8/18/12 Recaps: Setting Up

While I was at the farmhouse finishing up various small craft projects and catching up with a lot of old friends, Matt, his family and the boys in the wedding party spent Friday and Saturday mornings setting up the tent.

Friday morning they put up all 120 Chinese paper lanterns and arranges and tables and chairs:

Bobby (Matt's cousin) and Matt hanging lanterns

ready to hung

the groom overseeing the tent ^__^

Saturday morning, Matt drove back up to the tent at 7AM to finish setting up. His family joined him, and as a team they were able to do EVERYTHING including: putting the tablecloths on the tables, arranging the picture frames and labels, hanging the guest paper cranes, hanging the seating chart tags, putting out the trail mix, setting up the juice, and tons more!

the seating chart tags are hanging on twine behind the boys, and the trail mix is out on the table

"husband" and "wife" (in Korean) signs on our chairs

the drinks: mason jars, waters, sodas, coolers

directing guests to the seating chart tags

Without the help of Matt's family, plus the groomsmen, none of this would have ever been pulled off! A HUGE thank you to everyone that helped out, at the tent and elsewhere!

8/18/12 Recaps: Lanterns at Night

Matt and I made the right decision to head up to the mountain late Friday night to catch our lanterns all lit up. Matt's dad and stepmom had gone up a few hours prior and highly recommended it, and knowing that we probably wouldn't see the lights at the actual reception, we knew it would be our only chance. The small, battery-powered LED lights were added as an afterthought, thinking that the tent might get a little dark once the sun began to set. Fortunately we didn't need them for the real wedding, but were thankful we got to experience the magic anyways:

This was also one of the only moments of alone time Matt and I had had all week. As late as it was, as tired as we were, it was meditative and refreshing to sneak into the park in the middle of the night and experience our tent, something that we invested in, in quiet company.

8/18/12 Recaps: The Wedding Week

Here is the first of many recaps on the wedding! I am now settled back into Korea so I have the time and energy to start posting about the big day. Enjoy!

To start, I'll write about the wedding week.

The week started off with Matt and I moving into a family friend's farmhouse. Our friends graciously lent us their house while they were away on vacation, which turned out to be a Godsend! 7 of our out-of-town friends were able to stay with us in the house, making it a full house of 9! We moved in and prepared for friends to fly/drive in from all over: New Hampshire, New York, Wisconsin, California, Oregon and Ottawa!

Monday we drove up with my Mom to visit with Fr. Chabot, my childhood priest who would marry us. We went to his camp on a lake and enjoyed an afternoon discussing the ceremony details, which calmed my nerves a bit! One big thing that he suggested that threw me off guard was to add contemporary music to the ceremony. This was something Matt and I thought wasn't encouraged, so I was a little stressed! We spoke with the cantor and organist and figured out a few new songs, so it all worked out. We also added a few things into the ceremony: a unity candle and the signing of the marriage certificate.

Tuesday  and Wednesday we were busy finishing up last minute details. Matt spent a lot of time with his mother and sister getting the cranes ready (!) for their big debut, while I was at my parent's house making 12 gallons of homemade lemonade and iced tea.

Wednesday night our friends from Ottawa arrived: Pam and Jesse. We met Pam in Korea and she is one of my bridesmaids and also made our cake and cupcakes! We were so happy to see them and spent the night catching up at the farmhouse, which was so nice.

Thursday we had friends arriving at all hours from the airport and beyond. Matt and the boys got in some disc golfing, while the girls all hung out and worked on various little projects I had left to do. It was absolutely AMAZING to have my friends volunteer to help! While I knew they would, I didn't realize how enthusiastic they would be! I had the ladies painting signs, gluing, cutting, etc. Pam started the cakes/cupcakes and everyone just went about helping. It was terrific! That night we all went out to eat (the wedding party plus out of town guests) to a local pizza place in Portland on the waterfront.

Friday morning Matt and the boys woke up bright and early to hang the lanterns at the tent. Thankfully due to Matt's meticulous string cutting and measuring a week before, the process was super easy and there was plenty of help! At 3:00PM we had the rehearsal at the church. I will talk more about this in another post! After the rehearsal we all went to my parent's house and met up with out of town guests and close family for an awesome spaghetti dinner in the backyard. Again-more on that later!

Friday night, as exhausted as we were, Matt and I took a drive up to the tent at 11:30PM (!!) to see the LED lights that the boys had put in the tent. I will write a post about this as well, as the pictures are fabulous! It was great for the two of us to get a little alone time and to experience our lanterns lit up in the darkness!

So there was the extent of the busy wedding week!

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!