Other wedding blogs

In doing research for our wedding I have come across other blogs about weddings.

The funniest of them is You May Kiss The Blog.

The bride is an animator, so she makes silly cartoons about her wedding planning.

Makes me feel better to know other people have wedding stresses.

Maps

Since today I am planning on mailing most of the "save the date" cards, I thought I would put maps up, so people could get a better idea where the wedding is going to be.

If you want to see where the wedding is in relation to where we currently live I suggest Google Maps. I like the hybrid option so that you can see buildings too.





Soon, I will be putting up hotel suggestions (and hopefully reserving some blocks of rooms).

Stay tuned!

Photographer Booked

We get to check off another item on the wedding "to do" list.

We met with and booked the photographer for the wedding.

We met with Danielle Biel of Skye Blu at her studio this afternoon in Pasadena.

She is super nice! And her pictures are great! And that is coming from at least one person that dabbles in photography (a.k.a Tim).

We are pleased with her package because it includes 8 hours of her time at the wedding, which would pretty much cover getting ready before the ceremony until the guests start to leave. AND we get an engagement photo shoot. The engagement shoot won't take place until at least July as Danielle is technically on maturity leave until then (she is due May 9th!).

Here and here are pictures of weddings she has shot at Malibou Lake previously.

Matrons of Honor Dresses

I think I am going to have the ladies (EK and Elissa) get dresses from Aria Bridesmaid Dresses for the wedding.

I had thought I could have them find cool dresses they could wear again and again from someplace like Gap but green is apparently not one of the super "in" colors.


I got swatches in the mail from Aria, today. They look very different in person. The brown is for accents, maybe.

This planning is more fun then location hunting.

SAVE THE DATE!

I know everyone will be as excited as we are that we finally have a date set.
Mark your calendars for February 17, 2007 for the BIG DAY. (President's Day Weekend for those of you without your 2007 calendars)

We will be getting married and having the reception at The Malibou Lake Mountain Club. And catering provided by Truly Yours Catering

We had talked to the caterer and liked the prices and from the pictures it all looked great but we obviously had to go see it in person to be sure. So today we treked out to Agoura Hills to see for ourselves and it was even BETTER then the pictures online. So we reserved the date.

Here are some pictures Tim took while we were out there:


The Gate (and that is Cecilie in the lower left of the picture).


The outside of the location from the lawn.


Another shot of the outside from the lawn (you can see they have all the trees strung with lights!)


The lake across the street from the location


The lawn, where we will have the ceremony if the weather is nice (picture white chairs etc.)


The room where the reception will be. The fireplace really works, so if it is a chilly California evening we may have a fire in there.


The back part of the building, off this porch are the rooms for the ladies to get ready in before the wedding.

We will try to get proper "save the dates" to everyone soon. But for tonight we are just excited to have a date set!

Visiting Family

This is somewhat wedding related.

Tim and I went up to the Bay Area for a long weekend to visit matron of honor #1 aka my sister, mother of the bride aka my mom, ring bearer aka our nephew, and official bride giver awayer aka my brother in law.

My sister and mom appropriately oh'd and ah'd over the engagement ring in person. And we talked about the woos of wedding planning.

All in all the trip was fun and served no real purpose toward the wedding except making Tim and I blow our diets.

We did get two engagement gifts. One is a silver candy dish which belonged to my grandmother and the other is a cake cutting knife and cake server (to be used at the wedding).

Wedding planning continues and hopefully (fingers and toes crossed) a date will be selected in the near future. But we don't want to jinx anything so I won't say anymore.

Trying to Set a Date

Everyone seems very anxious for Tim and I to set a date, including us. We are hoping for sometime in February 2007, but we want to stay flexiable so that we can find the location.

But don't worry, it won't be Super Bowl Sunday Weekend.

Thus far we have looked at one location. I will not name the place but we didn't like it at all. Though the place its self was on the beach, the room they rent for weddings had zero view (unless by view you mean, looking out on to a tile courtyeard area. Plus there wedding person was not very nice i.e. acted like Tim and I were not really good enough to get married at her location.

Another place we were considering looking at has been crossed off our list because the room is also "cave like" as described by one of my co-workers who also checked it one out when she was getting married. (Side note: people in the legal profession love to plan weddings because I have gotten suggestions and advice from people at the firm I work at.) Tim had a business meeting at the place a while back and when I told him what my co-worker said he knew what room it was and agreed it was not what we were looking for.

So it is back to doing some research on locations this weekend, then Tim and I are going to call around next week and see what we can learn BEFORE we go look at the location. I don't want to waste another Saturday afternoon looking at a cramped ballroom if the price they are asking is ridiculous.

If anyone has suggestions of places (other then my mother's suggestion of the chapel at Forest Lawn) Tim and I are open to suggestions.


And thank you everyone who has been so loving and wonderful in congratulating Tim and I on our engagement, it really has made us realize how lucky we are, not only to have each other but to have such wonderful family and friends. :)

A little detail...

Since I have told the story several times today I think I will write it up here to try and save my voice (which I am losing after all the phone calls today).

The choice to get married:
Tim and I have been together almost four years so really this was a no brainer. As everyone knows both of us we couldn't be more perfect for each other. So we had been talking about it for a while. And finally we decided it was silly to wait any longer.

We headed to Robbins Brothers and picked out the ring you see in the post above. We thought this would be a difficult choice. But with the help of Arik our salesman, there was no question we found the right ring.

Last weekend we picked up the ring and impatiently waited for this weekend to roll around to make it offical.

Last night Tim and I headed to our favorite fancy resturant, Cezanne.

On our way there we heard the song we consider our song, "Such Great Heights" on the radio in the car. When we got to the resturant, the waiter we had had the first time we went to Cezanne four years ago when we first started dating was our waiter. Things just seemed to be falling into place so perfectly.

After we had dinner Tim took my hand and said all matter of wonderful things to me all of which lead me to cry. And he gave me the ring.

We apparently surprised the waitstaff who thought we were just there for a nice dinner out. They gave us complimentary champagne with a little slice of strawberry. Then we enjoyed awesome desserts.

Then out of excitement I called my mom and woke her up. It was midnight her time afterall.

The ring:
The diamond is from Tim's materal grandmother's engagement ring. The band as I said above is from Robbins Brothers. And it is simply beautiful in my humble opinion.

Thanks everyone for your congratulations and well wishes. We look forward to sharing this journey with all of you.

The ring...

If you're reading this, you know by now that Cecilie and I are engaged... since a lot of you are a plane flight away, we wanted to put up the pictures of our ring for you to see.

Stay tuned for more posts!