Justin and Amber

Planning a wedding has been no piece of cake. No matter how many times I look online at a pre-made checklist, or ask friends who have gotten married, there is always something else that needs to be adding to my to-do list. Every time I am able to check something off of that list, I feel no more accomplished because I still see the many things left to do. These past couple of weeks though, I have done a lot of things to prepare for my wedding and marriage.

The biggest change so far was buying a house! Justin and I purchased our first home together and I (along with my cat) moved in at the beginning of June. Justin will be moving in once we are married. After being together as a couple for over 5 years now, and knowing each other an additional 2 years, I am so ready to be living with him. We are waiting to live together because of our religious and personal beliefs, but gosh it’s about time! It has never seemed closer than it does today though, and every day it gets both easier and harder to wait. Having a house is great though! I don’t have to be quiet or wash the dishes if I don’t want to. The nice thing is, it’s my house and I want to wash dishes!

I have gotten many things done for the wedding. We have ordered our favors, and just so you know, custom M&Ms are outrageously expensive so we didn’t go with those! We have booked our limo with Cities Limo who seem like a great company! Justin and I are starting dance lessons soon which will hopefully help me to not feel like a fool on the dance floor! Our registries are finalized, flowers, cake, and photos are paid for, and dresses are being altered.

There are still many things left to do. We (as in me, or me and my bridesmaids) have to make the placecards, finish the favors, and do 1 million other things! Our honeymoon is just about booked– we are still going to Disney! I am excited and nervous about that, since I am not a theme-park kinda girl but nevertheless it should be fun.

But in 7 weeks, and 5 days, none of this will matter. All of the stress felt, the money spent, and the hours consumed to plan the beautiful wedding of Justin and Amber will no longer be important. What will be most important is I will be married to my best friend, and we will have started our lives together as husband and wife.

7 weeks and 5 days….

So we mailed out invites on Saturday, and a good number of people have already gotten them. Pretty exciting!
One of the things we are trying to encourage with our invites is that people RSVP online using their assigned “Response Code”. The custom written tool allows people to update our address book, correct any spelling mistakes we may have made to people’s names, and tell us whether or not they are coming… In less than 30 seconds.

But more than that, it’s allowing us to see our RSVPs faster than one could imagine. In fact, we have already gotten 18 people (6 families) RSVP’d. Congrats Wade on being the first person to RSVP from an invite :-).  It’s exciting to know whether or not people are coming so fast… much cooler than waiting for snail mail.

One other advantage to this method is that people can update them after submitting. For example, let’s say your a guy with a girlfriend, and for some reason you break up with said girlfriend between when the RSVP was sent, and when the wedding actually happens. In the old way, you would have to call us to update the name of the person coming, OR, wouldn’t be able to tell us that a second person was coming (perhaps you decided to “pick up chicks” at the wedding (not recommended)). With the new way, you simply log in again and update your details. Pretty slick eh? It’s not a one-shot deal like normal RSVP cards.

But as with all innovations that involve computer programming, or humans in general, it may still have a bug or two in it. If you happen to hit of those said bugs, please please please, let me know so I can get it fixed right away. If your response code isn’t working, give me a call and I’ll let you know what the proper one is (Amber thinks she may have misnumbered 1 or 2…).

Of course, if your not technically savvy, your probably not reading this, but you are surely welcome to send in the response card.

Less than 3 months to go people!

P.S. I might publish my RSVP Wordpress plugin (it’s almost perfectly packaged for re-use). It still needs a few tweeks though… If your interested in my plugin, stay tuned at http://www.rinsefirst.com/.

I believe we have now been through 3 marriage counseling sessions. So far so good. I have to admit, these personality profiles they have us take do a pretty spot on job of matching us to the letter. So far I would agree with just about everything they’ve said, both good and bad.

For example: you would probably never have guess this (yeah right), but me and Amber are pretty much in sync when it comes to our religious beliefs. In fact, we scored liked a 90/100 on it, which is pretty dang tough to do (I’m not even sure 100 is possible, and everything seems to be rounded to the nearest 10). We also scored pretty strongly on our communication… which probably explains why we’ve been able to date for 5 years with little trouble.

Our weakest was finance, which to us wasn’t all that surprising. Amber and I have very different views on money, which has already caused some “fun” in our relationship while planning this wedding… And even more fun now that we are looking for a house/townhouse in Woodbury. Needless to say though, our communication skills have so far been able to overcome our views on money, and when they haven’t, prayer seems to have solved it for us :-). In any case, I’m hoping that we limit the fireworks in our 4th session (which will be almost the sole topic for the week).

In other news: we have started looking for a home. We’ve secured pre-approval on a loan, and have already got a house (or 2) in mind. Amber’s hoping that we are able to go look at it as early as tomorrow.

Still waiting for some music requests from people :-). Right now I’m leaning towards hits from 1992… Things like:  Achy Breaky Heart, Black or White, Baby Got Back, Life is a Highway, 2 Legit 2 Quit… Ah yes.. Back when I had my own radio show…

What? What did he just say? More on that at Rinsefirst at another time…