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mysticjade

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Blog Entries posted by mysticjade

  1. mysticjade
    Settling back into the work week after a massively productive weekend! Signed a contract with our travel agent agreeing to the flight and resort, plus... I bought my wedding dress! It’s exactly what I envisioned, but BETTER. It’s not going to be ready until end of June, but that’s fine with me. It’s just nice to have something else knocked off the list
     
    All in all I am happy with how the planning is going, but as of a couple weeks ago me and my FH sat down and redid our budget and realized it’s actually going to be twice as big as we originally wanted. Now, our original goal was very low so it’s not like our wedding budget is sky high now, it’s just disappointing. But necessary. It’s just a matter of coming to terms with the new plan. This is, after all, not like when I emptied my RRSPs to buy my condo. My condo has equity at least. When I empty my savings a second time, it is money I will never get back.
  2. mysticjade

    And So It Begins!

    By mysticjade,

    Just before Christmas, my boyfriend surprised me with an engagement ring and proposal. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind of holiday merriment, family celebration, and tentative wedding planning. With my 33rd birthday now passed and a firm decision on what kind of wedding we want, I find myself scouring the internet for information and advice, but nothing really seems to fit my needs. There are a lot of factors to consider.
     
    Here’s our plan as it stands. Our wedding is going to be budget-conscious, hopefully around $10K. We’re doing a destination wedding, preferably in an English-speaking Caribbean country. He’s Catholic and I’m Hindu, so the wedding needs to be interfaith as well. But I’m not the kind of woman who ever paid much thought to her potential future wedding, so I really don’t have any patience for planning out a host of complicated details! And finally, I’m a feminist so I find a lot of the traditions revolving around weddings (of any religion) give me the heebies.
     
    So there you have it, why I’m calling myself the Mish Mash Bride. Meshing all these things together is not going to be easy. This is just a place for me to talk through the madness.
  3. mysticjade
    The FI and I decided that our plan for this weekend was to decide on a resort/TA and thankfully the universe delivered!
     
    I’d gone to a few bridal shows and kept running across a company called Absolute Wedsite. They specialized in arranging destination weddings, specifically Indian destination weddings, which was the biggest hurdle when dealing with other standard travel companies. So I contacted the company and set up an appointment for a consultation. Showed up this past Saturday with the FI, as well as his parents and mine.
     
    Fantastic experience! The owner of the company (Raj) performed the consult herself, asked us what we were looking for (English-speak Caribbean, a location we’d never been before) and what our budget was (~$1500). We told her we were leaning towards Montego Bay and she told us about the resorts that offered Hindu weddings. Originally me and my FI were interested in Iberostar Grand Rose Suites, but then Raj revealed a new resort called Royalton White Sands had just opened up in Dec. 2013. I’d never heard of it before but the pictures she showed here amazing. Not only that, the wedding coordinator at Royalton was a friend of Raj’s who was good at Indian weddings. FI was sold! He wanted to put a deposit down right there!
     
    But unfortunately, when we asked for April 2015 Raj said that she’d been booking April 2015 weddings back in December. I was gobsmacked! So we had to push our departure back, but we couldn’t do end of April/beginning of May, because my MOH (also my sister) has her board licensing exam around that time but won’t know the exact date until like a month before! So we had to push our departure date even further, to the end of May. I don’t mind, long engagement = more time to plan.
     
    So once we had a departure date & potential wedding day(s) selected, Raj said she would have to call the resort and check if my wedding date was available, and also if the priest in Jamaica is available the same day. Fingers crossed all goes according to plan and our resort and wedding date are set by this evening!!
     
    After that’s been finalized, we need to pick a date for our church wedding (also under the condition my sister is free), find a place (buffet/restaurant) for the after-church get-together, brainstorm for STD ideas (FI is really into magnets haha), pick a photographer (for cheap because wedding photography prices make me want to elope), and possibly buy my white dress. *flails*
  4. mysticjade
    This past weekend me and the FI went to the National Bride Show downtown. It was a bit of letdown (I got it mixed up with the BIG bridal show that happens at the MTCC) but some good inspiration definitely came out of it.
     
    Anyway, at one point we were walking around the perimeter and passed a booth for a photography company and I was taking everything in without much interest, when one particular mounted photo caught my eye... bride and groom next to each other with their backs to the photographer, standing still in a grassy green field, holding hands under a stormy grey sky... she with a green lightsaber and he with a red lightsaber as AT-ATs bear down on them. Sort of like this:
     

     
    I might have squealed rather loudly and feverently asked my dude if we could do that for engagement photos. Of course, I knew what his reaction would be, big-time no! But I'm not the giving up type.
     
    "I want to do photos where I'm force-choking you!"
    "No."
    "How about photos where I have Princess Leia buns?"
    "No."
     
    I laughed and gave up after that. He likes his science fiction and fantasy as much as I do, but to him a wedding = classy, not off the wall.
     
    The next day, I was over at his house with his family. His sister makes cakes as a hobby and I always knew she'd make one for our wedding, so we hopped on Pinterest looking for inspiration. First we looked at classic wedding cakes, then Indian-inspired wedding cakes, then she decided that since the cake at our destination wedding was the "real" wedding cake, she would be making a "fun" cake for our at home reception. She thought to herself "hmm, what do my brother and mysticjade both like... GAME OF THRONES!" and she immediately found a blood-spattered cake with the Iron Throne at the top that we cracked up over. Of course we immediately showed it to my FI, got the classic reaction: no thanks.
     
    Is it normal for the bride to out-geek the groom? If it's wrong, I don't want to be right.
  5. mysticjade

    Picking And Choosing

    By mysticjade,

    From here, on discarding traditions and making your own, or picking traditions to carry on.
     
    I’ve had some surprising things to wrestle with now that my wedding is on the horizon. I tell others and I tell myself that my ideal wedding is a court wedding followed by a small, intimate, backyard BBQ party. I’m not an ostentatious person, I prefer not having the spotlight on myself, in my heart I know that a full day of putting myself on display will wear me down. But faced with the actual prospect of my real wedding, I find myself hankering for the type of wedding I’m familiar with, the type of wedding that has the most personal meaning for me: a Hindu wedding. The red dress and gold jewelry, incense and henna patterns, Sanskrit chanting and the olaga playing through the background. All this despite the fact that most Hindu priests annoy the heck out of me.
     
    Apparently I prefer my religion being personal and informal, not officiated or mandated by gatekeepers. And I’m far more traditional than I thought. This wedding is bringing out the Capricorn in me. ;P
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