Alex has kept to himself when it comes to planning our wedding. He cares about it, and will give an opinion when asked, but if I’m talking about the difference between magenta and purple, he isn’t particularly into the conversation.

So you can imagine my surprise (and delight!) when he told me he had an idea for the wedding – specifically, an idea for the music at our wedding. We’ve already hired musicians for the ceremony, cocktail hour, and reception, but we haven’t quite gotten to the point where we’re choosing which pieces of music should be played when. I was all ears!

Before I continue, though, I have to give you a bit of background about Alex. He is waaaaay into the TV show NCIS.

(image from CBSTV.com)

It’s no joke with this show for him.  He can watch it for hours.  For Christmas, me, my brother, and my sister got him the first 3 seasons on DVD.  And you know how they constantly play it on TNT (or whichever cable channel it is)?  Guarantee you that channel is on if you come to our house.  I think it’s cute – I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so engrossed by TV, ever.

Maybe you see where this is going.  Alex’s input for the music at our wedding was this: he would like to walk into the wedding while the theme music for NCIS plays.

Yes, he’s serious.

I initially wanted no part of this idea.  But then I thought about it a little more, and while I just can’t see asking our ceremony harpist to figure out how to play the NCIS theme, there really isn’t a reason why we can’t ask the DJ to play it.  So I told Alex a couple of nights ago that I think I’d be OK with walking into our reception while the theme music plays.  He was excited – I’m not sure if he’s more psyched about the music or the fact that we’re using his idea.

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I did not particularly enjoy the process of shopping for my wedding dress.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the moment when I said “this is the dress I want,” I just didn’t have much fun going from store to store, trying on loads of dresses with little privacy and being told things like “I can tell you’re plain,” or, “you don’t have much of a chest” by saleswomen who were trying to convince me to spend thousands of dollars in their store. (For the record, the store I ultimately bought my dress from did NOT do any of those things to me!)

But, if I’m being honest, I was a lot more nervous about finding a place to rent the guys’ tuxedos from than I was about finding my own wedding-day outfit.

We have male members of the wedding party scattered across 3 different states. Simply going down to the local tailor and ordering up 8 tuxedos was not going to work for us, because the chances of getting all those guys to come into town for both measurements and to pick up/try on their tuxes are slim to none. Never having had need for a tuxedo myself, I had no clue which places were the best to check out, so I turned to the local chat forums on TheKnot, where I was told to try Savvi Formalwear, and to avoid Men’s Wearhouse at all costs. Well… that’s not fair. One bride told me Men’s Wearhouse worked out great for her wedding party, but she was the only one with a favorable opinion.

You may have noticed that when it comes to our wedding, Alex and I seem to be involved in a comedy of errors. Nothing we think is a great idea seems to work out the first time – planning our rehearsal dinner is a case in point. Tuxedo shopping was no exception. I had looked up both Savvi’s and MW’s websites and found both had locations in the Danbury Mall. So we headed there over the holiday break, thinking we’d check out both places and make a decision once we got a feel for each store.

… Guess what? Savvi seems to have closed their Danbury location. Moreover, MW doesn’t rent tuxes out of their mall location, they want you to go to their location across the street if you’re only looking to rent!

Being that Savvi was nowhere to be found, and therefore would not be convenient for 2 members of the wedding party, we had to cross it off our list. That left Men’s Wearhouse. I was pretty skeptical of MW when we walked in – after all, I had been hearing negative reviews about them for a couple of months now. But I’ve got to say, the 2 guys we spoke with there seemed to know their stuff, and weddings seem to be most of what they do. Alex told me that a tux is a tux, so we decided to go ahead and order ours through them. I’ll admit this: a big factor in making this decision was the fact that Alex would get his tux rental for free because of the total number of rentals we are going to be doing.

After a bit of talk, we decided Alex will be wearing a black/black tux combination, while the groomsmen will be wearing a black/sage combo. The bridesmaid dresses are also black with sage, so I think everything will match pretty well. I’m undecided what colors we’ll do for our little ringbearer, but they don’t want to measure him until May anyway, so there is plenty of time for that! Here is an image from the Men’s Wearhouse website of the sage vest, so everyone knows what I’m talking about (sage doesn’t seem to mean the same thing to everyone):

We asked a lot of questions while we were there, and I feel like we’re OK about our decision to go with Men’s Wearhouse for right now. If the wedding comes and we have a disaster, I will certainly post about it!

