1,000 Cranes

Are we crazy? Crane crazy? Perhaps.
One of our wedding motifs is the origami crane. While origami is traditionally Japanese, the crane is steeped in myth and legend throughout east Asia, including China and Korea. It is said that cranes live for 1,000 years.

In Japan, it is a wedding tradition to make 1,000 origami cranes for good luck. If you do so, then the crane will grant you a wish, and you will live happily in your new marriage.

Since we're planning on incorporating cranes anyways, I thought, what the heck? We mine as well make 1,000 and follow the tradition.

Yes, it can take anywhere from 40-60 hours to make 1,000 cranes by hand. But we will be splitting the work in half, which is nice. Regardless of that, it will still take us a few months. I just ordered the paper for the cranes today. Maybe we will be able to start the project in 2-3 weeks time.

We might be a little crazy, but we're determined. If worse comes to worst and we can't fold all 1,000, we'll still have a butt-load of cranes to use for the reception.

Now, the question is, where will we hang them? Behind the cake? As the backdrop for the homemade photo booth? Dangling around the edges of the tent? No matter where we put them, they need to stick together. 1,000 cranes hanging together is so beautiful and dramatic. I have order a few different shades of blue and white.

Here are some inspiration photos:

Wish us luck! we're going to need hands of STEEL! Pictures to come when the paper arrives :)

Mock-Up Invite

While I can’t spill the beans by showing pictures, I can say that we have finished one complete invitation and it looks AMAZING. All of our visions have come together fantastically. Claire, our designer, is wonderful. We thought the save-the-dates came out really well, but these invites pretty much blow them out of the water.

I’m not sure if I mentioned this or not, but Matt and I designed a pocket-fold for our invites. It involves a lot of pieces, including the invitation itself, a map, an RSVP card of information, and then another little fun component which I won’t spoil!

While we knew it was going to take us a while to put together these invites, making one last night reiterated how much work we really have to do. If only we were home and could have the help of all of our crafty family and friends!

With less than 2 months to go before we mail them home to my mother (who will then mail them to the guests), we are stressing. This coming weekend has now been dubbed “wedding weekend”. Out goal is to cut out all of the pocket folds and begin printing the invites. I have a feeling every weekend from now until July might be dubbed “Wedding weekend” but we’ll see. We now have a CAR that we are just dying to utilize every chance we get, so we’ll have to find a balance between road trips and wedding stuff. Bring it on!

I will take some teaser pics this weekend of the supplies.

Week 2 Complete

Well, another week has come and gone!

This week was also pretty good, although I didn't stick to my goals as much as I would hope. I cheated and had a few coffee drinks throughout the week. Oops!

I ended up doing 4 Turbo Fire workouts and one small hike. I missed a few workouts due to a ridiculously sore stomach and back. Fortunately, I recovered quickly and kept plowing through.

While I wanted to weigh myself at the jimjilbang (spa) this weekend, we didn't end up going. I am now going to wait until the 4 week mark to see my progress.

This week's goals:

Stop drinking calories
Actually do the 6 planned workouts, no excuses

So far, so good!

Ribbons and Lanterns and Trail Mix Oh My!

No matter your budget, it's hard not to get swept up into the monstrosity that is the wedding market. While I could do without ice sculptures, entrances on horseback and fireworks displays, I'm not one to pass up crafty projects that make weddings unique.

It unnerves me a little when couples choose aspects of their weddings that they feel represent them as a couple, only to have people (naysayers) exclaim: "oh, that was so over-done last year" and "lanterns are really over-used and uncreative". While no one has said this to Matt and me (yet), I have read about it enough on plenty of wedding blogs, and I am embarrassed to say that I almost started to fall for this bull crap.

Bottom line is, the wedding planning market is just like any other sales market, they push new colors, textiles, themes each and every year to encourage brides to buy into new trends and therefor (in most cases), spend more money. Because of the sellers, people subconsciously climb on board and then all of a sudden Chinese lanterns (which we're having at our wedding) and mason jars (which we're also having!) are boring.

