ashhtayy

The Website I spent what felt like forever working on our wedding website. Although I don’t feel they are necessary for an at home wedding (but still super fun to look at!), I felt it would be a great place for our DW guests to visit to get all the information they needed when making the decision as to whether or not they would attend. In the end, you’ll read it here a thousand times because you DO read, people (in general) don’t read. Except for our parents and immediate family members, I don’t think very many people even visited the site. The few friends that I know visited the site, likely only did because we asked if they had been on. I had started by using mywedding.com and when I was half way through I realized, I just didn’t like the site we had created. I went through multiple different sites when I finally found a simple layout on weddingwire.com that I loved. It was tough to find something when you don’t have a colour scheme in mind. All I knew was no bright colours, no beachy theme, likely just a blend of neutral colours. I found a basic design with a calligraphy I liked and just went at it. Our website includes: Welcome Our Story Our Engagement Wedding Party The Resort Guest Accommodations Travel Arrangements Wedding Events Photo Albums Book Now Guest Book Contact Us We paid nothing to have our wedding website. We considered paying (I think it was $50 CAD) for a unique domain and then opted to just have the weddingwire.com at the beginning. As I mentioned I had read that many people wouldn’t read the website and figured the $50 could be spent elsewhere. In hindsight I am happy we didn’t spend the money as it would have been extremely unnecessary; in our situation anyways. If I could back track I would have utilized the RSVP section that weddingwire.com offers. Life would have been MUCH easier. I will speak to the RSVP process (or lack thereof) in a future post.

@@calgarybride2015 we knew we had enough people out of the 200 that could no way make it (age, new babies, work, etc). we gambled by sending out all the STDs and in the end, it worked out for us. my FI did tell me if everyone attended i would have to get a second job @@TinkerSofi he definitely is a keeper we are so lucky to have found each other...it's crazy how life works out. we always talk about how if i didnt leave my former company there is no way we could have met. someone was looking out for us! i know what you mean about keeping the spreadsheets updated. it's tricky but i find it so helpful to have everything in one place. i should have mentioned in my post that all DID work out for my two teacher bffs. although neither were approved for the entire week off they are able to attend saturday through wednesday. they are coming in a day early to do trials, prep, etc with me and they will fly out as late as possible the day after our wedding. not the best case scenario but certainly not the worst. and you're right. we go there because it IS so hot. i'm over the fact that the wedding is in june. people that want to be there, will be there. i am SO excited to read about how your wedding goes. i follow your thread and it has inspired me tremendously. you've put so much work in and i can't wait to see the photos of how it all comes together. @@acw271011 thank you! i'm so lucky we found each other. he really isn't a super romantic guy but when the time was right, he didn't hold back. what's funny is after the scrapbook and the proposal he apologized saying he had hoped it could have made it look better but he could only find craft box #1 of mine. he couldn't find the "special paper" and the "glittery markers". those items were in craft box #2 lol after looking at the photographs of the resort almost all of our guests that have booked commented on how they thought it was one of the nicest resorts they had seen and thought the price was amazing. it was a relief to hear that from everyone. thanks - we love our photos too. we had to take a break 20 minutes in to warm up in our cars. we were all FREEZING! i had no feeling in my toes. obviously i wore cute boots not warm boots haha @@Wafflesmom i threw the "yes, he left BC to come to ON not the other way around" comment in for you west coasters. we hear it every time it comes up. it is cute though because after people snap out of their shock they always follow up with "he must love you a lot"

The Guest List The night we got engaged we started (and pretty much finished) our guest list. We quickly decided that we were going to invite everyone we would have invited had we had a local wedding. Our guest list with children and plus one’s was just shy of 200. There were quite a few people on there that we knew would not be able to travel for a variety of reasons but we still sent them a save the date. I have read a lot of posts on here about whether children should be invited to a destination wedding or not. Michael and I agreed from the very beginning on this topic. We looked at this as not just our wedding but a vacation for our guests. If a family could only afford one vacation a year then who were we to say “we want you, but your children need to stay home”. Although I respect the right of any couple to decide whether they want children there or not, we knew we were leaving this up to our friends and family. It also worked out that the resort we fell in love was family friendly. In the end we expected approximately 50 guests to attend. Today, almost a month past our booking deadline we have 54 adults and 2 children booked. At least one new person per week contacts our travel agent. I think it is very likely we could have another 6 – 10 people book. To create and track our guest list I simply used an excel spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are my life. We will probably have 500 by the time this wedding is over. I included: Name Departure Gate Yes, No, Maybe Indicator Address Email Length of Trip

@@calgarybride2015 thanks Kim i will be reaching out to you for lots of guidance along the way. you're a pro and are SO kind to all the brides-to-be on this site. thanks for being YOU!

