Website Warbles

I've been doing a lot of wedding website trial runs lately. I started out with The Knot, moved onto WedSpace, and ended up with My Wedding, which I still wasn't happy with. Now I don't need the créme de la créme when it comes to a website, but I like to customize. And make things colorful and personalized. And, I don't know, justify something to center if I really want to. None of the aforementioned websites were giving me that option, and I was getting mad. Fox growl.

So then I thought, what if I recreate a Blogger (or WordPress) site to make it look like a normal website, and have that be my wedding website? GENIUS. I basically know how to edit and format Blogger to make it do something close to what I want, so I gave that a go. Then I kept hearing how fantabulous WordPress was, so I tried that. And failed miserably. I don't know you all do it.

Back to Blogger I went.

I'd like to say I was relatively successful.. here's a preview of what I have so far!

It's still a work in progress, but I have to say that I'm kind of loving it. Our colors will (should) run along this general theme:

So it's kind of all matchy-matchy with the background, which I love. Now to actually get some content on there, besides my beautiful shining face. Hah.

Do you have a wedding website? What host site did you ultimately decide to use?

How engaging!

So I discovered this gem of a Groupon deal last April - a $425 one-hour photo session with Brooke Bready Photography for the low price of $65. That's a discount of 85!%!! Craziness. I was checking out the amazing deal, loving Brooke's amazing photography, and ultimately decided it was the perfect opportunity to use for an engagement photo session.

The kicker? I wasn't engaged yet.

Here was the rationale behind my thinking: we were on track to get engaged/be married, the Groupon was good for a year (and if we weren't engaged by then, well then, grrrrr), and if for some reason I actually was not engaged by April of 2011, I would get my friends together and have a BFF glam photo shoot. Genius. And no, I did not tell Mr. Foxy about buying this for fear of appearing psychotic.

However! It must have been good luck or something, because 9 days later, on April 18th, he proposed. I was able to schedule a session for September with Brooke, admitted my pre-engagement engagement-photo purchase to Foxy, had a good laugh, and was so excited to get our pictures taken at Brookside Gardens in Maryland.

Then I found out three days before the shoot that Brookside was hosting a "Children's Day" and the park would really not be the ideal place to have an engagement photo session. They basically denied our permit request (not that we really needed one anyway..) and I was kind of bummed. After some searching online, I found some great e-pics of other couples by the C&O canal in the Georgetown area of DC. This was already one of my favorite parts of DC, and figured it would actually be better than Brookside Gardens because of the water, unique architecture, little bridges, etc. So off we went!

I got a CD of the pictures within two weeks (longest two weeks everrrrrr) - here are some of my faves!

This is honestly one of my favorites, because Foxy and I are almost permanently making

weird faces at each other. It's how we communicate ;)

I like to call this our "indie/alternative CD cover shot"

This one has a funny story: we were on the corner of M St and Wisconsin Ave (very busy intersection) at 7pm on a Saturday night.. so yea, it was busy and we were trying not to die with all the people and the cars but still look cute. So as we are being disruptive to all the people walking by, one guy just comes in and starts moving my body and posing me, telling my "ANGLE YOUR BODY IN!" "STEP YOUR FRONT FOOT FORWARD!" "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!" "LOOK AT HIM AND SMILE!" There we were, feeling like awkward turtles to begin with (poor Foxy, this was like nightmare central for him) and this guy just starts yelling at us (in front of like a hundred people) that we suck at posing. He eventually gave up and walked away. And this was the result. Slight fail, I think. Oh well!

Definitely love them!

So the question is.. did you "preplan" your engagement at all?!

I do declare

So this is completely random and not so much wedding related, but about a year ago, Mr. Foxy and I reached a new level in our relationship. We took the big leap.. into domestic partnership! (Cue applause.)

We decided that since I would be going from a desk job with good health insurance to one as a massage therapist with likely little or no health insurance at all, we'd add me to Foxy's plan through his job. In order to do so (and since we aren't getting married for another 8+ months), we had to fill out this fun little form:

I mostly get a kick out of being able to choose from the terms fiancé or domestic partner, and criteria #5: we swear that we are not related by blood closer than would bar marriage in the state in which we reside. 

But I guess it has to be said!

Anyone else out there reaping the benefits of domestic partnership before marriage?