Jonathan & Tricia's Wedding

I’ve been blogging for over three years but this is the first time I’ve truly exciting content to discuss.  Tricia, my beloved, and I are getting married.  To share the celebration with family and friends I decided to combine two things I love, Tricia and blogging, resulting with what you see here.

We, if I can finagle Tricia into posting, will be talking about all of our wedding plans.  There’ll be pictures, text, and maybe some video and audio along the way.

This inaugural post has much excitement to share.  We have set the date for the wedding and the venue for the ceremony.  We are getting married on May 7, 2010 at 5:30 pm in St. Mary’s Church in Dedham.  The wedding will be on a Friday evening with the reception to follow sometime around 7 or so.

 

 

With a year or so until the wedding we’ve begun the preparations.  We’ve created first drafts of the guests lists surprising ourselves that our small wedding has 92 potential guests.  It is important to both of us that this remain an intimate gathering of our closest family and friends.  I am sure that once we spend more time on the guest list that the number of potential guests will drop.

Tricia’s aunt and uncle Joanne and Phil gave us a wonderful gift at our engagement party, which was held at the Dedham Community House last year, of several wedding planning books.  Bridal Bargains, in particular, has been very helpful and gave some great advice on the guest list.  It suggested created three lists highlighting people we must invite, people we’d like to invite, and people we’d want to invite if we could.

I’m someone who loves to research everything.  Ever since I asked Tricia to marry me the day before my birthday I’ve been hitting the library and borrowing all of their wedding planning books.  You name it and I’ve read it from Emily Post’s Wedding Etiquette to The Groom’s Guide: Almost Everything a Man Needs to Know.  This hasn’t made me an expert but I do feel a lot more prepared and ready for the whirlwind of planning necessary for even the intimate wedding of Tricia’s dreams.

This weekend we devoted a lot of time to wedding plans.  On Friday we met with my pastor to move things along with our wedding in the Church.  Then we looked around for invitations.  We’ve decided to print them ourselves because we can do just as good a job on our own while also saving some money.

 

The invitations are made by Gartner Studios and come in a kit.  It contains all the envelopes, invitations, and response cards we need.  All we have to do is choose our wording and print them out.  This seems easy enough and is just the sort of thing I’d like to do.

Too often with wedding planning there’s a lot for the bride to do, and be interested in, but not a lot for the groom.  Tricia and I have been doing our best to divide the necessary tasks between us as we see fit.  I’ve been covering the church stuff and the invites.  She’s working on the reception location.  Since we’re covering the wedding on our own we have also given ourselves extra freedom with the choices we make.  In some weddings the bride and groom may feel pressed to make certain choices because someone else is handling the financing (there’s nothing wrong with that) but we’ve managed to avoid that issue.

On Saturday we toured The Chateau in Norwood.  We looked at the Venetian Room and both fell in love with it.  It has enough room for everyone, is accessible, and beautiful.  As we exited the restaurant we looked at each other and Tricia said “This is the one.”  We’re not choosing just yet.  We have many other locations to visit before we make our decision.  But, this place gave me goose bumps…the good kind.

Finishing up this weekend we spent today at a bridal expo at the Crowne Plaza in Natick.  It is right on Rte 9 and the expo was quite interesting.  Around a dozen vendors were in attendance covering everything from her dress, my tux, cakes, locations, DJs and more.  We have a general idea of how we want the wedding to go but still need to pick everything.  Thankfully there’s plenty of time to make the right choices.

Oddly enough I enjoyed the fashion show at today’s expo where wedding gowns, bridesmaid dresses, and Mother of the Bride dresses were shown.  Most of the fashions were nice but I had to laugh at some of the colors.  I don’t care what anyone says but tangerine is something you eat, not a color.  I also was surprised by the Mother of the Bride dresses because I thought most of them belonged on a street walker.  I guess I’m more traditional and conservative than I thought.

That covers it for my initial post.  This is much longer than I had anticipated.  Each day brings another wedding task and brings me another day closer to marrying the woman I love.  I don’t know what can be more wonderful than that.

Peace

Jonathan the Groom