e-pics!!!!

I was scrambling around Wednesday morning, trying to get packed to leave town for Thanksgiving when I quickly opened my email. Buried in between 37 emails from JCrew (really JC, I love you but the email overload is killing me) I saw an email saying our photographer Brooks had posted some of our engagement pictures on Facebook. I dropped my pile of laundry I was in the process of folding/packing and plopped down at the computer. Umm... yay!!!!!

Here are our favs that he posted on the 'Book. Below each, a narration of what was going down during the (super fun but slightly awkward at times) photo shoot!


Yes, here we are canoodling in front of a birdbath, on the one and only busy street in Muenster, where we took the pics. Cars were driving by staring, while Mark and I snuggled and laughed and acted like we always hung out with our faces two inches apart.


This one could not have come out more perfect. Love. It.


This one took some serious work. Turns out Longhorns aren't that cooperative and don't always want to pop their head out from under the fence and smile at the camera. Behind the scenes action included my dad running around pouring out range cubes (read: Longhorn Treats) on the grass in strategic places, our photographer laying on the ground tasting said range cubes, and Mark and I once again canoodling like none of this was out of the ordinary and hoping desperately to not get poked by a set of horns! The results? Pretty much amazing.


"Oh yes, we were just out working on the farm and now we are just resting against this here rusty gate as the sun sets behind us."


Looooove this one! Love it. This was taken through the gate that leads down the road to my parents' place. Perfect mix of Texas flair and a bit o' romance.


Now this one may be my fav. What you can't tell is that Mark is totally sweating/shaking/straining to hold me up as we gaze at each other and smile. I guess running around and twirling me in the fields isn't in his normal work out regime. What would have thought?

We are thrilled with how these and all the others came out. I've got some great Save the Date's in the works using some of them, and we know just what the parents are getting for Christmas this year - framed pictures of us (and perhaps a few cows)!

Merry Christmas to Us!

Santa came early this year! With the wedding consuming all our finances here lately, Mark and I had already decided we were going to keep this Christmas to a bare minimum. I'd started to get creative and was hunting for the best bargains that would stay within our $50 each budget. That is, until I mentioned (ever so casually) to Mark a couple weeks ago that maybe we should buy a new TV as our Christmas gift to each other and take advantage of all the Post-Thanksgiving sales and great financing offers out there. We both have older than old televisions that were nothing fancy and pretty clunky and had been dreaming about a new flat screen for some time now. I'd been saying for at least a year that when we got engaged, I'd buy us a new TV (yes, a total bribe.. I know!), but once we actually did, we couldn't stand to spend the money when it could go towards the wedding.

But. Saving every penny for wedding stuff gets really old. So I just threw out the idea, that we could buy one now and split the payments for the next several months, to see what he thought about it.

To say he ran with this idea is a bit of an understatement. For the next fourteen days straight he read about TV's online, compared prices, shopped around, read reviews and talked to the experts. This weekend we decided to blow a bit of our wedding fund and headed out to Best Buy and came home with this little guy:



Annnnnd, now we are back to saving up for the wedding, all day, every day. Scout's honor. In fact, I'm asking Santa for chair rentals and pinspot lighting this year. But we all need a break sometime, right? And you can bet I'll be watching plenty of "Whose Wedding Is It Anyway" on the new tube.

What's short and cute and blue all over?

The bridesmaid dresses! And.. they’re here!





I was having such a blah day. I am off work this week and decided to go walk around the mall to perhaps find a new sweater to wear to Oklahoma this weekend for Thanksgiving. I was armed with a whole stack of coupons and hit up the pre-Black Friday sales with high hopes. I did mange to find all kinds of cute stuff, as well as some great deals on a few Christmas gifts that I went ahead and knocked off my list. I was carrying a whole slew of bags with me and stopped to treat myself to lunch at Corner Bakery in the mall food court. I never eat at the mall when I am by myself, but I was feeling especially independent and snagged a single table over by the ice rink and sat back to enjoy my salad.

