Why there are 3 weeks worth of unwatched Hopkins episodes on the DVR

Whew. This is a lot of work! It's been a bit of a stressful week - I'm not gonna lie. I've been getting price quotes and site proposals and finding about hidden fees and negotiating bar costs and looking at new places and looking for bridesmaid dresses that normal people can afford... It's all very complicated and it's not as easy as it seems! Every time I think I've calculated it all out, I've missed something that puts us over-budget. Every time I find a gorgeous bridesmaid dress that I love, it's $280 or something ridiculous like that. Thank God for Em, who has probably tried on 30 dresses by now and just keeps telling me "It's your wedding, we'll wear what you want us to wear. Stop worrying about what it costs." I just can't. I have too many grad school, fresh out of college, living on their own for the first time bridesmaids who don't need to spend that kind of money. It's a tough job, not only taking budgets into account, but also trying to consider different body types and decide which dresses will cling in which places on different people and which colors will wash out which skin tones... I'm trying hard to find something universally flattering and pretty, but like I said, everytime I find one it's outrageously priced. Ugh. I'll just keep looking!

As for venues and dates and such, I think we're pretty settled on May 29th, with June 5th as an acceptable back-up if the venue we want is booked on the 29th. We're finding that doing it on a Friday is giving us lots more options, including dates. We've looked at The Brookeville Inn, Linganore Winecellars, Wakefield Valley Golf Club, Silver Swan Bayside, Kent Manor Inn, and Turf Valley Resort, and we still have Stone Manor Country Club and Musket Ridge Golf Club to go. So far, the front-runners seem to be Silver Swan and Turf Valley. Turf Valley is incredibly fancy and incredibly inexpensive, which is great, and it has a lovely outdoor gazebo in a grove of willow trees for the ceremony, within view of a big lake with a huge fountain (which lights up pretty colors at night) and can offer us a ballroom about 3x the size of the reception area at Silver Swan. It's the obvious choice, but I'm having a hard time reconciling my vision of the wedding with the feel of the place. We're going back on Saturday to check out the ballroom all set up for a wedding, since it was set for a conference when I saw it yesterday, and Ben wasn't able to make it so he hasn't seen it at all. Hopefully seeing it all done up will make me feel differently. It really would save us tons of money, and we'd actually get a much nicer reception than we can afford anywhere else (tons of yummy hors d'oeuvres, seated dinner, full open bar, dessert plus wedding cake, a free night's stay for us after the reception... the list goes on!). I just feel like it may be a little TOO fancy for the laid back, casual-elegant feel I'm going for. We'll see. Here's a pic of the ceremony site...

The gazebo at Turf Valley

The lake and fountain through the willow trees from the ceremony area

So, back to the title of my post... I've had NO time to sit down and watch TV lately, so I'm totally out of the loop on my new favorite show (Hopkins, a reality show about Hopkins doctors). Speaking of Hopkins, thank God I finished that application before all this started. I got my Duke secondary app last week and I haven't TOUCHED any of the 5 essays I need to write for that. I'm contemplating not doing it, only because I REALLY don't want to go to North Carolina. Particularly with the reality of getting married setting in... I don't want to leave our families. Nowadays, I often find myself forgetting that I'm even applying to medical school! It was all that was on my mind before, and now I seriously forget all about it from time to time. It's amazing.

One more piece of news and then I'll stop. I started South Beach. AAAAAAAAAAH!!! Em and Josh started it last Friday and inspired me, and I currently weigh more than I ever have (and more than I care to discuss), and I'm getting married, and I'm going to the beach in a month, so it seemed like a good idea. It sucks, BAD, but I'll make it. If I can survive the first two carb-less weeks (I'm on day three), I'll be fine. Now if I could just muster up the energy to go to the gym... not only am I paying for it monthly, but I really should be exercising if I expect to lose any weight and get anything out of all this dieting misery. If I want to make the carb-suffering worth it, I need to get my ass to the treadmill.

So that's all for now. Sorry for the length - it's been a few days since my last post! And as for that burning question that keeps you checking my blog... Nope. Not yet.

Looks Promising...

