Kickin' it into High Gear

So now that our wonderfully relaxing 3-day weekend is over, we're ready to kick into high gear! We have 8.5 weeks to go until we're home in Maine (yes that's just 57 days away!) and just 11.5 weeks until the big day. So, that's basically 8 weeks left in Korea to get all the projects done that we've assigned as "do while here" as opposed to "do in Maine".

After a bit of crane-ing last night (count as of right now: 220), Matt and I hashed out a more detailed list of everything we need to get done here. It amounts to about 12 projects, some big and some small. With only 8 weeks left we're designating a few projects each week that we need to tackle in order to get it all done in time. The pressure is on but we're feeling re-energized and ready to go!

I know at some point we'll get burnt out, so the way I see it we should try to get as much done now while we're in a motivated and productive mood than leave it until later when we just want to throw the towel in!

Here are just some of the things we'll be working on while in Korea:
1. Folding 1000 cranes (duh) and then sticking a needle through them to prepare them for stringing
2. Finishing the final touches on the ceremony program and printing them here.
3. Designing and printing seating cards
4. Designing and printing tags for the mason jars (for people to write their names on)
5. finalizing the ceremony readings and music
6. finalizing the cute poems/sayings that we're having at various tables around the reception



Along with the projects, we've both being doing well with exercise and I've started a diet this week. I've been bringing my own lunch to school (salads, sandwiches sans bread, etc.) and have cancelled the school lunch fee for the next two months. That way I won't tempt myself with white rice and salty soups and fried meat!

crane-in' at my desk ^^

Destress: Camping for the long weekend

While we were planning to pack in a lot of hiking and sightseeing into this 3 day weekend, Matt and I instead found ourselves hanging around our absolutely beautiful campsite and doing nothing but relaxing, swimming and meditating. It a few words: it was just what we needed.

We drove down early Saturday morning to Jirisan National Park, the largest and oldest park in Korea. While it boasts of having 12 campgrounds, we chose a small, walk-in campground in hopes of having some peace and quiet. We knew we didn't want a car camping experience with hundreds if not thousands of Koreans!

What we arrived at was a small sliver of paradise: a 20-tent campground located across a small suspension bridge on the other side of a river littered with human sized boulders. The facilities were great, the campground was crowded, but not disgustingly so, and the sites even had platforms!

We nestled into a corner sight against the forest with the bubbling river below.

our set-up

When we weren't listening to music, meditating on the rocks, swimming in the frigid water or napping, we were off exploring Daewonsa Temple, a temple in the mountains of the park a mile or so up a long and twisted road. It was Buddha's Birthday after all, and we wanted to pay our respects and pay for a lantern and a prayer:

our lantern: for a happy marriage and world peace :)

praying

us at the national treasure pagoda

Sunday night we took a drive around the countryside on the outskirts of the park:

rural Korea

rice paddies

With stress-free minds we returned back to work today, ready to take on the world! :)

My Life in Google Docs

So this is a shameless plug for how incredibly awesome Google Docs is. Sorry, Microsoft Excel, but you're too difficult, have too many buttons, and your spreadsheets can't be shared and worked on by two people simultaneously!

Google Docs has been a Godsend with all of this wedding planning. I have made more spreadsheets in the past few months than I have in my entire life. To be clear though, I always hated making spreadsheets, so maybe in my past life (re: before the awesomeness that is google docs) I probably would have been doing anything in my power not to make them.

But alas, Google has made it so easy for Matt and I to make and update lists and share ideas. Not only has it been helpful between us as a couple, but Matt's sister Heather created a spreadsheet for all of the wedding projects which is updated by a few of us across the globe!

to do lists

projects

Along with the to-do spreadsheets and the project shopping lists, we also made an RSVP spreadsheet for when they start rolling in this week!

As each guest replies we will keep track of whether they are attending, how many are in their party, whether or not they want vegetarian meals, etc.

Thanks to Google Docs, my life is a whole lot easier!

"ringing" in the weekend!

After a few hiccups, we were able to finally order our rings last night!

I have been eying my wedding band for a while now, knowing that I wanted a band lined with small diamonds to accent my solitaire ring. I actually remember trying one on at the mall with my mom when I was home---16 months ago-- days after getting engaged! Like I said, it wasn't hard for me to decide that this is what I wanted:

French cut pave set wedding band. I wanted my band to be a little smaller in width than my engagement ring and to be more delicate, and this ring is the thinnest possible option they have with the pave set diamonds. My hands are very small and my fingers are pretty chubby, so I thought a bigger ring would look weird. I can't WAIT until I go home and get to try it on for size! 