Fortunately for me, I am a bit stubborn, and after almost falling for all of the negativity, I now don't care, because I happen to LOVE lanterns and mason jars. Despite what we (engaged couples) are fooled to believe, our weddings are going to be unique no matter what we decide to use as decorations.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the majority of people coming to my wedding will have probably never seen at least a few aspects in my wedding, if not all of them. I have never been to a wedding (although I admit I haven't been to very many yet), that had Chinese lanterns, mason jars, paper origami cranes, yard games and a home made photo booth. Have you? It's hard to step back and realize that while I spend countless hours a week pouring through wedding websites and Pinterest, the majority of people aren't immersed in crafty wedding ideas on a day to day basis, and therefor don't come across dozens of mason jar wedding pictures.

No matter what, even if everyone attending my wedding HAS been to a paper crane affair, my wedding is going to be unique, because DUH...it's Matt and my wedding, not anybody else's!

I can't wait to get going on all of these projects in the coming months!

150 DAYS to go! (Matt remembers when there was 450!)

Week 1 Complete

Yeah!

Well week 1 was a bit stressful (to say the least!) I managed to stick to my goals and all is well with the world!

Last week I did:
5 Turbo Fire workouts
a 2.5 mile river walk

While I had aimed at 6 TF workouts, Saturday night's was cancelled due to extra long family Skype sessions. I didn't mind one bit, and made it up by a nice long river walk the following morning with Matt.

While I wasn't thinking too consciously about my diet last week (just focusing on getting back to regular exercise), I do want to focus more on it this week.

My goals for this week:
-Turbo Fire as scheduled (6 nights)
-No calories from drinks (no soda, coffee with sugar/cream, juice, etc)
-Be conscious of what I am eating

Week 3 I will focus more on dieting as well.

It takes 4 straight weeks of something to make it routine, so I am going to mainly focus on exercise for the first 4 weeks, and then once I get going I will really start to concentrate on the diet. I know in the past that if I start out exercising a ton, keeping a food journal, calorie counting and taking out a lot of my favorite foods from my diet, that I tend to fail. Now I have 19 weeks to go, I can pace myself a little, start out with exercise and go from there.

Cheers to week 2! Now only if this weather would warm up, I am just itching for cherry blossoms and sunny hikes. This past weekend was crappy weather-wise, we couldn't even get a hike in.

Staying optimistic! ^^

48 Hour Freak Out

While most wedding planning experiences don't go as horribly as movies sometimes portray (think Bridesmaids), no one is immune to unforeseeable complications.

Last week was one of the most stressful in my life.

In one sentence: the church where we're getting married cancelled our wedding. Yes, they CANCELLED it. What do I mean? I mean that my mother reserved the church more than a year ago, right after we got engaged, and somehow they lost our reservation in their books. I am guessing they forgot to pencil us in to the new 2012 calendar. That's what we get for booking early!

The only reason why I found this out was because I emailed the priest to double check about the ceremony time. We were thinking 2:00 or 2:30 would work since there is a 4:00PM mass on Saturdays. The priest responded quickly and told us that a new rule had been put in place that weddings could start no later than 1PM on Saturdays due to confessions etc. While surprised, we weren't too concerned. We could make 1PM work.

Then, about an hour later, we get another email. "Sorry, but someone is already booked for 1PM on August 18th, 2012. The only available slot is 11:00AM."

WHAT?!?!?!

Mind you, this email came to us at about 1:30 in the morning, just as I was drifting off to sleep. We checked emails one last time, and there it was. To get an email like this is devastating. 11:00AM? There is NO way we could make that work with a late afternoon BBQ reception. Another booking? How in the world could somebody reserve the 1PM slot when we booked the church more than 17 months before the wedding?

What was truly aggravating was that my mother, who has been the liason between the church and us, was NEVER informed about different time slots. She has been attending mass almost every Sunday. She knows the women who work in the rectory, she has known them for years. She has had plenty of conversations with the deacon, and no one ever mentioned that there were two time slots.

To say that we were pissed, upset, devastated, was an understatement. I don't think Matt has ever seen me cry that hard. Looking back on this situation it seems foolish of me to react that way, but I just couldn't believe it. I was sobbing, Matt was growling with anger, and we got just a few measly hours of sleep that night.

