Wedding Report

So I do have a reason I haven't written about my wedding day. I wanted to put up pictures, but I didn't have any yet, so I've been procrastinating. I found some wedding pictures on my photographer's blog so here you go. It was the most perfect day of my life.

We decorated for the reception the night before the wedding. I didn't want the reception to look like it was on a basketball court, even though it was so I had to do some improvising. The reception was held at the oldest LDS church in Mesa. It's an old Spanish-style church with an entrance into an open air courtyard before you get to the doors to the gym. It is so cute. In order to make the gym look like more like a ballroom than a basketball court, I (along with the help of some great friends) strung up white Christmas lights all over the ceiling and then draped a thin cream colored fabric across the whole ceiling to give the illusion of a tent. It turned out so good. My colors were Cranberry Red and Cream. The tables were draped in crushed velvet red tablecloths with mammoth white calla lily centerpieces. It was simple, but classic looking. I loved it. The tables also had candles, a small cream fabric center and red rose petals. There was a dance floor on one side of the room with the tables on the other. The refreshment tables were in the center of the room. I hung clusters of lighted white paper lanterns on each side of the room. Okay, I'm realizing that I'm not describing this very well, but I thought it was perfect and beautiful.

The day was PERFECT! I slept in a little, then got up and Brandon and I went over to my mom's house for a late breakfast. Most of the family from out of town was there so it was good to hang out with everyone. About noon, I went home and took a long bubble bath. At two, my beauty team (THANK YOU ANNELL AND SARA!!!) came over to get me ready. It was so much fun. By the way, Brandon had been staying at my house and I had been staying at Jill's or my parent's house, so Brandon was getting ready in the room down the hall. Then my mom came over and we all left for the temple.

The ceremony was perfect as well. I can't believe they fit so many people in the sealing room. I think there were over 70. In fact, Brandon and I were waiting a floor above the sealing room and could see as everyone was filing into the room. I never thought it would end. The sealer was so sweet and sat and talked to us right before the sealing. I was so overcome with emotion. I had never been happier in my whole life. During the sealing, I couldn't even say "Yes" when I was supposed to because I was crying. I think Brandon thought I was having second thoughts! :) Not really, but I knew with my whole heart that I was marrying the right person in the right place at the right time and that I was the luckiest woman in the universe.

The reception was so much fun! We started with a family and close friends dinner with the most delicious food - chicken cordon bleu, green beans wrapped in bacon, garlic mashed red potatoes and salad and rolls. Yummy! My mom made all the food and it was much better than any caterer. After dinner, the reception started. We decided not to have a line and that was the best decision! We just walked around and talked to people and danced when we wanted to. Because we started everything so late in the day, I wasn't tired and could just enjoy myself. It really couldn't have been more perfect.

After the reception, Brandon's aunt chauffeured us to the hotel in a very expensive Mercedes. All of my siblings and cousins had chipped in to get a room at a nice hotel that they had scattered rose petals and kisses throughout. It was the PERFECT DAY!!!

Funny news

BIKER FAILS TO NOTICE MISSING LEG

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese biker failed to notice his leg had been severed below the knee when he hit a safety barrier, and rode on for more than a mile, leaving a friend to pick up the missing limb.
The 54-year-old office worker was out on his motorcycle with a group of friends in the city of Hamamatsu, west of Tokyo, on Monday, when he was unable to negotiate a curve in the road and bumped into the central barrier, the Mainichi Shimbun said.
He felt excruciating pain, but did not notice that his right leg was missing until he stopped at the next junction, the paper quoted local police as saying.
The man and his leg were taken to a hospital, but the limb had been crushed in the collision, the paper said.

*Commentary - WHAT???!!!??? I don't even know where to start with this one. How do you not notice if your leg is missing???

BLIND DRIVER CAUGHT AGAIN

TALLINN (Reuters) - An Estonian man who was caught driving a car even though he is blind has been at it again, police said on Monday, and this time he faces jail.
Police first arrested the man, 20, a week ago.
"We arrested the same blind man driving his car again on Saturday in the town of Torvandi, near Tartu (in southern Estonia)," said Marge Kohtla, a spokeswoman for Tartu police district.
"He was drunk. There were three people in the car with him giving him instructions."
She said police wanted the court to jail the man for 30 days and confiscate his car.