Matt's ring was also a fairly easy decision. We did some research on groom's rings since neither of us knew anything about them. After much searching, Matt realized he just wanted a basic, comfort fit band in white gold to match my set. After a few trips to get his finger sized, we were good to go and ordered this ring to go with mine:

Heather, Matt's sister, will be receiving them in the mail, keeping them safe and more importantly taking pictures and showing us what they look like!!

ETA is May 31st.

 Next week is filled with awesomeness:

-it's a 4 day week since we have Monday off for Buddha's birthday (thanks, Buddha!)
-The invitations will arrive in Maine Tuesday or Wednesday and maybe even get to guests by Friday
-The rings will arrive next Thursday!

Inivites: Check!

After literally MONTHS of working on the invitations, they have left the coop and are now en route to the USA:

It's strange not having them laying around the living room!

They were shipped to my mom who will then put the gorgeous cherry blossom stamps on them and mail them out locally (because she's awesome like that!).

There is only one Fed Ex location in Daejeon, and although it cost us a pretty penny, it's worth it to get the tracking and priority mail. Can you imagine if these were lost or damaged?

ETA is Tuesday or Wednesday since it's a 3 day holiday weekend. Hopefully guests will start receiving the invites as early as next Friday, and you know what that means: I can post detailed pics soon after!

It's a Girl!

Last night we went to bed in anticipation for an early morning phone call from Matt's sister, Heather. She had a check up appointment yesterday and found out that she's having a little baby girl! Her name will be June Ann, named after their grandmother. So cute!

We are more than thrilled at the news! While everyone (including us) thought it was going to be a boy, we are ecstatic that June will be joining the family in mid-October.

Congrats to Heather! I can't wait to be an aunt, and Matt is pretty excited about being an uncle and setting up the crib in August when we're home. Time to start shopping for cute little dresses here in Korea!

Just another reason why we're so blessed, and why 2012 is turning out to be quite the amazing year for us!!

Inviting the Prez

It's no secret that I am very fond of our current president. Think what you want about whether or not he's done a good job, the man has overcome a lot of obstacles and is quite frankly amazing. He has been such an inspiration to me, and pictures of him with his family, pictures of him smiling and laughing with little kids, oh-my-god I can't help but smile and be happy myself. I saw him speak in Bangor when I was up at the University of Maine in 2008 when he was campaigning. I met (and shook hands with) Hillary Clinton on the same day as well, but just being in the same room as Obama made my head spin. The amount of positive energy coming from that crowd and that man you could almost reach out and grab.

So of course it's natural that I invite him to my wedding ^^

1600 Pennsylvania Ave, please!

 I heard that if you send a wedding invitation to the president, the secretary's office that deals with letters will mail you back a congratulation letter. Yip Yip!

Now if he'd only take some time out of his busy schedule to head up to Maine with the fam, that would be awesome sauce, haha.

Final Color Palette

Long engagements mean that you have plenty of time to decide on a color scheme, change it, decide on another one only to change that months later.

We always knew from the beginning that we wanted either blue or green or both in our color palette. While we changed our minds a few times in the first 6 months of the engagement, we settled in blues and white pretty early on. What I hadn't intended was for a few other accent colors to work their way into our scheme all sneaky like:

Light brown has worked it's way in to the palette the way of twine. We decided that our pocket-fold invitations were missing "something". We hoed and hummed about it until a little piece of twine laying around the house happened to seal the deal. We are also incorporating twine into many other aspects of the reception, but don't want to spoil ALL of the details! In the past few weeks we have also really liked the idea of burlap, which is close in color to twine. We will use burlap on the tables, as well as in a few signs.

The gray worked it's way in when Claire designed our save the dates. While we didn't ask for it, she chose the light gray as one of the text colors and we ended up loving it.
Fin

Flowers for the Prez

DUDE.

Just found out (even though it was a few months ago) that Broadturn Farm, the people who are doing the flowers for our wedding, made bouquets for President Obama!

He came to a fundraising dinner at the Portland Museum of Art. Stacy and the rest of the crew at the farm made these absolutely stunning bouquets for the event (these pictures are from Broadturn Farm Blog: www.broadturnfarm.com) :

Oyster shells decorated the vases

 So much gorgeousness!!!

How awesome is this?! I am getting so excited about all of the floral arrangements for our wedding!

Labor of Love

After weeks and weeks of prep and construction, the invitations are complete and ready to be mailed! When I say complete, I mean all of the invites that will be sent together in a box to the States are ready to go, around 85 envelopes. We still have to make a few more for our friends here in Korea. But it's all good! We are so happy of the end result and can't wait until people start RSVPing to our wedding!