After my mom met with the deacon and the other residing priest, they agreed that it was their fault entirely and decided to ask the other couple if they could move their wedding, since we reserved first. While we weren't too optimistic, it was all they could offer. If the other couple wasn't willing, we would have to settle for the 11AM slot and re-structure our entire reception.

48 hours after getting the first bits of news, we got a few happy emails from my mom and the priests letting us know that the other couple has graciously agreed to move their ceremony to 12PM so we could have ours at 2:30! Not only did they move their ceremony, but the church has agreed to let us have a later ceremony that we would have had otherwise.

Things do happen to work out for the best in the end. It is hard in the heat of the moment to see past all of the anger, frustration, and complete dismay, but things did settle themselves out. Matt and I had a long talk during this fiasco about the possibility of an earlier wedding, and we came to the conclusion that we were going to have an amazing day regardless.

One thing I've learned is to try to stay calm and understand that things will go wrong during the planning process, but that doesn't mean things won't work out. A wedding is a wedding!

Week 1: Commencing

Last week was our initial start to the M & D Wedding Challenge. We made a board with categories (diet, exercise, etc) and allotted stars to each one according to a simple rubric we made. We have a total number of stars that we're trying to reach each week. Since last week was the start-up week, we didn't hit our goals, but that's OK because now we know what we need to change to make improvements.

Last week I exercised 4 times: two Turbo Fire workouts, a 2 mile walk on the river and a hike to a Buddhist temple.

This week is considered Week 1 because I am starting the Turbo Fire schedule. I am going to follow it strictly for the entire 20 weeks, that is my goal. If I start on week 1 this week, I will finish the week we go home to Maine, perfect! I am holding myself accountable by posting weekly updates on the blog, every Monday night I will touch base regarding to Turbo Fire.


The two  TF workouts I did last week were awesome. I plowed right through them! I was a little stiff the next day, but nothing bad. I am excited to get back into 6 days a week of intense HIIT (high intensity interval training) workouts!

GOAL 1 for Week 1: To follow the schedule exactly, no skipped workouts.(6 days/week)
GOAL 2 for Week 1: To add an additional form of exercise once (a walk or a hike)

LET'S DO THIS! ^^

Organization is Key

Wedding planning, at least the budgeting aspect, is a lot like travel planning. I have a lot of experience planning trips. I spent 12 years (since the age of 8) obsessively planning trips that I never ended up going on, and the past 6 years planning ones that I have. 

Budgeting for this wedding is much like budgeting for a big trip. Matt and I have been fortunate to have gone on three big trips since moving to Korea, four if you include going home for 3 weeks last year. While some people might think we are just swimming in money, that’s far from the truth. We have to strategically budget for every single aspect of the trip, starting months before departure. Thankfully, this experience has helped us tremendously. While the wedding is a super-budgeting monster, taking much more preparation, we have the necessary tools for successfully ensuring that everything gets paid, and gets paid in time (fingers crossed!)

Now that we have almost 5 months to go, every single dollar is accounted for. While most of our money is spent before pay day even arrives, this wedding is taking that to an exponential level. We have charts for the next 5 paychecks telling us when deposits are due, when to buy certain items, whether or not a project has to be done in Korea or the USA. The exchange rate and other living-outside-of-the-country hassles roar their ugly heads making the simple concept of “how much money do we have?” a lot harder than it has to be. While we can’t do anything about it, it’s frustrating when every month the exchange rate is different. Some months we lose more money, some months we don’t. We never know if what we want to send home will be the right amount. This has always been a pain since moving here, but now it’s a little more important. Every dollar, as one knows, counts.

While it seems unnerving, it’s also good in a way that we’re getting so close. Now we can sit back and have a pretty good grasp of our financial situation. When the wedding was months and months away, it was hard to tell where we’d be when it finally rolled around, it was difficult to budget.

It’s so exciting to know that our next big “trip” is this wedding. We were engaged almost 14 months ago. We’ve had two big trips between then and now, and so the countdown has always included other big ticket items. But now there is nothing left standing between us and MAINE and our WEDDING. To say that we’re getting anxious is an understatement!