A cuople hours later, I’m in my apartment, putting away my purchases and stashing some gifts in the back of the closet when it suddenly occurs to me.. where is my Banana Republic bag? I run down to the car, nothing. Look back in all my other bags, nothing. Run back over to the mall, hit up Corner Bakery and EVERY store I went to, nothing. I lost a brand new sweater and dress that I had just bought, without so much as even trying them on first! I went back home and sulked/fumed/couldn’t get over how ridiculous I am for losing something a mere twenty minutes after I purchased it. Nothing could cheer me up.

Until! I was moping around when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number so I let it go to voicemail, then checked the message as soon as it appeared on my cell screen. Maybe some honest chap had in fact turned in my lost Banana bag! (I’d left my number with mall security, just in case.) Well it wasn’t my lost loot, but instead the shop where I had ordered my bridesmaid dresses this summer - they were here! She said they could hold them for me as long as needed, but she wanted to let me know they were here and looked beautiful.

I jumped in the car and high-tailed it over to Plano, where I picked up all of the dresses. They. Looked. Fabulous. They might not be the cute LBD from Banana that some random girl out there it sporting courtesy of me (grr), but they are twelve adorable dresses that my bridal party are going to rock come July! Leave it to the wedding to turn my drag day into fab!

Asking My Crew

One of the first things I started working on when we got engaged was our bridal party. I was super excited about inviting all our friends to be a part of the wedding and start sharing all the plans and details with them. Mark quickly came up with his list of guys and waited until he saw them in person to ask them if they would be his groomsmen. Me on the other hand, I knew I wanted to do something a little different than just asking my dozen girls when I saw them or calling them up to pop the bridesmaid question.

I started googling around for creative ways to ask your bridesmaids. Surprisingly, I couldn't really find much of anything terribly creative or unique, other than sending personalized fortune cookies or some sort of other little charm or token. I wasn't too keen on the fortune cookie idea (although I did debate it for a while) and everything else out there was a little more than I wanted to spend on this task (especially when you multiply it times 12), so I decided to enlist the most creative person I know to help me design something to send out.

Enter Maid of Honor/Sister/Graphic Designer Kelly. She worked with my (somewhat amateur) sketches of ideas that I had for postcard designs and created an adorable card using Illustrator. I knew I wanted them to match the wedding theme (although let's be honest, at this point we had zero theme!), so we went for a rustic, chic design, with a little bit of Texas flare. So Kelly designed some cute little boots with Mark and my initials on them and we incorporated a slogan that I found somewhere online when I was searching around for ideas: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something You.



We printed the cards out using my parent's rinky-dink printer on some heavy linen paper, and then trimmed them to jumbo postcard size with our handy-dandy paper cutter. I wrote each girl a personal note on the cards, telling them how much I loved them and how great it would be to have them as one of my bridesmaids. We then made envelopes for each one out of scrapbook paper and some cute flower stickers, and added an address card with the same little cowboy boots on the front of each envelope.



I sent them off in the mail and waited for the phone calls from the girls as they got them. Everyone loved them and was thrilled to join our crazy wedding party! I am truly blessed to have such fabulous friends who are ready and willing to stand up for me on my big day, as well as listen to me talk about the wedding for one year straight :)

Check, Checkity, Check!

What's better than making a great big list of things to do, and then checking tasks off as you accomplish them?? For me, being the over-organized, list-loving, sharpie-carrying B2B that I am, not much!

