Our Vineyard Wedding

Just to get it out of my system, I wanted to try a few things out.

We’re getting married in ten days.

Ok, not bad.

We’re getting married in a week and a half.

A little more urgent. I get butterflies in my stomach a little bit.

Our wedding is next week.

Ok, wow, that brings on a little panic attack.

In two weeks, my wife and I will be in Greece.

That’s pretty cool… but still foreign to me (no pun intended).

This is my wife, Michelle.

Also very strange… but I’m sure I’ll get used to it, because everyone will always be like, “Wow, who’s THAT!?!”

Ok, it’s really close now. Deep breaths.

So only 13 more days… what happened to the last year and 8 months? Things are moving right along as intended, I am trying not to stress over anything and just let it be. Justin and I went for a drive today and ended up having a great lunch, walk in the park and I even got to practice driving standard.

But I digress… I have lots to catch you up on. A couple weeks back my mom held my bridal shower in Glastonbury. It was great, and she did a wonderful job of planning it all. It was lots of fun to see everyone. Click here for photos. Then last weekend, I was surprised into a bachelorette party… it was GREAT! Thanks to everyone who came and to my bridesmaids for planning it… you really surprised me and I had a wonderful evening.

I’ve started to have some crazy wedding dreams, mostly about stuff not getting done. Like my dress not showing up or one scary one where I didn’t have eyebrows. Bad stuff. Maybe I should have some tea before going to bed.

My scouts have alerted me to the (inaugural) Foxwoods Food and Wine Festival the weekend of our wedding. If you’re looking for something to do on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, it sounds pretty cool:

Catch celebrity chefs Tom Colicchio, Tyler Florence and Masaharu Morimoto in the act during an inspiring weekend of cooking demonstrations, wine tastings, culinary seminars and special events. Be part of this exciting inaugural festival that’s destined to become a classic.

Remember, if you’re staying at our hotel, you can catch a free shuttle to/from Foxwoods at any time.

Of course, I would have found this sooner, but I haven’t exactly been looking for things to do that weekend…

I’ve just posted some of the best photos from our engagement session back in June with Mike Ross. He’ll be doing our wedding as well. Can’t wait to see how those come out!

Check them out over here.

The hotel block is over at the end of this week, so after that, you’ll be up against $200+ rooms that are not very close to the wedding. The place we’ve picked is less than a mile away, has a free shuttle to the vineyard and Foxwoods, and has all the cool kids staying at it! More info here. Don’t delay!

We are taking a bus ride from DC to Hartford tonight… we leave at 10pm and arrive at 6am. This should be interesting

Michelle was browsing a page on tips for getting married in Connecticut tonight. I’m really glad they have this one on there:

Connecticut law specifies that no man may marry his mother, grandmother, daughter, granddaughter, sister, aunt, niece, stepmother or stepdaughter, and no woman may marry her father, grandfather, son, grandson, brother, uncle, nephew, stepfather or stepson. Any marriage within these degrees is void.

Somehow I think someone who needs this tip is having considerably more difficulty with the whole planning process than we are.

We’re building our lists of songs for the reception and want you to help! Please suggest some songs that would be good for any kind of dancing so that our DJ can have them ready. Just leave a comment and we’ll start compiling the list.

In other news, we started booking hotels today for Athens, Santorini, and Istanbul… really looking forward to the honeymoon. I’ve been wanting to just sit and map things and figure out some places we’d like to go and things we’d like to stay near, and today we finally got down to it. Any travel advice that you might have for Greece, Turkey, or just in general would be a big help.

Yay… we are getting response cards back in the mail. And its fun!!! I cannot wait to see everyone, I am getting excited now.

Hello, dear readers… long time no speak. Seems like Michelle has had the microphone for a while now, so it’s my turn to say a few words.

Fortunately, and as you would probably expect, Michelle has been driving much of the work that we’ve been doing, which is good because I have even less of an clue of what to do, in general. All I know is there seem to be endless lists of things to do and all of them require a fair amount of thought. Some of them also require physical work, be it driving many times between DC and Connecticut, eating lots of cake (trust me, it gets difficult), cutting and copying and printing until all hours of the night, or repeatedly updating address book entries. So that has certainly kept us busy, and the entries on the blog have reflected that.

When we started this blog, I had hoped to talk more about our thoughts and feelings as we moved closer to the big day. But it’s been over a year now and I think we’ve pretty much been reduced to online todo lists. Just wanted to let people know that all of that has been going on behind the scenes, of course, and our minister, Alice, has been a big help in keeping us mindful of the things that really matter.

The emergency move following the flooding tested our relationship and our patience with ourselves and with each other like no other thing we’ve experienced. And I keep coming back to something that Mark (Michelle’s dad) told me a while back — you are together to handle the things that neither of you could do separately, for the rest of your lives. We’ve been together over four years now and I can see that there is much wisdom in that.

Our marriage is the start of a journey and an ongoing transformation of our relationship. The changes will never end and I’m looking forward to that journey. And planning this wedding has been more about compromise and working together with ourselves and our families than the difficulty of doing a thing alone, so it in itself has been, and continues to be, a good test. However, I’m definitely looking forward to kicking back and spending most of September in Greece and Turkey!

So, with that, I’m off for now. I will try to check back with some more Moments From The Heart™ in the next weeks leading up to the wedding.