wedding dress

so i finally started looking at all my bridal magazines and placing post-its on all the dresses that caught my eye. good grief. i have a lot of filtering out to do...

next steps

so two major hurdles are completed. we got the church (i paid the deposit last friday), and we got the hotel for the reception (we signed the contract and paid the deposit last saturday). that takes a load off! this saturday we are actually going to a pre-marriage experience. here's what it encompasses:

These one day sessions are for engaged couples who are being married for the first time. Engaged couples who attend these sessions have not been previously married to each other civilly nor have they been previously married to another party (e.g., annulment, widowed). These sessions address such topics as:

1. Sacrament of Matrimony
2. Family of Origin
3. Communication
4. Decision-Making

These sessions provide an opportunity for engaged couples to assess their readiness for marriage and to assist them in understanding that marriage is a Vocation, a Covenant and a Sacrament.

it's only one day, unlike those engagement encounters that last an entire weekend. but i do hope we learn more about each other, or at least how to better communicate. both of us have very different ways of expressing ourselves, and maybe we can broach that through this experience. i wish we were doing the weekend encounter, because i think those delve into more self-development and introspection, but, we do what we can. maybe we can do the engagement encounter some next year...we still have plenty of time.

other than signing the contract for the reception site, i took a break from wedding stuff this weekend. it was GREAT! but i'll get back to it again as i start looking through magazines to find my dress... :-) :-) :-)

updates

woohoo! just got the shipping notice that the save-the-date cards we ordered through costco are on their way. in the meantime, i sent an email (using apple mail's stationery) requesting for our friends and family to save the date. so some people will get both an email and a notecard. we're trying to imprint the date in their heads so they won't forget! oooh i just realized that i forgot to put our website on the save-the-date cards. oh well!

as far as the "planning" meeting with the parents...it went really well. they really want this day to be what we want it to be and they really want to help us out with that (aka expenses). so we worked out what our package would be for the reception at embassy suites, and we will be signing the contract with the hotel tomorrow morning.

one requirement from the church is that we attend either a one day saturday experience or a weekend engagement encounter. considering we are not sure about our schedules (especially since francis is in the middle of transitioning to a new job), we're opting for the one day, which we have scheduled for early october. we may do the engagement encounter, but we'll see how our schedules develop over the next few weeks.

so what's next? francis wants to take a 3 month sabbatical from any planning. yeah right, like that's going to happen! we still need to review florists, djs, photographers, videographers, attire, transportation, etc. and we still need to finalize our bridal party! we've got plenty to do...so no vacation for him!

mark your calendar!

ok i don't know how good i am going to be about updating this blog. i will try to have at least weekly updates. so we'll see how that goes...

we have a date! OCTOBER 3, 2009. so mark your calendars now! fr. dennis mongrain will be our priest at st. denis. our interview with him went really well. of course introductions are made and he asked us what we do for a living. me: aerospace engineer; his reponse: that's great. francis: criminal investigator; his reponse: woah officer! LOL. he kept referring to francis as officer/detective the entire time...and made numerous references to law & order and csi. you could tell he was very intrigued by francis' career choice: "do you carry a gun? do you arrest people?" when not discussing law enforcement, he asked us some questions, like how long have we known each other, the story of how we started dating, as well as how did francis propose. after the q&a, he gave us some paperwork to take home to fill out, and then he asked us when we wanted to have ceremony. that's it! sure we have to fill out the forms that state both of us are free to marry and get witnesses (using our parents is recommended), as well as provide our completion certificates for the sacraments of baptism, communion and confirmation. but essentially, we're set for saturday, october 3, 2009 at 3pm! woohoo! this wedding will actually take place! i'm still trying to adjust to the idea...

so the church is secured, now it's time to secure a reception site. over the weekend, we looked over various reception sites: marriott, sheraton, hilton, pacific palms, doubletree...we want the reception to be pretty close to the church, so we were limited in our selection. we happened to be in ontario on sunday, so we dropped by the hotels in that area. it was a no brainer. NO! so our other option was the anaheim area. the hilton and marriott were both booked due to a convention happening that weekend. NOOOOOO! so i got scared that there wouldn't be ANYTHING available since the hotels we were looking at were within walking distance of the convention center. but lo and behold, embassy suites and the doubletree off of harbor blvd. were available. we sat and talked to each hotel's catering manager and discussed our options. as gorgeous as the doubletree is, we're going with the embassy suites. we don't want to blow ALL our savings on this wedding...we do have to live somewhere after the ceremony. i am NOT living with either of our parents. hahaha that's the one thing i'm absolutely sure of. love them all, but NO! ;-)

so tonight we have a family meeting since we have numbers to present to the 'rents, and saturday we sign the contract with the embassy suites!

and a big THANK YOU to april and ron. they have been a big help through these initial planning stages...giving us ideas for reception sites, how to "pass" the interview with fr. dennis ("children of god" and "soldiers for christ"), and april even provided me with her box of wedding stuff (magazines, planners, etc) for ideas! thank you sooo much!

darn social networking sites...

i underestimated how quickly people would respond once i changed my status from "in a relationship" to "engaged" on both facebook and myspace. it's a good thing i waited until after i told the people who i needed to tell in person before updating because i'm believing the whole adage that "news travels fast".

so as more and more people know, that makes me want to really get cracking on all this planning up ahead. but first things first...interview at st. denis tomorrow...and then figuring out the date so we can start looking at reception sites.

Wow...

I am actually engaged! We are actually planning this wedding! I'm somewhat still in shock...I haven't caught up to the news yet. After our weekend in Vegas, it has been non-stop as we have been busying ourselves with telling our friends and family the good news. First, we told our parents over dinner at a restaurant (under the pretense that we were celebrating Francis' birthday and job change). We told our coworkers, then some friends, and then, last Saturday, we announced it to most of our friends while we were at our friend's birthday celebration. Now I only have a couple more people to personally break the news to, and then I can publicly share the good news on all those social networking sites, like MySpace and Facebook.

I'm really glad that we're shooting for a late September/early October wedding. There is just so much to plan, and I don't even have a color scheme yet! We are meeting with the priest at St. Denis Catholic Church this Wednesday for our initial interview. Hope it goes well! We got tips from our friends who recently got married, and we simply have to remember: "Children of God" and "Soldiers of Christ". LOL!