Winding Down

Winding down after a wedding is an experience that most people never talk about. While I have no experience with this personally, I feel like I've been ramped up on speed for the past 6 months and am just now coming off of a very long high. Here is the roller-coaster of emotions I've felt in the past 12 days:

1. happiness: during the wedding. seriously, 95% of the time I was blissfully unaware of the small stuff, and was completely happy and blissful the entire day.

2. relief: I felt a little of this following the ceremony stepping into the Mercedes convertible Matt's uncle graciously lent us. I felt WAY more of this when the reception was winding down and I knew things were settled. No one tells you how utterly relieved you are that the one day you've been planning and preparing for for YEARS is over. We were told time and time again that the day goes by way too fast, and I was prepared for that to happen, which is why I wasn't too upset when I realized that it was true. I was more relieved than anything that the stress I had built up in my body could finally start to dissipate. 

3. relaxation: On the way to the honeymoon, after Sunday morning brunch with the family. The entire 3 days we were on Monhegan Island we continuously reminded each other of how awesome everything was, and how we were now married and could allow ourselves to relax. Naps were had that weren't filled with wedding nightmares, strolls were taken, junk food was eaten without hesitation (our one and only pint of Ben and Jerry's we've had in 1.5 years!). 

4. dismay: I admit, I wasn't ready for my vacation to be over. I was thankful that we scheduled 3 weeks before the wedding, but I wasn't happy with only mere days after the wedding. It was very hard trying to motivate myself to get on the plane back to Korea. It was the first time that we've ever experienced "blahness" on our way back home. Usually when we go on vacation we have a blast and then we're ready to go back to Korea and continue with our lives. It wasn't the same this time. Thankfully now that I've been back for 5 days I am starting to feel like myself again!

5. restlessness: I am finding myself randomly thinking about little wedding projects and fretting about who is going to execute them until I remind myself that it's over. It's actually over. No more wedding planning, no point in browsing weddingbee blogs. I'm trying to let the calm sink in, but it's hard when I spent so much of my time preparing for it!

6. love: My hubs is, simply put, a keeper. Seriously, people, not a minute goes by where my heart isn't doing flips and jumping jacks about him. Coming back to Korea and settling into our routine has been a wonderful thing. While I enjoyed the time we spent together at home on vacation, our routine was out of whack, but now we're settling in again. Nightly board game playing, conversations over a hot pot of coffee, river walks, life is good!

MARRIED!

It's been an amazing, crazy past month! Sorry for the lack of posts leading up to our trip to Maine and to the big day.

Stay tuned for MANY recaps about numerous parts of the wedding! And for now..a sneak peek:

Olympics Fun

Wondering where I've been in the past few weeks? Sorry, things always get crazy right before the end of school and the beginning of vacation!

With the Olympics starting in just a few days, I planned a week-long English summer camp for my kids, Olympics theme. It's been a LOT of fun so far, despite their relative laziness (I mean, cmon, it's summer!), and my anxiety about flying/maine/projects/wedding.

So far we've done a LOT. Here are some snapshots, if you want to see what camp is like in Korea:

relay race

 We had a "torch" relay. Teams (5 teams, one for each continent represented in the 5 rings) had to balance tennis balls (flame) on their torch (rolled up paper), run down to the end of the room, write a summer olympic event (ex. pole vault) and run back. They had 2 minutes to write as many words as they could, with each person writing one word at a time. If you drop the ball, you have to start at the beginning. Team with the most words won. We played 4 times and added scores up at the end.

flag coloring

The first competition was to create a flag for their team continent. This is the "Americas" team.

London Sightseeing

 Day 3 was a tour around London. Teams had to "visit" 6 different London landmarks and read a paragraph, answer some questions, and then complete a puzzle before moving on to the next landmark. The team who finished all 6 landmarks first won GOLD. This is by far the students FAVORITE activity. It lasts a long time (more than 1 hour) but they were very involved, super competitive and engaged. The puzzles at each station were different: crosswords, word searches, scrambles, cryptograms, sudoku, and a maze.

olympic history timeline

As a history/education major, I always sneak in some history into my camps. This camp the students made a timeline, spanning from the ancient Greek Olympics all the way to the 2012 London Olympics. We only focused on the summer games. Each of the 5 teams were in charge of a time period and had to research facts about 6 different games.

world map and country info

I made this map for another English teacher for her open class last week in front of the principal and faculty. I decided to reuse it for the camp. If you're wondering why Europe seems huge, it's because she was focusing on it and asked for it to be larger, and for the Americas to be smaller!  Each of the teams had to research one English speaking country from their continent: USA, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and India.

team flags

Here are the continent flags some of the students in the morning session made. You can see the small colors circles around them are the medals they've won doing various activities. A gold medal is 15 points, silver is 10, and bronze is 5.

