go on over!

I posted at the new blog - please check it out!

more recap right here...

*slinking back...*

My profound apologies to the few of you who have been anxiously awaiting wedding recaps, as well as the others who have just wondered "where the hell is she?" Well, the honest truth is that I'm so sick of weddings that I can't handle blogging about mine.

It's not like I'm violently tearing wedding dresses off mannequins at David's Bridal, although I admit I received my MOH dress (not from DB but from Dessy via the amazing netbride.com) for my best friend's wedding and haven't tried it on yet. I haven't even gotten to the point of unsubscribing from all the wedding blogs that provided so much inspiration for my own wedding, though I do simply delete almost every post from my Google Reader every day rather than pore over all of them. It's just that I haven't had any desire to do my own recaps here, or for the blog that might post a little feature on my DIY and earth-friendly projects. My dress is still hanging in our garage/basement. I haven't attempted to sell any of the tchotchkes I so lovingly created and collected. Some gifts are even sitting unopened because I know what's in the boxes and don't want to deal with putting them away (ungrateful wretch). And I certainly haven't gotten close to finishing thank-you notes.

Tim and I are going to Milwaukee in a couple weeks (Dec. 28) for a post-wedding celebration with many of my family's friends who weren't able to attend the wedding. I think it'll be a nice way to end the whole shebang. But for now, dear readers, I'm going to officially end this blog, rather than drag it out even longer. A picture-heavy and text-light wedding recap will soon be here. I hope you'll join me.

Wendy

wedding recap #1: pre-ceremony

After 2 weeks of the flu (+ ear infection, + sinus infection) and generally loving life ;-), I'm back and ready to show you pictures! Sorry that some of them have the watermark of our fabulous photographer, and also that many are unedited - Laura gave me a bunch of them without the watermark and with more vibrant colors, but then I couldn't help adding more. :-)

One more time: I love Laura and Peter. Love them.

Here we go!

The banquet room, pre-ceremony: you can see the tent through the doorway, where the chuppah is set up and waiting for us.

Honestly, I have no idea how this all got done so beautifully. Well, no, that's not fair at all - Tim, my mom, the Fontainebleau staff, the caterers, and the wedding party were working incredibly hard for hours making everything look beautiful. But I saw very little of that! I was feeling so sick the couple days before the wedding and the day of the wedding that all my list-making aspirations went out the window, and that morning I just haphazardly assigned tasks to the wedding party and was totally spaced out. But they outdid themselves. The guys were given the task of hanging the paper lanterns (in addition to setting up all the throwies Tim and I had made), and I'm fairly certain they spent an hour just figuring out an algorithm that would make them look best. Yes, our friends are nerds.

Here I am with Ariel, who's wearing the crown I made to match our ribbon ties... I did the ribbon part, and Audrey (flower lady extraordinaire) made a gorgeous wreath-type thing that fit perfectly onto the ribbon crown.

My fam - grandpa, mom, (me,) dad, aunt Merle (affectionately known as Auntie M)

Pop quiz: guess how old my grandpa is. No fair if you already know. Answer will be in my next post.

My husband, looking so happy - yay! The guys had forgotten to put on their boutonnieres. They did it a few minutes later.

Our "first look," very representative of us: silly.

Look at those trees in the background! I was so sad for a month before the wedding when I saw fallen leaves, because I was worried everything would be dead for the wedding. Such an optimist. :-)

I love that Peter caught this shot. Are dragonflies good luck, like bird crap? I'd rather have a dragonfly, thankyouverymuch.

Chrissy, Melissa, me, Gabby, Hillary - they're wearing their gorgeous shawls by Jes. I opted not to wear the beautiful jacket she made for me, because I was apparently sweating out a fever. Our bouquets are decorated with the ribbon ties I made!

The guys ran down the hill to the lake and dock, and somewhere in the process Tim lost his boutonniere. But it sure is a great picture.

At this point, I've handed my bouquet to Tim so I can go find straight pins to fashion a makeshift bout. But Hillary's dad, Terry, managed to find the original!

On the table is our ketubah by our friend Paul. It is SO awesome. The painting was done on a reclaimed wood tabletop, and the wood things on the side (when hanging, they're on the right) are sliders for the English and Hebrew texts of the ketubah to fit into. Our rabbi (the wonderful David Regenspan) is holding one of the texts.

It was a little weird to be in that room because it was right by the front door, and guests kept walking in as we were trying to do something very serious - signing the ketubah and marriage license. I just felt a little bad that people kept ducking their heads in to say hi, and we had specifically asked my grandpa and aunt to be our witnesses... I envisioned it being a private event. It was still really nice, but it felt really chaotic with lots of people trying to talk to us. Then after we finished (with 5 minutes to spare before the ceremony), Tim noticed some friends come in with their uninvited teenage son. It wasn't exactly what I wanted to hit me right before the ceremony, but oh well.

Our friends Molly and Michael are serving themselves some hopefully-hotter-now-than-when-I-tried-it cider before the ceremony. Luckily, when Tim and I went upstairs for Yichud, it was plenty hot and we sat soothing our throats with hot cider. :-) Awww, how romantic!