Doesn't look like much, but it's months of work!

an up close picture of my family's invite

Just one of the many surfaces in our house covered in projects

As we sat on the couch tying the twine around the pocket-folds and putting them into envelopes, Matt stopped mid-tie and exclaimed how crazy it is to think we'll be getting responses back from people soon. While we're not going to have traditional RSVP cards coming back to us in the mail, we'll still be receiving emails and messages from my mother, which will be so exciting. It's been very hard for us to keep focus sometimes since it's been such a long engagement, but now that the invitations are going out the reality of it all is really seeming to bombard us in the face, in an anxious but thrilling way of course!

Now that the invitations are done for now, it's time to get back to folding cranes! We only have 120, so we have a longgggg ways to go! Time to get crackin'!

Wedding Gift Surprise!

The other day I walked into work and found a lovely package on my desk all the way from Hong Kong. Our friend Anne, who came to Korea with us in 2010, sent us a wedding gift! Being in Korea, we didn't expect any  gifts until we arrived home, so it was nice a nice surprise!

really cute wrapping paper!

Receiving a wedding gift reminds us more and more how close the wedding really is! Just 93 days to go now. We will be home in Maine in 72. As the days go by we're getting more and more excited about not just the wedding, but about being home and enjoying 4 weeks with friends and family. Some of our friends and family we haven't seen for more than two years! We've only been back to visit once, more than 15 months ago. We haven't enjoyed a summer in Maine since 2009, and for most of that year Matt was hiking the AT and I was with him. For all of these reasons, we're starting to make lists of things we want to do while we're home. Despite all of the wedding planning, it's a goal of ours to pack in as many Maine summer experiences as possible. Hopefully we can find the time!


In other news, we are finally purchasing the wedding bands. We were supposed to almost a month ago, but we had some issues figuring out Matt's sizing and choosing the right style of band. Now we (hopefully) have everything squared away! Once we buy them I will post pics!

Happy almost weekend! <3

Camping Adventures

Our goal last week was to work on the invitations every night so that we could reward ourselves by going camping on the weekend. While we didn't finish all 100 invites, 85 are DONE and are awaiting envelopes. We're pretty proud! Tonight (Monday) we will hopefully finish the invites, print the remaining addresses and then assemble them into a box to be shipped stateside!!

Saturday night we "stealth" camped right next to a beach in the northwest on an island called Anmyeondo. By stealth camp, we mean that camping wasn't permitted, but we did it anyways, and no one bothered us!

After a long walk on the beach we enjoyed a beer while watching the amazing neon blue phosphorescence in the waves. It was pretty surreal. After a while Matt wanted to try talking some pictures of it, opening his shutter for about 75 seconds to capture the light in pitch darkness. The pictures came out great, but they turned out even better once I decided to try something with the flashlight mode on my itouch:

Matt heart Dani

August 18 2012

awww (matt made this one)

How cool are these pictures?! We didn't think they would come out, but it was so much fun! You can also see the blue phosphorescence in the background. It's amazing how great these pics turned out considering it was PITCH BLACK!

Back to wedding planning tonight after a relaxing, wonderful weekend away with my birthday boy and soon to be husband :D

Cherry Blossom Stamps

I love how fitting it is that I just ordered "Forever" Stamps for our wedding invitations!  It was a toss-up between the red and white "LOVE" stamps and the Washington D.C cherry blossom stamps. It wasn't too hard to make my decision though, I mean, aren't they freakin' beautiful?

Not only are they pretty, but considering I have to use two stamps due to the weight of the invites, the entire picture will be put on each envelope, instead of just half. Also, the blue matches nicely with the text color of the addresses, so I knew I had a winner. Red and white "love" stamps don't go too well with our color scheme.

I soooo wish I were home to put the stamps on myself, but my awesome mother has that task and will hopefully take a picture of the finished product for us to see! She is the best!

Speaking of invitations, Matt is getting out early from school today due to a field trip and I might sneak out a bit early myself so that we can FINISH the invites before going camping tomorrow! We worked really had every night all week so that we could celebrate Matt's birthday by going beach camping.

So close!

Sneak peek pictures to come of the invites!

100.

Well, folks, it's been swell these past 477 days, but now it's time to get serious. From tomorrow we now have DOUBLE DIGITS UNTIL THE WEDDING!

That's right. 100 days from today I'll be walking down the aisle in a white dress on my way to marrying Matt, my other half.

We celebrated by making each other some pretty sweet cards:

Can you guess who's whose?

Matt's is on the left, mine is on the right. Matt layered paper and used a box cutter to cut out the letters and hearts, which looks pretty sweet! On the inside of the giant card are "100 reasons why I'll love you forever". Pretty damn awesome!!!!

