Wedding Shows-Anxiety Sets In!

I want to briefly jump back for a moment to mention that after our initial engagement in Sept, planning started to move along nicely! We had explored a few possible venues in Florida, and even attended a wedding show with my Mom.

Our first wedding show we went to (way back in Sept) was a lot of fun because we had plenty of planning time and were just starting wedding exploration. I loved that Gary fully embraced these type of events with me, from buying me my pink "BRIDE" tee to participating on stage in a "groom" contest in front of the entire crowd! Besides that, there were so many fun things to try and choose from, including these awesome flip books.  Checkout the one we made, complete with a fishing pole prop (quite appropriate to our "engagement story").

And the caricature we had done....

But as you can see, we sort of took a hiatus from wedding planning during the holidays. After the New Year, reality set in that we were still venueless and hadn't set our date. Eek. We had an initial idea of the date we wanted, which would possibly be over an upcoming holiday weekend. This put more pressure on to BOOK as quickly as possible because we'd been told holidays fill up quickly and guests need as much time as possible to plan. Still, we knew our venue would determine if our tentative date was available, so we had to decide on that first. Anxiety was definitely setting in!

As I mentioned earlier, we had explored a few possible venues right after the engagement. The locations varied from Orlando to Sarasota to St. Augustine. The venue is definitely one of the hardest decisions to make because it sets the tone/direction for the entire event, and can also be a good portion of the budget. We had one place in the back of our head that we first visited and had kept comparing other possible venues to, but we weren't sure if it was "the one." We didn't really give Orlando a thorough exploration, and at this point there were some other places we wanted to checkout before committing...and we needed to do so asap before I had a major stress meltdown!

We heard of a "Bridal Crawl" going on in Orlando, which was basically another bridal show but held at several different locations you could bounce around to, all possible venues also containing a variety of vendors (florists, caterers, DJs, etc). This was a perfect way for us to explore our hometown, so Danielle, Gary, and I embarked on the crawl. We all left with a sugar high from too many cake samples but a lot of great information.

Our crawl badges- "I Asked" (his), "I Said Yes" (mine)

The crawl was successful in the sense of helping us narrow locations down (plus acquire more vendor contacts), but we decided to make one last weekend trip to St. Augustine before picking our winner. We had been there already and really liked one specific location, but there were a few others we wanted to checkout too. Plus there was still one other possible location we were weighing everything against, each with different pros/cons making things more difficult.

All I'm going to say at this point is with less than 9 months away from our tentative wedding date, this is what we actually had:

1.) My dress (go figure)
2.) The bridal party selected

As you can imagine, the pressure was (and still is) on! Stay tuned for the outcome of our venue selection! :)


XoXo

Krissy

Our First Round of Holidays as an Engaged Couple

Going into late November through the new year is like a blur.  We travel a lot and basically spend each weekend immersed in some big activity whether it's partying or traveling or shopping.  The wedding planning preparations pretty much took a backseat during this moment (aside from researching small details online in our spare time).

One thing that I was 100% focused on doing at some point over the holidays was taking Kristen to the ICE exhibit at the Gaylord Palms.  This is something I know she has always wanted to see, and each year we procrastinated and ended up not going.  That was not going to happen this year!  One random Friday after work, I arranged some tickets and told Kristen that I planned "something," but wouldn't tell her what.  I like to keep her on her toes, so I turned it into a fun little surprise. 

The exhibit was at least 500 times colder than I actually imagined.  About 5 minutes in, the tips of my fingers and my ears were going numb.  The sculptures were definitely everything advertised and more.  Here's a shot of us as we exited the attraction...




Our faces were actually frozen this way for a good hour or so

 In addition to the fun holiday attractions, we had friends throw annual parties that we look forward to every year.  We have annual "White Trash Christmas Bash" and the Dillon's famous pizza party.  These parties are generally right around the same weekend or on back to back weekends, so that's always a part of the year I look forward to (I like to party if you haven't noticed yet). 

The pizza party was awesome this year, especially seeing as I did not have wisdom tooth surgery 2 days before the party this time (last year I couldn't eat pizza and stayed hopped up on pain medication the entire time).  This party is always fun for me personally, because I feel especially proud of how creative my future wife is;  she always makes the most creative pizza each year.  After seeing her construct an exact replica of Rudolph the red nose reindeer, I basically decided there was not much I could do to top this so I just rolled my whole batch of dough into one giant slice of pizza...

She won on creativity, I won in the weight division.  This slice gave me issues after I ate half of it.

In addition to our friends yearly get-togethers, we also had the annual company Christmas parties.  Kristen's company [IZEA] had a pretty fun theme and did a masquerade party on Wall Street.

Here are a few more shots of the festivities....

White Trash xmas bash!  Nothin' better than some natty light and a bon fire!



The IZEA Masquerade Christmas party at the Globe. 

Figuring out our Christmas situation each year has proven to be a bit of a challenge.  We both want to spend as much of the Holiday's with our families as possible, so we've had to come up with some kind of middle ground.  For the past 2 years, we've woken up on Christmas morning and went to Kristen's parents, opened gifts, spent a few hours together and then driven to Pensacola to arrive for dinner time.

This has worked out well for us for the past few years and it's pretty cool getting to see our family's on opposite sides of the state in the same day.  We spent Christmas day and the 4 days after in Pensacola just utterly relaxing.  Whenever we're back there, we find that it's a huge escape for us.  We usually sleep in each day, go out at night, play board games, fish and just hang with my family. 

The other great part about being there is Milo absolutely loves it.  He thrives off of terrorizing my parent's boxer Achillies and having a back yard to run freely for those few days.  When we come back to Orlando, he usually mopes and barely looks at us for days.

This past holiday season was another success in the books and I look forward to many more as we approach married life!

Christmas Morning at the Barnhart's -- 2010

- Smitty