process and I’m happy that the hive will be along with us as we continue attempting to stay together despite the governmental roadblocks.

First, we made another ginormo packet of personal info. As for what goes into the packet? That info can be found here. Mr.D realized that he needed his previous vaccination form transcribed by a civil surgeon on the the I-693 form to be included in this packet so he searched high and low to find a doctor who could do that. Prices ranged from $25 to $100! So be sure to shop around if you to do this, some doctors also told us that he needed another full medical exam.  In our case this was FALSE and in our opinion, the offices were either misinformed or attempting to make more money off us. Mr.D could have had his vaccines done at the doctor approved by the US government in London, but it would have cost even more money! So he had them done free on the NHS, only to find he had to pay for a doctor to transcribe the form here.

We sent off a wedding gift of $1,010 (*gasp…choke choke*) to the government (on 10/1) and waited. We received the usual “we got it” receipt (on 10/6) from the government and waited some more. We sent the package off in late September and on October 16th were sent a letter letting Mr.D know where and when to go for his biometrics (fingerprinting) appointment (rescheduled for 11/20). A week or two after we received that letter we received another letting us know our case had been sent to California (10/26).

Having our case in California means there is a slight chance that we get to skip the interview portion of the AOS and skip straight to the swim suit competition. Mr.D also applied for an EAD (authorization to be employed) and that should be coming soon. Here is a general timeline for the EAD from Visa Journey. Another approval you can file for is advanced parole, my understanding is that the advanced parole is supposed to be used if you have any specific travel dates that take you out of the country. We didn’t apply for this at the time, because we didn’t have any specific travel dates.

So where are we now? The D’orsays are waiting on our EAD to come. We don’t feel we have any hopes for knowing when our AOS will be complete as most people say it can take anywhere from months to years (fingers crossed for months!). So I try not to worry about it. Maybe we’ll do an interview, maybe we won’t. The process isn’t very transparent, and that part is amazingly frustrating. So the D’orsays just check out mail, take lots of photos together and wait.

Anyone else in the process?

D’orsay immigration posts

Post 1

Post 2

Post 3

Post 4

Post 5

Post 6

Post 7

Post 8

and omigod this post you’re reading is post 9!!!

I know I know, you want pictures.  I need to wait for online reviewing to end first, then the recaps shall begin!

A few weeks ago our DJ, Evan, emailed me asking if I’d be willing to write a review for them, because he’d like it to be their 150^th review on WeddingWire.I said sure! Because not only do I love reading reviews, I enjoy writing them too!

It’s important to note however, that Evan didn’t ask me explicitly to write a positive review, because we all know how I feel about that. After checking out Evan’s blog post about WeddingWire/150^th review I learned a bit about the vendor perspective of reviews. The post however, had me start thinking of my own relationship to reviews

It reached an almost neurotic level when it came to crafting our registry.  I would search through hundreds of product reviews on Amazon.  I’d go through the 5 star ones and the 1 star reviews, attempting to get an accurate picture.  I did this for every single item on our registry. Every single one.  I had this entire “you try before I buy” mentality about the whole thing. Anything I wasn’t 100% sure about I put on the BBB registry because of their return policy.

If I’m that way about a blender….imagine how far off the deep end I went with vendor reviews.  I searched Yelp and WeddingWire, I asked individual brides who had used them (found via Weddingbee and the Knot), and just googling the vendor name along with “review” to see what would come up.  This process served me very, very well.I felt that anytime you ask for references vendors will (rightly) give you the names of couples they did a great job for. So I was pretty excited to find unbiased reviews for tons of vendors.  I felt I needed to hear from couples who had experience with the vendors firsthand before I could think of booking them.

The only point in which my review hunt failed us is where I didn’t listen to the reviews, or pick up on red flags.  I’ll write about this more when I’m ready, but I was severely disappointed with our caterer.  In her reviews there are several red flags, which, while in the minority are still there in black and white.  Instead of paying attention to those (as I would with a blender) I ignored them in favor of price.  As you can imagine, that turned out to be a huge mistake.  If only I had stayed the course, I probably would have chosen a caterer without the red flags and hopefully had a better experience.

Are you a review junkie too?

Do you follow your vendors?  I do! I recently joined Twitter and since Twitter pulls your email address to help you find people you know; it naturally pulled my vendors who tweet.  Instantly, I was following along with our DJ, Photog and Officiant.  I already followed some of their blogs (and Laura and I go to TaeBo together), but this new social media makes me feel more connected than ever.

I enjoy hearing about the other weddings they’re doing, seeing new blog posts and getting to know more about them on other levels.  I also think it helps them get to know me and my style in different and more in-depth ways.  For example, when I accidentally made myself look like a superhero my DJ joked that he could play superhero music for my entrance and my photographer gave me the contact info for his hair stylist friend!

In fact, I sorta wished all my vendors tweeted and blogged so I could follow along.  Except the cake baker…because I don’t know if I could handle tweets about buttercream while dieting.

Do you follow your vendors?

Any clue what I’m referring to? It’s my ears, and in particular, how I plan on decorating them on the wedding day. Or really, how I planned, then couldn’t decide, then lost one pair of earrings and am back at square one with two weeks to go to the wedding. hmmm.

At first, I considered wearing smaller pearls and a cameo necklace.  But that much jewelry seemed distracting and I eventually decided it was best to only decorate my ears. Then the question became posts or drop/dangle earrings?  They need to be large enough to show up in photos, but light enough that I don’t get  a headache.

I found this pair that I loved, but waited to long and they disappeared…le sigh.

Then I started exploring earrings that dropped or dangled.

I started to become concerned that my earrings would be competing with my veil, getting caught in it, or generally making my face/head are too “busy” and went back to looking at post earrings.

I stumbled over to emitations and found this pair.

I ended up just purchasing the emitations ones and hoping they work out! I’m at the point where I’m getting too close to be picky!

What are you doing for the wedding? Posts or Danglies?