Mine is a collage of pictures with some quotes and a letter written in the middle. I also wrote a list of "100 reasons why I love you" which I printed out and gave to him with the card. Great minds think alike, and although it's not genius to come up with that idea, the things we came up with were nowhere near ordinary. They all reflect us personally and are such a pleasure to read...tear jerking really ;)


Just a quick update on the invitations:

>Everything has been printed except the addresses on the envelopes.
>Everything (4 different cards) have been cut out
>80 pockets have been glued into the pocket-folds and have set overnight under books. We have around 20 left to go.
>We are halfway through backing some of the cards that will go into the pocket. We're backing them with card-stock, so we've been doing a lot of double sided taping!

We still have to finish the pockets, backing the cards, taping the invite into the pocket-fold, cutting twine, and printing addresses, but we're almost there! Those things are all relatively easy compared to what we've been doing!

It feels AMAZING to have these almost ready to go. The anticipation is rising!


WAHOO 100 DAYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Happy Good

A message from my Vice Principal this morning on our messenger chat system:
"Be Happy Good, Dani!"

I love this woman (yes, she's a woman, which is Korea is no small feat at her level). She knows how to make me smile.

I am so incredibly blessed to be working with some of the nicest people on the planet. While most teachers have connected with at least one of their Korean co-teachers, I have been fortunate enough to connect with not only my 7 English co-teachers, but also the majority of 3rd grade teachers, and most of all, my vice principal. It's such a comfort knowing that every day when I come to school, to a building with over 1200 Korean kids and adults as the only foreigner, that I am taken care of. They have understood and responded appropriately to my bouts of homesickness, Matt's TKD injuries, family hardships, wedding planning/stress, banking matters, vacation dates, my own illnesses, and every other concern you can think of. I have never once had to beg to stay home sick from school, or leave a few minutes early to transfer money home, or bring Matt to the doctor's for an exam.

While that may not sound like a big deal, I have heard of different scenarios across the board when it comes to teaching in Korea, but most of them aren't entirely positive. Once I realized that this wasn't necessarily normal, I told myself to be thankful and to give back as much as I can. This has meant bringing in food to the teacher's office to share, staying late for open classes, making 175 page reference books, editing tests, and judging contests with a big smile on my face. Everything I do here at school I do with a smile, and I think people know how much I love it here.

It will be hard to leave this place, for sure.

Feeling a bit nostalgic today. Even though I have 10 more months on my contract, only 7 of those are actual teaching months. August I will be in Maine and January and February are a swirl of vacation, a few camps, and desk-warming. My school just finished the first semester's midterm exams last week. That means that everything is downhill from here on out. It's ridiculous how fast the time flies once one exam has taken place. YIKES!

Speaking of time flying...we're almost down to double digits until the wedding!!!!!

The Stress is Rising..

Looking at my calendar, I can't believe it's already May. I can't believe that Matt and I have already been engaged for almost 16 months, and that we only have a mere 3 months left until the wedding. While I am beyond excited, my stress levels are starting to rise! While I have a lot of things to get done between now and then, it is my personal wellness goal to sit back and reflect each night on how blessed I am, and how great it's going to be to marry Matt, the love of my life. This is important for me, because while I can't see myself doing this, I am very worried about transforming into the dreaded "Bridezilla".

Since the beginning of our engagement I knew that I wanted my wedding to be as stress-free as possible. Many people might think that in order to have a stress-free wedding you shouldn't go the extra mile for various projects, and while I agree to some extent, my mile-long project list is not what I meant when I envisioned stress-free wedding planning. I mostly meant I wanted the process, the traditions and expectations to be stress-free. I think up to this point it's been relatively smooth-sailing. I was very laid back about bridesmaids dresses and their responsibilities, letting them ultimately decide on their look. Instead of assigning various members of my family and friends to carry out projects for me, I created a list where people could sign up if they felt like it was something they wanted to do. At every point in the process I have had an open-minded approach, which has served me well thus far. It's not going to change anytime soon, but now that things are coming down to the wire, I am feeling stressed about everything falling into place.

Two nights ago I had my 4th wedding nightmare, the most realistic and involved one yet. In every dream nothing seems to go as planned. While I am not walking down the aisle naked, everything else is wrong. The flower lady doesn't show up, thinking she was booked for another wedding. Sarah, my maid of honor, quickly french braids my hair right before I walk down the aisle because for some reason I haven't even showered and no one thought to make an appointment. Nothing is set up, the tables don't have centerpieces or tablecloths. I am a wreck in this dream, crying my eyes out because half of guests don't show up, it's in a completely different location, and Matt is nowhere to be found. While it's just a dream it's scary waking up in a pool of sweat.

I am not sure if some of this stress is due to the fact that I'm in Korea and can't communicate face-to-face with those who are part of our wedding, or if I'd feel this way no matter where I was. Regardless, it's hard managing such conflicting emotions: anxiety and pure excitement.

Wish us luck as we start to pull everything together. This weekend Matt and I are staying home, locking the doors (not literally!) and finishing the invitations. Stay tuned for a sneak peek and some more wedding news!