A Girl Can Dream....

There are a few decedent luxurious things that I would do if I had an endless wedding budget! I don't, but in the mean time a girl can dream, right?!



Cookie Valise from www.bandgcookie.com. $18 for 1/2 dozen cookies or brownies and it comes in this cute brown mini-suitcase! If only I had $18 to spend on every one of our guests!



Classy alternative to the “bathroom basket” from www.valseyandme.com. The box holds 40 mini soaps which are personalized with your married name and the kind of soap you pick (five scents). It also comes in white or black. Refills of 20 additional soaps are $25.



They also have this smaller version that would be a nice favor or bridesmaid or shower thank you gift. Holds 10 mini soaps – great “couple gift” as these are $20 each! The mini is only available in white.



Cute brown sugar hearts for coffe cups -- great at the reception or as favors. Click here to see more: www.pinkproducts.co.uk. I found another source for similar sugar hearts -- Sur La Table. 64 sugar hearts for $24.95. I'm seriously considering buying a box...where does the desire for little things like this end?!



Little olive oil bottles from my favorite Italian source - O&Co. Seriously sooo yummy, and what better gift from an Italian bride?!

OK, so none of this is worth blowing our budget over, but...you guessed it...a girl can dream!

Plan B vs. Plan A -- Part II

As I mentioned in a previous post we had our wedding ceremony and location all picked out and with no notice we had to start all over again. We had originally chosen an Italian restaurant in Burlington to host our reception -- Trattoria Delia.



The food is fantastic, their wine list is really top notch and it has kind of a rustic Italian feeling to it and the price was within our budget! My only big concern was light wasn't great and I was worried for our photographer and as a result for our pictures, but I decided to get over it.

Let me preface this by saying that dispite my experience I would recommend this as a place for a romantic dinner for two. I would not however, recommend this as a reception location as I don't think they have much experience with private parties (despite what I was told) and I think they'd hosted maybe one wedding prior to our conversations.

To make a long (and frustrating) story short -- the owner of the restaurant sent us a written contract (we had a verbal agreement and were just waiting for her to send us something in writing) and when it arrived it was 100% more than what we'd discussed. Yup, you heard me right -- she doubled the price. She had no explanation and backed herself into many a corner. I put her on speaker phone and had the conversation with my mother and fiance in the room so they could hear how calm and reasonable I was vs. how unreasonable she was. I had detailed notes of our conversation and it was just icky.

After much discussion we decided to look for another option as she basically said "she couldn't work with me!" I am really the farthest thing from a "bridezilla" (although I hate that over used expression anyway) -- really!

So I popped on my trusty Vermont local board on the knot and got some recommendations from other Vermont brides. With their ideas I made some calls, asked some questions and left for Vermont a day later armed and ready to START AGAIN!

I am THRILLED with our "Plan B" where we will be hosting our reception. Enter Adrianas on the Church Street Marketplace.



We will use their outdoor "patio" you can see in this photo for our cocktail hour and then head upstairs to their second floor where we'll have the whole room for the rest of the evening.



The upstairs has vaulted ceilings and a floor to ceiling window overlooking the marketplace (show above).



There is also a beautiful dark wood bar which will be our "head table." My fiance (well then husband I guess) and I will sit on the end (on the right hand side of the photo above) and the wedding party and 20-somethings will join us. There will be 3 long tables of 16-19 (depending on who RSVP's yes) with white table clothes and a brown runner down the center from the Vermont Tent Company.

All in all -- I'd say we turned lemons into lemonade! The added bonus of "Plan B" is that we get to walk with all our guests from the church around the corner to the restaurant on the marketplace which will be great fun and also provide some great photo ops (not quite as set up as this image from our photographer, Daria Bishop, but you see the potential).



Also we'll get to enjoy our own cocktail hour and if we decide to take some more photos on the marketplace our guests will get to watch (if they like) WHILE enjoying their cocktails! Oh boy :)



Oh yeah -- AND there is a Ben & Jerry's right across the marketplace from the restaurant! Double score :)

"Plan B" so much better than "Plan A"

Our first plan (and deposits/commitments) was made to a museum south of Burlington for a garden ceremony and an Italian restaurant in Burlington for the reception. Due to a total turn around in the restaurants price (literally twice as much as had been originally committed to) we were left with 48 hours to re-plan our entire Burlington wedding!

(I exaggerate slightly -- we had planned a weekend trip to show my parents what we'd settled on and get other things taken care of -- cake tasting, engagement photos etc. and we were leaving in two days when the restaurant owner lost her mind and asked us for 2x the money we'd agreed on).

Now this would devastate most brides (I'm not going to lie -- I did cry a little), but I would not be discouraged. We drove up to Burlington the next day as planned, this time with my parents in tow, and started again. I had some appointments made and options scoped out and ended up settling on a beautiful congregational church in downtown Burlington for our ceremony followed by a great second floor restaurant right on the marketplace two blocks from the church. It turns out I like our plan B so much better than our plan A!

First I'll show you the Plan A and Plan B ceremony locations and in another post I'll talk about the reception and what I learned so as now to overwhelm anyone in one big post.

Ceremony Plan A:







Bostwick Garden at the Shelburne Museum

Ceremony Plan B:

Outside of the Church



Front of church inside



Church Isle



Detail of church pew fabric -- happens to be sage green with a beautiful pattern reminicent of our invitation's brocade pattern! Score us :)




The interior photos were taken by our wonderful florist who went to scope out the church to put together our design proposal. Thanks Dana!!

Next time....reception Plan A and Plan B!

Pet Friedly?