*Commentary - I don't know why, but I find this hilarious. What blind man would even want to drive a car and who are these people that get in a car with a drunk, blind man???

MEME

(Tagged by Jackie) I usually don't do these, but I just feel like it right now, so here goes:

Jobs I've Held:
1. Waitress
2. Stock broker
3. ESL Teacher (English as a Second Language)
4. Lawyer

Places to go for a Weekend Getaway:
1. San Diego
2. Cabin in the mountains
3. Mexico
4. Laying in my bed with my husband and a good book!

Movies I can watch over and Over:
1. Save the Last Dance
2. Sweet Home Alabama
3. How to Lose a Guy in 10 days
4. Return to Me

My Guilty Pleasures:
1. McDonalds Double Cheeseburger (don't laugh)
2. Kick Butt Garlic Bread with Cheese (Oregano's)
3. Carmel Cone Haagen Daaz
4. Pizza Cookie (White Chocolate Macadamia Nut at Oreganos or Peanut Butter at BJ's)

Places I have lived:
1. Mesa, AZ
2. Flagstaff, AZ
3. Beijing, China
4. Atlanta, GA (just for one summer)

T.V. Shows:
1. Gilmore Girls
2. One Tree Hill
3. Anything on HGTV (Home and Garden)
4. Law and Order

Favorite Foods:
1. Anything Italian
2. Anything Mexican
3. Navajo Tacos
4. Dessert

Places I'd Rather Be Right Now:
1. The Beach
2. At Home
3. At a cabin in the woods
4. Wherever my husband is.

People I'm Tagging: ALL OF YOU WHO READ THIS! :)

Favorite website of the week

I decided a couple weeks ago to begin a more healthy lifestyle starting today. I had a big bowl of gelato last night to prepare! :) Anyway, a friend of mine introduced me to a website over a year ago, but I have only recently fell in love with it. It's Spark People and it's my tool to becoming a better me (and a hot body). For a great new clip about Spark People, click here. This website was created by a really rich guy who made a bunch of money by selling his online auction site to e-bay. He recoups some money from advertisers, but has spent over 5 million dollars of his own money just because he wants to help people! It has everything you could want in the way of nutrition. It helps you count your calorie/fat/protein/carb intake by entering what you eat. It automatically calculates everything for you. You can also enter in recipes and it will figure the nutrition value for you. It helps you figure out how to reach goals with both diet and exersise, even creating a fitness schedule for you with recommended exercises. It will put together meal plans everyday if you want. It tracks your weight and measurements. It makes getting into shape so much fun. Plus it gives you points for doing good things. The points don't really mean anything, but who doesn't like getting points? It's strangely motivating. The best part is that it's all free! Okay, I sound like an infomercial, but I'm so excited about my new goals. I will probably be more successful if I make my goals public, so here it goes. I want to reach my target weight by February 1 (I'm not telling you what that is). I am going to try to work out at least 3 times a week, more if I can. I just want to start being nicer to my body. I'm starting off slow tonight by going to Water Aerobics, but I'll ramp up. Wish me luck!!!

Calendar and Fishy

I know, I know. I haven't updated forever. It's just that there's a few big things to blog about and I feel like I can't blog about insignificant things until I catch up. Oh well, I'm giving up. I'll eventually get around to blogging about the wedding, the honeymoon, life as a newlywed, etc. But for now, I can't help but report on some very blog worthy events that happened last night.

The first isn't an event as much as a funny story. Some dear friends of mine are moving to Georgia on Sunday. Thus, I hosted a small gathering with a few friends last night to say goodbye. Holli, one of the friends that's moving away told me that she had a Christmas present for me back in December. It just always seemed that she forgot to bring it every time I saw her over the past few months. She would give me hints though as to what it was and I eventually guessed that it was a desk calendar. So last night, I asked her about the calendar. She looked at me sheepishly while her husband, John, snickered. I guess they had a garage sale in preparation for the move. The calendar was wrapped in Christmas paper and Holli put it out to sell. John told her that no one was going to buy a "mystery" item. Holli won out and the wrapped calendar was purchased. So not only does my friend purchase a gift for me, tell me that she has a gift for me, leaves me in anticipation for months about actually receiving the gift, but then sells it at a garage sale for a quarter. That was the worst Christmas present ever. At least I never even purchased a Christmas gift for her.