Today we visited two potential sites on the eastern shore, both waterfront :) We were very excited. First was the Silver Swan Bayside at the Queen Anne Marina on Kent Island. It was beautiful! Basically everything we want - waterfront ceremony, lovely indoor/outdoor reception area with a nice dining room (which is being re-painted, re-carpeted and re-decorated this month) and a soon-to-be-completed tented brick patio overlooking the water. It also has its own little private beach, which will be great for a photo shoot :) AND, drum roll, it's affordable! We may have to just do a beer and wine bar (sorry, Janelle), but we really don't have many guests who drink at all, and most who do drink like wine and/or beer, so I think that's ok.

The ceremony area :)

The dining room for the reception
The little private beach

Looking down the other direction from the ceremony spot toward the marina

So, we loved it. We put a hold on a date too - May 29th :) That's pretty exciting! We still have two other places to visit, so we're going to give them a fair shot too, but this is our front runner for now.

Our second visit was to Kent Manor Inn, also on Kent Island. We just walked around and looked - they didn't have an open appointment to talk with us but they're sending us some pricing info. I'm pretty sure it'll be too pricey. I'll post pics later - my fiancee is getting upset that I'm not snuggling with him :)

"The Story"

No, not THE story (he hasn't given me the ring yet, don't get excited). This is the story of how we decided to get married. Everyone gets confused when I say I'm engaged but I don't have a ring or a proposal story :)

On Friday the 18th, I was riding home from work with my mom when somehow the whole marriage thing came up. She started in on me about how she really thought Ben and I should try to get married before we live together, how that's what God wants for us, etc., to which I responded, "but we can't afford it". I did NOT want to skip the ring and the engagement and all that just to go get a piece of paper that says we're married to make other people happy. Of course this was the wrong attitude to have - it's what would make GOD happy - but anyway... The point is, Ben couldn't afford a ring. It was going to be a long time before he'd be able to. I was already planning on saving up what I make this coming year before med school and putting it away for a wedding, but I thought that wouldn't be for another year or two. Our plan was for Ben to save up as much as he could for a year and that's what he'd spend on a ring, and then we'd get engaged, and then we'd start planning maybe for a summer 2010 wedding.

So, I got to thinking. My mom was going on and on about how God would make a way for us and He'd bless us for making the right choice if we decided to do this - how He delights in us when we chose to obey His will and wants to reward us for it. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became to me that we were waiting to get married and disobeying God all for a ring. We'd have the money to get married before med school (I was already planning on saving it up this year), we were planning on living together when I went to school (so we were already planning on being able to afford living together) - the ONLY thing holding us back was the engagement ring. Now, keep in mind, I had told Ben on more than one occasion that I was willing to settle for a smaller, less expensive ring in order to marry him sooner, but he just would have NONE of that. He loves me too much, and always wants to give me the best. Which is an OK problem to have :) I brought up the subject with him that evening, and he said he'd love to get married sooner, but there was still the ring problem, and he refused to do anything cheap to get the ball rolling.

Then, all at once, it hit me. Mom Mom's ring. I had asked my great Aunt Fran for it when my Mom Mom passed away in 2006, but she just wasn't ready to part with it. My grandfather (her brother) actually got in an argument with her about it, so it was a bit of a sore subject and I was very hesitant about calling her myself to ask about it. For some reason, Ben just decided that he should call her. Maybe she'd respond better to him (she's always LOVED him), and to the idea of him wanting to give it to me, and to the special-ness of it all. So, while I stood over the stove in his kitchen stirring some tuna helper, he went out back on the patio and gave her a call. 15 minutes later, he came inside, tried to bullshit me (because it's just what he does), but quickly caved and told me that she said yes. We couldn't believe it. I cried, of course, immediately. It was a giant wave of emotion, first about having my Mom Mom's ring (who I was very close with all my life) for the rest of my life, and then the realization that we were finally getting married. It was UN. REAL.