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

As a “something extra” gift this Christmas, my godmother gave me an adorable little book called Brides Companion, by Susannah Marriott. It’s full of poems and quotes and traditions, with a few DIY ideas mixed in. I’m going to use it for inspiration when designing our ceremony programs and wedding favors in a few months. As I was flipping through it, I came across the following passage, which cracked me up (you have to read all the way to the end), so I had to share it here!

How To Avoid a Bad Husband
(from A True Friend, American etiquette manual, published in the 1870′s)

• Never marry for wealth.
• Never marry a fop, or one who struts about dandy-like, in his silk gloves and ruffles, with a silvered cane and rings on his fingers.
• Never marry a stranger, or one whose character is not known or tested.
• Never marry a man who treats his mother or sister unkindly or indifferently.
• Never, on any account, marry a gambler or a profane person.
• Never marry a man who is addicted to the use of ardent spirits.
• Take an especial and seasonable care that your children shall not have an a*s for a father.

Some of this could still be considered decent advice today, right?

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I posted this recently on the Weddzilla Blog, but I wanted to share it here as well.

Maybe it’s because it’s so cold outside lately, but I’ve caught myself daydreaming about our honeymoon quite often this week. So I thought a blog post about honeymoon planning could be in order!

Alex and I had completely unrealistic ideas in our heads when we started talking about where we’d like to go for our honeymoon. I think our first concept was to go to Tahiti, then to Fiji, then to Australia – but we were going to stop in New Zealand on the way to Australia. I have done a decent amount of travel, and I do know how much things cost, but I was still blown away by the price tag for that trip. OOPS! We realized we would have to scale our honeymoon down if we were going to be able to afford food for the year after we get married. So Alex suggested traveling around Europe. His parents had done that, and he thought it might be fun. We already had a trip to Italy planned (which you can read about here if you’re interested), so we researched places like Greece, France and the UK. We also discussed Hawaii, but I went to Hawaii in 2000 and Alex wasn’t sure he liked the idea of going someplace I’ve already been.

I’m usually a do-it-yourself kind of travel planner. I’ve become pretty good at finding great deals online for airfare and hotels. But this was our honeymoon. I had big ideas in my head about getting upgraded to first-class and finding buckets of champagne in our hotel room. I knew I didn’t have a clue how to ensure any of those things might happen on my own, so I convinced Alex we should go to a travel agent. We wound up at Liberty Travel, where I had booked a previous trip to Tahiti and Bora Bora, and had a relationship with an agent named Kelly.

We told Kelly we were thinking about Hawaii, but we were much more interested in Europe. She was great – went through all the Hawaii literature with us from hotels to excursions. She also told us about how there is a direct flight to Honolulu from Newark, which after our experience with flying to Italy sounded pretty appealing. Then she went over everything for Europe, focusing on Greece because that’s what we were most interested in. Greece sounded AMAZING, and Liberty had a stopover in Paris that we could tack onto the trip for not a whole lot more, too.

Then Kelly told us about a few options we had not really considered before talking to her. She told us about Jade Mountain in St. Lucia and The Crane in Barbados. These were two places she had gone on her own honeymoon. They’re all-inclusive, but much more low-key and private than the all-inclusives you usually picture when you hear that term. All-inclusive is a VERY attractive option for a honeymoon – no worrying about having to pull out a wallet the whole time you’re there! Her point was that after a wedding, it might be not-so-relaxing to sit on a plane for 12 hours to get to your honeymoon destination. Heading to the Caribbean would put us on a (warm, sunny, not at all icy) beach a lot faster than heading to Hawaii or Europe.

Alex and I did not ultimately choose to go to the Caribbean on our honeymoon. But I’m sharing this information with all of you brides because I think these are great options, and they aren’t something you’re necessarily going to find out about by surfing the web. I have been to St. Lucia before, and that island is BEAUTIFUL – I would go back in a heartbeat, and I am actually contemplating taking Alex to the Jade Mountain resort for a weekend before the wedding just to escape all the craziness.

Hope all the honeymoon destination talk warmed you up for at least a few minutes!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Last week I got some exciting news, and today I am finally able to share it with everyone because it’s become official!

If you look to the right sidebar on this webpage, you will see a box titled “Become a Fan.”  Inside that box, you will see an image that announces I have been selected as a Featured Bride Blogger on Weddzilla.com.  The full website has not launched yet (I’ll keep everyone posted as to when it does launch), but the blog is up and running, and full of useful and fun information for brides and wedding fans alike.

Clicking on that image should take you straight to my posts on the Weddzilla blog.  I expect to writing 2-3 entries a week for them, but I will also be keeping up this blog as well – in fact, many of my entries for the Weddzilla blog will probably make their way to The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities).  I will be doing my best to point everyone towards what I write, here or there!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.