There was a random assortment of people at the little dinner party, including one of my most unique friends. Let's call her Hollywood. She's great and a lot of fun, but sometimes quite spastic. Anyway, she saw my beta fish in a bowl of cloudy, low water and promptly chastised me for abusing my fish. I told her if she was so offended by the state of my fish bowl, she could clean it out. She went straight to the kitchen to do so. A brief moment later, I saw my husband go running into the kitchen. Apparently Hollywood had dumped poor fishy down the disposal. Fishy couldn't be reached by the human hand, so sweet husband thought that the only way to get to poor fishy out of the sink would be to shop vac him out. Luckily, Holli lobbied for poor fishy's safety and convinced sweet husband to forgo the shop vac and explore other options. I know you're all on the edge of your seat in anticipation of the ending to this tragic story. Well, poor fishy did, in fact, survive. Apparently, some salad tongs and a flashlight make for a safe, albeit, slightly mangled fishy. He's now still alive after 24 hours, so we're fairly sure he'll make it. I'm pretty sure he laid in the drain for about 20 minutes. Luckily, Hollywood had the foresight to continuously pour water down the drain to keep him alive. Thank you sweet husband for saving my fishy with my salad tongs. It looks like I need a new set of salad tongs now. I know I should have been so scared to loose poor fishy, who's been with me for quite some time, but I was laughing so hard. It was like a Friends episode. Well, we wanted Holli and John to have one last memory of us all before they left.

And some final Arizona words to the Ronquillos. Congratulations John on this new, exciting chapter of your life. You've already accomplished so much in your short life and I know you'll continue to be amazing. Holli, we have so many memories. Thanks for bringing the pictures to remember some of them. Long life rock painitng. I love you both and will miss you, but am very happy for you. Plus, I know you'll come visit me and our friendship is nowhere near the end. Take care of each other! BFF!

I said yes!

Brandon finally asked me to marry him last night and guess what? I SAID YES! This may be confusing to most since we've been engaged for three months and our wedding is in 9 DAYS!, but here's the thing... Because of a whole bunch of timing issues and circumstances with the ring, he's never really had the chance to propose. We just kind of decided to get married and then started planning the wedding. So here's how it went...

I came home from work and he greeted me at the door and invited me in. The house smelled wonderful and there was classical music playing. He led me into the living room where the table is. There was a bouquet of roses on the table along with a candle and dinner. Dinner was ribs and mashed potatoes and wow, was it good. After dinner, he served key lime pie. During dessert he got down on one knee and asked me what I had planned for the rest of my life. I told him that I was planning to spend it with him. It was very sweet and very cute. I'm so excited to get married to him.

Spa Day

I have this fabulous friend named Stacy. She is absolutely wonderful. We met in college, both finance majors. I don't think either one of us could have graduated without the other. In honor of my upcoming wedding, Stacy treated me to a spa day. It was amazing. I'll walk you through from the beginning. We walked in the front door and were immediately treated like royalty. We checked in and were then given a brief tour of the facility. We were then led to the women's area where we were presented with keys to our lockers and comfy slippers. We found a comfy robe in our lockers. Before changing though, we headed to the restaurant for lunch. We split a very yummy chicken basil sandwich and a pesto chicken pizza. It was all delicious. After lunch, we changed into our swimsuits, covered up with our robes and headed first to the jacuzzi. After a brief sit in the jacuzzi, we got out to get ready for our massages. We then headed into the women's lounge to wait for our massages. The women's lounge was a very quiet, peaceful room with super comfy chairs, frosty beverages and soothing music, and a bunch of women laying around in bath robes. Stacy had a maternity massage, while I was treated to a Camelback Signature massage which consisted of aromatherapy, reflexology and hot rock massage...heavenly. After an hour of pure bliss, my massage was over. Sad. We then changed back into our swim suits and headed back out to the pool. The water was the perfect temperature. The weather was great. We ordered fruit smoothies and layed by the pool for a good two hours. The best part about the whole day was spending such great time with Stacy. We just talked and talked and had the best day ever. Thank you Stacy! It was just what I needed in the middle of this chaos called wedding planning.

11 More Days!

Greatest Bridal Shower!