Earlier this week, I met up with the WP to catch up on the wedding plans. She is a total rock star, and made me a calendar for the next eight months, showing what we need to be focusing on week by week. Now normally you would think that 32 weeks of things to do and projects to complete and crafts to craft would be terrifying/overwhelming, but I was so excited! I think its purely because of the calendar/To Do format that she used, which is one big list just waiting for me to cross things off of it. She, Mark and I are all sharing the calendar on Google documents, so we can all keep track of what we need to be working on and what's coming up ahead, as well as edit and change/add things to the plan as needed. Right now, we're on Save the Dates, which means I need to get them designed and printed (still waiting on the photos for that), get our wedding website completed (which is waaay more time consuming that I thought it would be!) and get some of the hotel blocks figured out. Apparently some people are WAY on the ball and book hotel rooms as soon as they know about the wedding. Who would have thought?!

It feels good to have a game plan now, and a nice organized list to keep us all on track. I'm off work all next week (yay Thanksgiving Break!), so I should be able to get cracking on it. Plus, we'll be spending time at both parents' houses for the holiday, so that should be plenty of time to sit around and work on our website, while we stuff our faces with turkey (twice!).


The infamous calendar, courtesy of my WP/BFF

Let's take this party across the border! (passports not required.)

Before we ever had a florist, a dress, a DJ or colors, we had our Rehearsal Dinner booked and its menu selected. Mark's parents are really on the ball. It only took about two weeks after we got engaged before they wanted to get our RD figured out and taken care of. We are so excited and grateful that they want to host this for us, so we agreed to meet them in Muenster one weekend this summer to scope out possible places for the party.

Now, in case you didn't already know, Muenster is a small town. Like really, really small. From the get go, the future in-laws were worried that they wouldn't be able to find something they liked or something that would be as nice and fancy as they had envisioned our Rehearsal Dinner being. I knew we could find something that would work, but they definitely had to be convinced. Mark and I did our homework before they came into town and scoped out anything and everything that might be what they were looking for. We had a list of local restaurants, tea rooms, hotels and bed and breakfasts that were in and around Muenster that would host a private party of our size. Many of them were really nice and quite charming. But there was one that stood out with the in-laws, hands down. The funny part? It's not in Muenster, or even Texas.. it's in Oklahoma!

So we are rehearsing in Texas, then taking our bridal party posse across the border to Mark's home state of OK for our RD at the Winstar Golf Course Clubhouse. (Yup, that's Winstar as in the ginormous casino just across the Texas border. Pay no attention to all the crazy grandma gamblers, just drive on past all those slot machines and neon lights to the scenic golf course tucked behind it!). It's a great setting, and can totally compare to any big city country club that we would never be able to find out in the sticks where we're getting married.

It sounds totally silly, but a dual state wedding is perfect for us. My family's from Texas, Mark's is from Oklahoma. I went to school at the University of Texas, Mark graduated from Oklahoma State. My friends are scattered around TX, his friends mostly call OK home. My extended family will be coming in from all over Texas, Mark's will be road-tripping it across Oklahoma for our wedding. And it's not as bad as it sounds... our small town wedding is actually less than ten miles south of the state line, so while it may sound like we have to drive miles and miles to get to our out-of-state rehearsal dinner, it's really no further than we'd likely have to drive anyways. Plus, we think its a great way to include a little bit of both of our backgrounds in our wedding weekend!

Find the perfect dress? Oh yeah, we did it!

This past Saturday, I gathered my posse and set out on a mission: buy a dress. No matter what, I was coming home with a dress ordered! I'd looked high and low and probably tried on fifty dresses already.. I knew what I wanted, I knew what my budget was, and we were going to find us a winner! It was game time.

I'm happy to report we was successful - THE dress has been ordered!

My mom, my little sister/MOH, my aunt and Mark's mom met at my apartment bright and early Saturday morning. I had warned them before: Go to bed early on Friday! Eat a big breakfast! Pack snacks! Bring drinks! We had three back-to-back appointments scheduled and there was no time for breaks. I meant business.

I'm thrilled with the dress I got, excited to have spent the day with these four awesome ladies and so very relieved to check this (rather large) wedding task off the list!


My aunt, me and my mom outside the shop where we found out winner!


Me and FMIL, with the official dress receipt!