Registering

Throughout planning the wedding, on my downtime Jon and I have been registering at different places for gifts. We picked these places because we enjoy the merchandise from there and they are popular enough that someone who wants to get us a gift has no trouble finding one. One store that we registered in was Home Decor where we mostly picked kitchenware and a few decoration items. Then we went online and began registering at Bed, Bath&Beyond since there is not one in this town, but there is one in every city that our family lives in so they have a place to shop for us that they know they can find out what we want instead of guessing.

Legal Issues

After getting everything else set in stone, there was one more thing that Jon and I had left before we could make our wedding binding and legal and that was obtaining a marriage license/certificate. This we got at the City Hall where we recieved worksheets asking about our history and general information. Then when we return to turn in the applications, we were asked to bring our picture I.D.s and a $25 Dollar fee. After that during the wedding reception we would have the wedding certificate to sign there along with our Judge. Our judge is Stephen Aaron and together we set up an appointment to get to know him and him us when we ask him if he will marry us.

The Menu

For my menu I wanted to keep it simple so there was no mess to clean up after the wedding was over. I also realized that my wedding was in the middle of summer so a big hot feast was not a great choice for food. Instead I started looking around for meals that didnt require alot of work and were great for the season that we were in. Foods that agreed with my ideas were cold cut sandwiches, fruits and vegetables, cheese trays, meat trays, and chips. For beverages water would be just fine. After finding out that every caterer was booked in Evanston, I decided I was going to have to do it myself. So my choice for food was to order the trays from Wal*Mart, which had every choice that I had thought of for my wedding, plus their prices are low and the food is great.

Bridesmaids Dresses

I had more to do with this shopping even, however I still did not require much stress out of this one as well. The Bridesmaids dresses were all brown to match the men in the other line, while the flower girl I put in pink. We got the dresses from Davids Bridal. I let my ladies pick out their own style that they felt comfortable in and it turned out being a set that matched together anyway. Then I gave them the choice of me paying for their dresses and them paying for their hair and nails or visa versa. They chose to pay for the dresses and I said that I would pay for their hair and nails as my present to them for being in my line at the wedding. All in all it was a fun day with the girls and was a productive part for my wedding.

The Tuxedos

I did not have to do much with this except twist Jon's arm until he finally got his line together to go down and do it. He chose the tuxedos based on my color scheme. The Line of men would be wearing black tuxes with brown vests and ties, while Jon's tux would be black with a cream vest and tie. This would seperate him from his line and match him to me and my dress. The total of all 6 of the tuxedo rentals was $600 and that was including a fitting for each person and insurance on the tuxes in case of accidents. Jon picks those all up two weeks before the wedding.

The Music

It is always good to have friends everywhere which is the perk that I had with my D.J. Kevin and Angel Lanham are great friends of the family and together we have dont numerous things together and helped each other out. Last summer I was the photographer at their wedding and did their engagements. So when they heard that I was getting married they offered to be my D.J. Excitedly I said yes and set up an appointment to talk about my part in the music. All my job for the wedding was to make a couple CDs for them. The first had my ceremony music on for before and after the actual ceremony. Then there was a CD for the important songs like the First Dance, The Father Daughter Dance, The Mother Son Dance, the Grandparents dance, the Garter Song and the Bouquet toss. The one Cd was for a mix of fast songs that I wanted including crowd favorites like the Cha Cha Slide and the Boot Scootin Boogie and the other CD was for slow songs. I would give these to them and they would be able to mix them to play at my wedding.

The Invitations

This was a more important thing that we had to do because they invitations are what lets everybody know that there is going to be a wedding, the locationg and time of it. For the invitations, I took Brenda's advice and went to Westar Printing where she said I would find a large selection with great prices. They had 4 albums full of choices for invitations so luckily Jon and I agreed on what kind of style we wanted. We decided not to go fancy on the invitations because we didnt want to spend alot of money on something that would probably be thrown away after a while. We both wanted invitations that were a copy of one of our engagement photos with the writing on top of it. We found the perfect one and asked the sales associate to give us an estimate on 110 invitations. To our Surprise it only came to $94 dollars including envelopes. We were instantly sold. All we had to do was bring copyrights from the photographer and a digital copy of the picture we wanted to use. This was one of the easier things that we did for the wedding.