Below are examples of the country fact sheets:

America country fact sheet....loving Obama!

Ireland fact sheet---how cute is the president?

Wedding Programs

Here is a sneak peek of a project that I am trying to get done before stepping on the plane in just
 3 DAYS.

These are our cute little ceremony programs, which are also fans. Not to be brutally honest, but I think that the fan might come in handy more than the actual program itself! Claire, our
South African friend, graciously offered to design these as well, and they're absolutely awesome. While we had a few snafus with the printing margins (stupid printers, honestly...we can make microscopic storage chips but we still have ridiculously junky printers?) we got them to work and I've been printing and cutting like a mad woman.

A few pieces of double sided tape (I think we've gone through a total of 15 rolls so far for all projects), these puppies are strong and work as wonderful fans. I think we will definitely be needing them at the church for an August wedding! Maybe some guests will save them and bring them to the reception as well.

Included on the program:

side 1: the wedding ceremony program itself. This has names of our priest, cantor and organist, as well as the order of events. Since this is a Catholic wedding and most of our guests are not Catholic, we thought it would be nice to give everyone a head's up on what will happen in order. There are also the readings and names of those who will be reading for us.

side 2: this side is a bit of fun. We have a cute little icon of our wedding party, with everyone's names listed, including the bride and groom, best man, maid of honor, maids, groomsmen, junior maids, flower girls and ring bearer. SHEESH, people...we have a LOT of peeps in our party! Under that diagram is a little Mad-Lib story that guests can do in pairs (we will put golf pencils out), while waiting for the ceremony to begin. Basically it's a cute story of us (Matt and Dani), that everyone can fill in funny parts of speech to make it interesting.

I have about 60 done with another 40 being printed as we speak!

Reception Shoes

Well, I did it people. I went with my gut instinct and ordered some "fun" shoes for the outdoor reception.

Since I knew everyone would cry mutiny if I changed into Crocs (haters don't be hatin'!), I chose another, less ugly version of a comfort shoe:

Yes, TOMS. Blue, sparkly ones to be exact.

To remind everyone back home, I haven't stepped foot on American soil for 1.5 years. Although I have seen some Korean girls sporting TOMS, I think they must order them from abroad, since I can't find any in stores here. Because of this, I haven't had the pleasure of owning a pair...

..until NOW!

I ordered them a few weeks ago and they've arrived at my moms. I am excited to be changing into comfortable shoes for the entire afternoon after the ceremony. While I'm not sure what I will be wearing yet when I walk down the aisle, at least I know I am covered at the park!

Did you realize that TOMS has an entire "wedding" section on their website? Neither did I! It didn't take much to choose these ones as the winners.

Photo Love

More pictures of the other photo collages we've put up around the apartment:

above our bed in the closet bedroom

on the wall to the right of Matt's computer desk

Unfortunately with this humidity the pictures keep falling down. I didn't use a lot of double sided tape, though, so as they fall down we've been repairing them and adding more tape. Hopefully they'll stay up for a while.I hate hate hate the cement walls. The wallpaper is literally plastered right to the cement.Oh well, what can you do! ^__^

Closin' In...

...on the RSVP deadline!

This is exciting stuff, people.

On our list, there are a total of 91 parties that are invited to our wedding and all but 22 have RSVP'd. Our deadline (per our wedding website) is July 21st. That's just 6 days away! While we have a pretty good idea who will come and who won't, it will still be nice to get the official numbers in soon.

We have a few people that are obviously coming  who haven't RSVP'd yet (mainly family), so with those numbers calculated in to the total, we're looking good! Now we just have to have them take a couple minutes to fill out the RSVP form, easy peasy. Our spreadsheet is not only keeping track of numbers, but also vegetarian meals and is calculating how many little welcome bags we need for the out-of-town guests.
This weekend we will take a look at who hasn't contacted us yet, and will email/contact those who may have forgotten.

We're in the process of making pie charts (because Matt loves to do little things like this with Excel!) of the number of "yes" v. "no" and also the percentage of out-of-town guests v. in town guests. Should be interesting to see the final tally!

Once everyone has RSVP'd then we are going to try to nail down seating charts before we go home. It's a goal, but it might not happen just because it will probably take the entire last week we're in Korea to track people down. Wishful thinking, though! We'd like to get as many paper projects done and printed here, so we can work on larger stuff in Maine.

Loving the marriage advice from all of those who have submitted their RSVPs, friends and close family alike. We were thinking of maybe writing down those pieces of advice and displaying them at the reception in some way, shape or form. Who knows!

Exciting stuff!