I'm so excited to share more with you! What next - details or ceremony?

All pictures by Laura Kozlowski and Peter Ozolins, c. 2008 Laura B. Kozlowski.

New family member!!!

This is my beautiful new niece, No-Name. Her name has its roots in ancient Jewish traditions. Har har. Actually, she'll be officially named and blessed at my brother and SIL's synagogue tomorrow morning. ***Update: Her name is Sara Tikvah - Sara pronounced "Sahhhra" (the Hebrew way), and Tikvah meaning "hope." They plan to call her by her full name. I love it!

Pretty good reason for Josh & Hillary not being able to come to the wedding, eh?

There is very little doubt as to whose family she's part of:

• hair
• cheeks
• size! (21 inches; 8 lbs, 15.5 oz)

leave me unprotected, please.

Copy this sentence into your blog if you're in a heterosexual marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by people who think GLBT marriage hurts it somehow.

(Thanks, Stinkerpants!)

www.noon8.org

Don't know where to vote?

first teaser (b&w)

First, I must say again that I am so in love with our photographer and her assistant (& boyfriend), Laura Kozlowski and Peter Ozolins. They had the perfect temperament for us - very chill, definitely not hyper, but still great about getting people revved up for a good photo and about sticking to a schedule - and they take beautiful photos. They're the same two who took our awesome engagement photos. 

Despite some holdups that made them get to the Inn at the requested time but not come upstairs to do the end-of-getting-ready pics I had asked for, they stayed beyond the contracted amount of time, partied with us a little bit, and seemed to genuinely get along with our friends, which is pretty awesome.

So here's the first teaser Laura sent me this morning. It's b&w, so you can't see my dress yet in its full splendor, but I love the vintage-y look of the shot. I also love the slightly suspicious expressions on our faces... you can tell that we're both a little uncomfortable, and I think that's good. It's the real deal.

source

that's it!

DESPITE both of us having horrible colds; our cat giving my a four-inch long set of bloody scratches on my upper chest, right on the skin exposed by my V-neck dress; a somewhat overzealous/overexcited flower girl telling the photographers I was having a "moment" (with a motion toward her head) and that they couldn't go upstairs to take getting-ready pictures (resulting in their sitting around for ~45 minutes when the bridesmaids and I were getting ready sans photos, and all other pre-ceremony activities getting pushed back enough that it felt more stressful than it would have otherwise); and two friends/colleagues showing up with their not-invited 13-year-old-son...

...it was amazing.

Certainly didn't start that way, I must say. I really don't want to be that person telling you about how it started SO bad and ended SO great, because it really didn't start THAT bad. It was just kind of waking up on the wrong side of the bed, which is a wedding-day bummer, I'd venture to say. I woke up yesterday feeling absolutely horrendous, which made me really sad... definitely not that first-day-of-school feeling (yes, I'm a nerd). Our rehearsal dinner and welcome party were a lot of fun, but I was already feeling pretty sick and wasn't feeling much like socializing. My outfit was a hit, though! :-) The food at Maxie's was SO great (fried green tomatoes!!!), and Tim had the brilliant idea of using some of my painstakingly decorated jelly jars as decoration there, since there weren't centerpieces. (They have awesome lamps and ceiling decorations, and the food was family-style so big centerpieces would've been annoying.) It was wonderful and made for really nice ambiance.

At home, we had WAY too much food and drink, but oh well! now we have leftovers. Our next-door neighbors, whom we don't know very well but whom we had had apprised of the party a few days earlier (and I got to hold Sydney, their 3-month-old kitten!!), brought over an absolutely incredible cake she made for us. It was a HUGE round chocolate cake with a kind of cream cheese frosting, with piped words like "love," "forgiveness," and "understanding" (and more creative ones I can't think of right now) on the side. It was such a beautiful gesture that really meant a lot to us, especially because we haven't talked to them a whole lot... it feels like a fresh start. :-)  (Not that we had any bad blood, but they're just really shy, and so is Tim, and... I'm just out of town all the time. :-P )

So anyway, my mom did a great job of shooing people out, even though Tim didn't totally understand why people had to leave. (Boys.) Two of his groomsmen stayed and drank scotch until about 1, which was totally fine... I went to sleep and couldn't hear them at all.

But in the morning, I felt like such absolute shit that I didn't know how I was going to get through the day. I woke up around 9 and started getting ready (whaaaaa? 9?! a bride?!? waking up at NINE on her wedding day?!?!?!), but Tim was still sleeping. We needed to leave at 10:15 to get to the Inn in time to meet the wedding party. Needless to say, with him getting up at 9:50, that didn't happen.

It was fine. We dealt. I was bitchy to the wedding party, especially since I was losing my voice and two of the guys were talking & fussing with paper lanterns when I was trying to explain something and be heard. I believe my exact words were "[cat hissing noise]." That is not an exaggeration.

I think that's about enough for now. Hopefully I'll get some teaser pics from Laura in the next few days so I can do a little more recapping - meanwhile, I'll work on feeling better! But for now I'll say this: I knew things would perk up, and they most certainly did. Here's what started the perking up (sorry, these are cell phone pics of the bouquet as it looks in my kitchen right now):