The Blonde Diaries

I’ve starting seeing the billboards pop up all over town for wedding and bridal conventions to help newly engaged brides start planning for their upcoming nuptials. After my own wedding and attending 2 others last weekend, I have to say I don’t miss it at all. LOL One of the hardest things was planning for a wedding in a town I hadn’t grown up in and none of my friends or acquaintances actually were married there either! I quickly learned using sites like The Knot and Angie’s List would be my life saver as I searched and searched for the right people to help with my wedding.

When I wasn’t able to find what I needed on those two sites, I often was left with Google which can be a nightmare to sort. I found that using more descriptive search terms like “raleigh wedding photographers” was doing a lot more good than something like wedding photographer + raleigh. For some reason that “+” feature has never worked for me, in fact, neither has the exclude symbol of “-” while searching has never worked. The most important thing is to just remember it is just one day, if something doesn’t work right no one except you will know.

As I am getting older, I have very few friends left to marry off. At the same time, these friends have already established their house with the items they need over the years. That can be good if people want to upgrade via their registry and bad if they don’t. I have one friend getting married who didn’t register for physical gifts. She made a wish list for her guests to contribute towards something. It is a good idea but sometimes you want to give a gift they can see not one that is there in thought.

Lucky for me, I was able to talk said friend into telling me which set of cooking pots she wanted and I bought them for her. If you aren’t that lucky then you might want to consider the abstract gift and then something small like Sharis Berries chocolate strawberries that can be delivered to their hotel before or after the wedding. It is a little something that shows you care and were thinking about them but you still honored their gift request. At first I thought chocolate strawberries were a bit silly until someone purchased them for my honeymoon cruise. It was so nice to come into the cabin after a long day on shore to see a delicious snack waiting for me.

I think the most common wedding cliche out there is that your bridesmaids will wear their bridesmaid dresses again after the wedding if you pick something tasteful. I’m sure whoever came up with that idea originally had very good intentions and wishes but it just isn’t realistic. I just don’t know anyone who has worn their dress after the wedding they stood in. I know that I never wore the mocha brown floor length dress that I bought for my cousin’s wedding and I haven’t heard of any of my friends rewearing the dress I picked out even though it was lovely – maybe I’m a tad bias. So what has your experience been? Do you agree? Disagree?

Mike and I hit our 1 year anniversary this weekend. To celebrate I decided to gather a group of friends together to help eat the 1 year old top layer of our wedding cake. I was totally expecting it to taste frozen and old but we were all pleasantly surprised. No freezer burn, no mold, no grossness what-so-ever.  It tasted exactly like it did one year ago when it was fresh. I can’t believe that all I had to do was wrap the layer in saran wrap and place in the freezer. Nothing else was needed to keep the cake fresh and moist. I am so glad my cake lady shared that knowledge because the cake could have been a disaster.

It is a shame we won’t have it to eat next year. I wonder what she would charge to make a small topper each year.

Yesterday for my Wordless Wednesday post, I left you with a simple photo of gold ballet slippers but didn’t give any hints as to what they represented or why there was a great photo of used shoes. I thought today I’d share through photos how those shoes come into play.  These are from the getting ready phase of my wedding this past July.

Basically, they were my wedding shoes as I didn’t want to be taller than my groom.  I also wanted to spend my day in comfort so I just pulled these from my closet as I tend to wear them to work and on the weekends some and put them on.  They worked out wonderfully and I’m so glad I went with these over some other fancy shoe.  It is kind of funny to see how pretty they were in that photo yesterday since I wear them a lot and I didn’t bother to clean them at all.  LOL

Photos were taken by Morgan Lynn of MorganLynnPhotograhy.com and the photos were taken at the Magnolia Hotel in downtown Houston.