I still don't feel like it's real. After all this time, all this anticipation, all the dreaming and wishing and hoping I've been doing for so long, it isn't a dream anymore. Which is probably why it still feels like a dream - because that's all it's ever been for me, for SO long. I've been convinced that I wanted to marry him since I was 16! Not that I was really ready to be convinced, in hindsight, but I know that's how I felt. That's how long I've been making fake plans and wishfully daydreaming. I even had a "wedding journal" of ideas and locations and stuff, and in the calendar in the front of it I had circled a date in 2005 as our wedding day (we used to think we needed to get married before I went off to college or we'd spontaneously combust or something). Hilarious. But anyway, it's all incredibly surreal and I still have to mentally pinch myself several times a day to make sure it's all really happening. I'm really trying to sit back and enjoy it, because it's something I've been looking forward to for so long. And not just in the sense that all little girls look forward to their wedding day... in a very real and concrete sense. Knowing who it will be when you're daydreaming about it makes the anticipation so much more immediate and painful - you want so badly to be with THAT specific person for the rest of your life, and more than just the fun of weddings, you're anticipating THAT dream becoming a reality. I've watched both of his sisters and my own mother meet someone, fall in love, and get married all well within the space that we've been dating, so I've had that "it's MY turn" feeling for quite some time. And now it really is! Ben calls this whole thing "operation our turn" :) Cute.

So, that's the story. If you know Ben, you know there's always an interesting story :)

I Caved.

So I was trying to avoid the whole blog thing, because everyone's doing it and I don't like peer pressure. But I just have so much that I want to keep people updated on now, and instead of sending annoying daily e-mails to my bridesmaids, I figured I'd just give them a place to check in on the progress if they felt like it.

I guess it's obvious by now that I am engaged. After 8 years of pre-engagement bliss, we have entered the marathon stage - wedding planning. I have to say, life was fairly relaxed until now :) I recently graduated from Gettysburg, recovered from pneumonia, started applying to med school and started my full-time job at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, which doesn't sound relaxed, but compared to the past two weeks it really was! It's really not that bad, it's just that we'd like to get married in late May of next year, and since that's only 10 months away and its a popular time of year to get married, we're feeling lots of pressure to get a place booked.

So far we've visited Celebrations at the Bay, which is a beautiful site in Pasadena, MD on the Chesapeake Bay, but the people who work there are apparently bloody thieves... they wanted $23K for a 115-person ceremony and reception. YIKES. We had really gotten excited about that place and really hadn't invested much time in looking around anywhere else, so after that big let-down on Sunday, we had to really start looking around. Today we visited Wakefield Valley Golf Club in Westminster, which is the exact opposite - SUPER affordable and very accomodating and friendly. Very willing to work with us on menu changes, special arrangements, whatever. That was refreshing, but unfortunately neither of us got that "this is it" feeling when we were there. We're not sure what to expect and whether or not it's a good idea to expect some sort of magical feeling, but I need to be more excited about it than I was today. Friday we're visiting Linganore Winecellars in Mount Airy, MD, and Saturday we're going just across the bay bridge onto the Eastern Shore to visit the Silver Sawn Bayside at Queen Anne Marina, another waterfront site. If it hasn't become clear by now, we're planning to do an outdoor ceremony and we'd love for it to be by the water! It could even be a pond or a river, I don't care! Next week we're visiting Turf Valley Golf Resort & Spa, as well as Stone Manor Country Club out past Frederick in Middletown. I really like Stone Manor, and I'm excited about Linganore too (it would be very unique). Ben is all about Silver Swan (he's really gung-ho on being by the water) and Turf Valley. I'm really afraid we'll end up with differing opinions on the final location decision, which will be tough to compromise on!

In other news, I got my dress last weekend :) People might call me crazy for not looking around more, but I really didn't want to allow myself to try on $1500-dresses and fall in love with them - there are more important things I'd like to splurge on. I found a beautiful chiffon gown at Davids and I only spent $350 on it, so I'm thrilled! I LOVE IT! If you want a pic, e-mail me. I don't want to post anything here, should Ben accidentally stumble upon it. He'd be very upset. I'm counting on him not knowing what "chiffon" means. He's not big on fabrics :)

AND one more thing... after the big let-down on Sunday, we went to meet my great aunt and picked up my great-grandmother's diamond :) Those of you who have known me for a while probably know that I was VERY close with her until she passed away two years ago, so having her diamond is going to be really special. We had it reset and now Ben is withholding it from me, because apparently he's a proponent of certain forms of torture. He picked it up today, but he wants to do a proposal and surprise me somewhat, so now I'm waiting. Hopefully my next post will be about the proposal...