I thought I had thought of everything to make planning for our guests as easy as possible -- wedding website? check. room blocks? check. airport information? check. rental car info? check. when/where details? check. directions/maps? check. Pet friendly hotels? WHAT? Ugh.



Last weekend, while in the car with my fiance's mother, grandmother, aunt and cousin-in-law, his grandmother said, "Well my dog will have to come with me? What hotels are pet friendly? Also her son and his partner would also be traveling with their two dogs and "can't come without the dogs."" Ok, so I thought you put your dog in a kennel or got a friend to watch them when you go places, but apparently these people travel with their dogs!

So I checked with the three hotels I'd blocked rooms at to discover one of them actually did allow pets for a small additional fee ($10 per dog per night). Hooray! Not bad at all. Feeling triumphant I emailed fiance's grandmother to inform her and called my future mother-in-law to let her know too. Then I promptly updated our wedding website with the information!

Pfew -- crisis overted. I hope there is nothing else I've forgotten. My mother's side of the family is Italian (and I identify with that heritage the most) and so I have this constant need to make sure everything is taken care of (and everyone is feed well)!

What lengths have you gone to to make your guests travel experience is easy as pie? Anything like this you realized at the last minute? Do share if I'm forgetting anything.

Wedding Season Heating Up

With wedding season heating up there are lots of wedding related parties to attend --bridal showers, bachelorettes and the main event -- the wedding itself. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have inherited a large number of my fiance's cousins and this year lots of them are getting married.

On Sunday I drove to Pennsylvania with my fiance's mother, grandmother, aunt and new cousin-in-law (who just married his cousin in Montreal on June 16th). Although my fiance and I were the first of three couples to get engaged last year we are the last to get married (in early September) due to my work schedule.

As much as I enjoy my fiance's family, I felt as if we were the last of a large laundry list of things they "had to do" this summer. The bridal shower I attended was for one of his female cousins who is getting married two weeks before us. My bridal shower will be the weekend before her wedding (which I'm sure she, her mother and two sisters, won't attend despit the fact that they all came out to Connecticut for the last shower). Then she'll be waiting until our wedding to take her honeymoon.

I can't help but feel like I'm jumping through hoops to travel to all of these showers and weddings, buy all of the gifts and show up with honest joy for them...and then we get the excuses and resentment.

"Your shower is the week before [girl cousin's] wedding? Oh I was hoping we'd have a weekend off," or "Your wedding is the first week of school -- I just don't think I'll be able to get a sub," or "Well, I have to bring the dogs with me -- where is there an animal friendly hotel?," to "How far is Burlington? Why did you pick a place so far away when we all live in Connecticut?"

Is it too much to ask that if it is such a great inconvenience that they simply decline our invitation and stop making me feel terrible about all the choices we've made? I know weddings are expensive. I know that they involve travel, hotels, gifts and time. But I've bent over backwards to make people's planning easier.

1) I sent save-the-dates eight months early



2) I created a wedding website full of info -- discounted hotel blocks, travel assistance (flight links etc), fun things to do in the area, a time-line for the wedding day...even our wedding menu so they could make an educated choice!



3) Our reception will be walking distance from our ceremony (not an hour away like the last wedding)

4) We will be taking pictures prior to the ceremony and attending our cocktail hour (unlike the 3 hour gap they experienced last summer -- not to mention they are in for the same poorly planned 3 hour gap at her sisters wedding 2 weeks before ours)

Also, our wedding will be less than half the size of everyone else's (maybe 60 people), so I was hoping the people we did invite would realize it was very intimate and we invited them because we truly wanted them to share in our day. The people I've invited (mostly family friends as my actual family is so small) are all honored and so excited to attend. Why can't I get some of the same excited for us from my fiance's family?!

I just want everyone attending our wedding to be excited and honored to be there -- not feel like we're the last of a list of things they can check off "Done!" OK -- Rant over.

PS. Sorry for very few pictures. Here is a photo of our honeymoon hotel where non of the above will matter because I will be relaxing on the beach and married to the love of my life!

Vermont Vows

Once we decided we would be getting married in Vermont I started to look around for resources. I was very disappointed to see there were absolutely no Vermont vendor listings on theknot.com. This surprises me more and more now that I know Vermont is home to a significant number of "destination weddings."

Then I came across Vermont Vows which is a fantastic publication. It's a feast for the eyes, hugely informative and they use real brides which is refreshing!



They also have a very useful website with vendor resources broken down by category. Check out www.vermontvows.com Click HERE to view the latest issue on-line. It is the best Vermont wedding publication I've found. I hope it proves to be useful for you.

For those of you planning a wedding far from home, where did you go to do your vendor research?

"Inherited" Family

My fiance has quite a large family (mother was one of eight siblings and father was one of five)! This is a sharp contrast to my very small family (my mother has one sister and two boys in their 40's and my father had one sister -- with no kids -- who passed away last year). I had no cousins my age growing up to play with.

This means I've inherited a large number of cousins/peers and this year -- cousins-in-law as well. Ours is the fourth wedding of his cousins in 16 months! This also means lots of bridal showers and family gathering. I realized last night that if we went to his aunt's 4th of July party this Saturday it would be the fourth weekend in a row with his family -- cousin's wedding in Montreal, Father's BBQ in Connecticut in our honor, another cousin's bridal shower (yesterday - this time in Pennsylvania) and this weekend's 4th of July party would be #4! I asked him last night if it was ok if we took a break as Saturday is my mother's birthday and I was a little "family gathering-ed out." He was very sweet and said "Of COURSE!"

We are blessed that our parents live 10 minutes from each other which makes visiting much easier. How are you adjusting to your new family? Is it very similar to yours? Different? Do you live close to both sets of parents? Does one set live very far away?