Wedding Planning Part I

Time is quickly flying by as we wedding plan, so I thought it would be good to slow things down a bit and enjoy this Monday by reflecting back on where we started 4 short months ago!

It's fun going back, collecting all the pictures from our journey and putting them in order because it's neat to see how they tell such a love story!!!

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I know some people enjoy picking out their engagement ring, while others might not.  

I loved how comfortable Charlie and I were as we did this together and personally, I LOVED it!!

We turned each trip into a lunch date or coffee date =)

In the end, we became friends with the owner of the jewelry store and some of the other incredibly sweet people working there.  We are talking nice to the point that they told us to stop by on our way from the church to the reception so that they could pop some champagne for us and our bridal party!!!

A picture from the day we knew we found the ring!

Once we were officially engaged, our two families came together and celebrated over a festive evening out.

 Gorgeous engagement flowers from Charlie and Charlie's dad. 

Like father, like son =)  They are both big romantics!!!

 Still floating on cloud nine....

Moving on to some wedding planning.  Although it may be more work

having a whole bunch of bridesmaids, I love it that way!

 Having a good selection of stationary on hand was helpful in getting things out in a timely fashion.

We had a photographer take our save the date photos! 

In the end, we went with photos from both our save the date shoot and our engagement photographs.

I couldn't recommend Minted enough!!!  Their company was easy to use and had a really fast turn around rate.  Some of the toughest work in the beginning was definitely collecting everyones current addresses and compiling a guest list.

 Next we tackled our Wedding Website and some of our gift registries. 

Charlie is great with the computer and really helped to put the important details on our website.

The Knot has been a great free resource when it comes to wedding websites and super easy for linking up your registries.  The wedding registries were a blast to do together in the store.

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Note: While men might not particularly care what pattern their table linens are,  they do get a kick out of walking around the store and using the gun to scan all the bar codes.  Careful, they may even go scan-go-lucky and randomly throw on that R2D2 spatula they think is cool and that really nice jewelry case you like but don't think anyone would ever consider buying. 

When it comes to registries, let him have fun with it too, heck, we ended up with both those items!

 Read up, read up, read up and get a cute notebook to get your thoughts organized! 

Going out and buying a wedding etiquette book was a great idea.  It's better to read about wedding etiquette before you give the wedding bloopers a chance occur.  

Just know, they still happen, it's life!

 Some of the sweet ladies from Tae Kwon Do helped us celebrate our engagement Hawaiian style.

 Then came dress shopping!!!  Four stores and many hours later, I finally found the one!

Bernadette is just a little excited herself.  

I hope she has wonderful memories of us shopping together.  Sometimes it is just bittersweet being so much older than your baby sister.  Me getting married and leaving home has to be emotional for her, too.  But she says "not to worry, I'm coming with you and Charlie on your honeymoon!"

 Dress receipt in hand =)  So happy to finally have found the DRESS

 Some of the best advice another mom gave us was to take pictures from all angles when you try on dresses.  This way you can get an idea of what it looks like in a picture.  Doing this helped a ton!!!

Right away you could say "yes" "no" or "maybe". 

Just make sure your fiance doesn't get his hands on your camera or phone while these top secret pictures are stored on them!!!

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More pictures and stories to come!!