Bridesmaid Dresses

Yay! So we (the girls and I) are 99% sure that they will be choosing between these dresses for the wedding. They are all from J.Crew and are made from silk chiffon. While we haven't decided 100% on this color (casablanca blue), we will decide soon. There is also another shade called matisse blue that we are also considering.

It's really exciting to make the final decisions on the dresses, just because I think they add so much color to the wedding and I think my girls will look fantastic in them! Once we make the final decision, we will start looking at suits for the guys.

Here are some pictures. I am letting the girls choose whatever style they want. Hopefully they will choose different ones, but no matter what I think it will look great :)

Now just picture these dresses with bouquets similar in color with some more whites and greens:

This picture was my original inspiration for practically the entire wedding.

AHH this is so exciting! :)

Flights = Booked!

Big news! Our first major purchase (and arguably the most important one) has been made! We are officially showing up to our own wedding: the tickets are booked.

If you've been following my blog you would remember how upsetting the entire flight search was getting to me. While we did not score unbelievable flights, we did manage to find ones $400 cheaper (total) than the original flights that have been showing up for weeks.

The downside?

They are round-trip into Manchester, New Hampshire, which is around a 2 hour drive from home. So they're definitely not as convenient as Portland Jetport that's a mere 20 minutes from my parent's house.

Along with the distance, the timing isn't perfect either. We get in really late at night (12:30AM) and our flight back to Korea departs at 5:20AM. Both are extremely annoying since the airport is so far away.

Regardless, they were cheaper, and the actual itinerary times are much shorter than what we're used to. The total time to Manchester is only 20 hrs, and the flight back to Korea is 23 hrs. Might sound like a lot, but usually we deal with 27+. We were lucky in that we don't have any long (more than 3 hour) layovers, which is nice.

and BONUS! The big flights to and from Korea are with Asiana Airlines, a Korean airline that is a little fancier than what we're used to. We're excited to see how it is.

We're both estatic that the flights have been booked, primarily because it was both making us a little nuts. We were constantly checking for lower fares only to find that prices were consistently rising. Everyone back home has been talking about the gas prices and summer increases, so we figured we couldn't wait much longer than now.

Even if a cheaper flight appears, we won't know about it because we are DONE searching, and can put that at peace.

WE'RE GOING HOME IN 5 MONTHS!!!

Wedding Challenge: Day 1

It’s the first day of a new year at school. Thankfully I have no classes (I got less than 4 hours of sleep last night). Besides the start of the school year, Matt and I are also kick starting our M&D Wedding Challenge, whatever that means! We wanted to jump back into regular exercise and home cooking again after we got back from vacation, but we ended up getting sick for seriously 3 weeks. Excuses aside, we’re ready to roll. Matt won’t be exercising for the first few days due to recent LASEK (laser eye surgery), but we’ve got a nice healthy menu planned and our pantry is stocked! 

I will be starting Turbo Fire again on a strict schedule. I have almost 5 months to go before the big day, and conveniently the program lasts 20 weeks which will put me about a month out from the wedding. Then I can hopefully concentrate on toning up.

Last time that I did Turbo Fire on a schedule I lost 8 pounds in 4 weeks and significant inches from my waist.  Then I took off for vacation to Malaysia, so I obviously got off the exercise wagon. I am really excited to start again on the scheduled calendar instead of a few workouts here and there. 

Those who know me well know that I work best under pressure. While I ended up with pretty decent grades in college, I procrastinated until the very last second. I don’t like sleepless nights either, so I would start studying the night before an assignment around 7PM and finish around midnight. It worked well for me!

I also wait until the night before to pack before a trip. It doesn’t matter if it’s a weekend trip away or a 4 week trip home. 

So now I am almost 5 months out from my wedding and can no longer put off the big push to diet and exercise. While we don’t eat a lot of terrible food, the focus will be to eat at home during the week and try to fill our plates with the right proportion of food (the new Food Pyramid if you will).

Wish us luck as we embark on 5 intense months of planning, healthy eating, exercise, and meditation. It’s going to be crazy from here on out!

By the way, I can’t believe I started this blog with 15 months to go.