My bridal shower was on Saturday. It was amazing. It was done as a group effort by a few of my friends, namely Jill, Holli, and Janette. It was perfect. The food was amazing. Tons of people came. I got a lot of great gifts including twelve, yes TWELVE pieces of lingerie. Now, some of my friends were very dirty in their gifts, but it was fun. Brandon's aunt was there and she gave me some lingerie, but it wasn't very scandalous. After she saw all the other stuff I got, she was so mad that she didn't get what she really wanted to. She thought that Pollyanna could have worn what she got me. All in all it was a perfect shower and I have the best friends in the whole world who are spoiling me rotten! Thanks girls!

On another topic, (still wedding related), we finally got our invitations in and sent out on Friday. They were delivered at about 11 am on Friday. At noon, Jill, Jackie (my sis-in-law), Lynda (friend), Josh (brother), and Brandon were all at my house folding and stuffing about 400 invitations. They were all in the mail by 1:30 pm. Good job everyone!

We also narrowly avoided another wedding catastrophe this weekend. My flowers are all calla lilies. White ones for the tables and deep red ones for my bouquet (which were a bit difficult to find). Well we ordered them a couple months ago, apparently when my wedding date was still May 19th. I guess we forgot to tell the florist that the date changed to June 2nd because the flowers came in this weekend and the florist wanted to know why we didn't pick them up. Plus, they said they had a hard time finding the red lilies and didn't know if they could get them again by June 2nd. Well my mom talked to the owner of the flower wholesaler today and he didn't make her pay for the first order and said he will be able to get more flowers in time for the real wedding. Isn't it wonderful when people are just nice? Thank you Mr. Flower Man. You are a very nice person.

12 MORE DAYS!!!!

Wedding planning keeps on going...

So, we had a slight catastrophe this week. I was supposed to get the invitations on Monday, but when they came in, they were horrible! The biggest (one of many) was that they spelled Brandon's parents last name wrong. So they are reprinting them and we should get them back on Friday. We have a crew ready to stuff at noon so we can hopefully get them out by Friday afternoon. Most people won't get them before 10 days prior to the wedding, but I guess there's nothing I can do about that. I'm getting my facial today and my spa day on Monday. Don't I have the greatest friends? We finally booked our honeymoon this week. We are spending five nights at a resort in Cancun! Yay! I'm so excited about that. We can lounge around in luxury for a whole week! My bridal shower is this weekend. I'm pretty excited about that too. I think some of my friends might try to embarrass me, but I doubt that's possible. I just can't believe how close it's getting. Before you know it, I'll have been married for 50 years!

23 days to go!

I know I have not been a good blogger. I really want to. I just need to try harder to make time for it. Okay, so I get married in 23 days! Wedding planning started out to be more stressful than I could bear, but I stepped back, took a breath, and relaxed. It's been pretty smooth sailing ever since. I guess the thing that I've noticed so much in this whole process is how little I care about the event and how much I care about the actual marraige. I really could not have chosen a better man. He is truly amazing. He tries so hard to make me happy. He works endlessly on communicating with me and solving all problems before they can cause contention. I'm not saying everything is always perfect, but he tries so hard to understand me and thus inspires me to try hard as well. I never thought I could be this happy.

Okay, now getting past the sappy stuff, I am also excited about the actual wedding day. I have my dress and it's beautiful. It's ivory with darker ivory embroidery and a deep red sash around the wasit. I'm wearing a strand of my great grandmother's pearls for sentiment (plus they actually go with the dress). My colors are cranberry red and ivory. I've designed the reception myself and it will hopefully be different than other receptions I've been to. There will be no trellis or ivy or picket fences. It will actually be quite simple, but hopefully elegant and I'm excited to see how it all comes out.

I think I'm almost done with most of the planning. We're still waiting for the invitations to come in. I am still in search of fabulous earrings. I still need to craft some type of mechanism to hang a bunch of round, Chinese paper lanterns from the ceiling at the reception. I have a dress fitting on Friday. We still have to book the honeymoon too!

Luckily, I have a lot of very talented friends. One of my friends is an extremely talented photographer and has already done some fantasic engagment photos for us. I'm excited to see the wedding pictures that she does. I have another friend who does makeup and skin care. She has provided me with some great products to get my skin ready for the big day and is taking care of my makeup. My cousin does my hair. We've already practiced my wedding hair and I think it will look great! And I have several other friends that are planning my bridal shower and have shopped with me and have planned with me. I am very lucky.

23 more days!