@@snswedding2016 AND we're from the same area we were meant to find each other on this site! i remember reading you and your FI are going to the BDR in September and can't wait to hear all about it. i know we will get all the details from @@TinkerSofi when she gets married in august BUT the more information the better. it's looking more and more like we won't be able to attend a BDR. my FI just started a new job and fingers crossed i will be starting a new position with my current comany soon. after our trip to BC in the beginning of august we won't be able to take vacation for awhile and when we do it will be to BC again to visit his family as they likely won't take a trip to ON because of the wedding. i will be piggy backing off your BDR for information thanks in advance lol

The Engagement Photo Shoot Right after we got engaged a very good high school friend and his wife emailed to say they would love if we would let them shoot our engagement photographs…for no cost. I quickly replied to their email to thank them for the offer and said we would get in touch with them when the weather was nicer. The month after receiving their email my life became extremely hectic; in a beautiful want to pull your hair out sort of way. My high school best friend and university best friend were both getting married back-to-back weekends in the summer and the planning for things such as the jack and jills, bridal showers, bachelorettes and weddings were kicking into full steam. It seemed like every moment I wasn’t working I was with them planning, shopping for dresses, working on wedding crafts until 3AM, fielding frantic phone calls about which napkin pattern to pick, etc. Amidst the craziness Michael and I decided to reacknowledge the fact that we too were getting married. We called my high school friend and his wife and booked a date for our engagement shoot. It all happened so fast. We didn’t decide what we were wearing for the photographs until the morning of, we didn’t consider the fact that it was going to be snowing and the temperature was around -20 degrees celsius…we just did it. It was a great pick-me-up for both of us. We knew that the months leading up to my best friends weddings were going to be crazy for me being a bridesmaid in one wedding and the maid of honour in the other and this was the perfect way to stop and celebrate us. I highly recommend engagement photographs for the following reasons: When you aren’t used to posing for pictures you don’t know what to do. This was great practice for both of us. Sure it was awkward, but hopefully we got some of that awkwardness out of the way and our wedding pictures won’t look…like they likely would have had we not done this. Although everyone on your social media may not want to see them (I’m posting them here anyways lol) your immediate family will LOVE them. Especially in our situation because Michael doesn’t get to see his family nearly as much as he’d like to. They are a great keepsake to show your children 20 years down the road. We did our engagement photographs 17 months out of our wedding date. Although I don’t recommend doing them that far out, I do recommend doing them for the reasons stated above. We actually plan on getting a second set of engagement photos done this summer so that we can have some shots displayed at our wedding when we are wearing summer clothing. To some that may seem like overkill, but…not to us! Our wedding, our rules @@snswedding2016 thank you! i know i am breaking serious unwritten rules about when the socially acceptable time is to make these things but i really felt like i needed to do this so that i could start holding my self accountable for working on all the planning that is to come. LOVE that he made a scrapbook. so thoughtful and such a surprise. i also love the fact that i had NO idea the engagement was coming. i mean, i knew it would eventually, but i am so thankful i wasn't wondering every time we did something if "today was going to be the day". he's the best. and cute about about how we both ended up planning DWs...at the same resort it just seems to make the most sense. @@acw271011 thanks! as i said, i too love reading them. they can be SO helpful.

The First Step in Planning We knew immediately we wanted a destination wedding. It wasn’t because we dreamed of marrying with our toes in the sand, but because either way our friends and families would have to travel to get to our wedding (BC or ON). With the costs of flights ranging from $600 - $900 round-trip and then factoring in hotel stays, etc. our closest friends and family agreed that traveling to a tropical destination would be amazing and, most importantly, feasible. I contacted many local TA’s and one after the other they fell short. To me, our must-have list was fairly simple: A smaller resort that offered something ‘outside-of-the-box’ for our ceremony, A resort with amazing food (my FI is Italian), and A resort that fell in our guests budgets ($1500 for ON, $1800 for BC) The local TA’s I contacted in the beginning were not helpful. I felt they were pushing us in a direction we weren’t interested in going and they were not showing us anything that fell in line with what I thought was a simple must-have list. Selecting a resort was one of the most stressful times for me. I started shortly after we were engaged; spending hours researching for a few nights straight and then stopping for weeks because I found myself becoming too overwhelmed. How are you supposed to pick one resort when ALL of the photographs look beautiful? I finally came across a photograph of the Azul Fives Sky Deck; I was amazed. This was the ‘outside-of-the-box’ element I was looking for. I went back to one of our local TA’s and requested prices. They came back astronomical. I wasn’t about to ask my guests to spend between $2200 - $2500 to see us wed. When the TA told me I would have to choose a new resort if I wanted to stay within our “unreasonable” budget I was crushed. It was around that time that I came across this website. I began reading about Azul Fives in detail and came across a post about Gourmet Inclusive TA’s. For those of you unaware, Azul Fives by Karisma is a gourmet all-inclusive resort. My booking with a GI TA you receive additional perks. Someone provided a link to GI TA’s in ON and I emailed all of them. One particular GI TA emailed me back almost instantly. She had already sent out a request to get me the quotes for the dates I was looking for and answered every single question I had listed in my email. From that night forward I continued using this GI TA. I couldn’t believe how quick she was to respond and how thorough she was. When she received a quote I had requested and she knew it was out of our price range, she tried another week and another week, and I never had to ask. I felt as if she was a mind reader. She kept amazing me with how great her communication was and how committed she seemed to finding us the best rate at the resort we wanted. Initially we wanted to get married during a school break or have it overlap with a school holiday because my two best friends are teachers and I couldn’t imagine getting married without them there. That is one wish I had to give up on. Rates during March Break were outrageous. Had we of stuck with that plan we would have had no one other than our immediate families attend – it was just too expensive. And that is how we ended up with a June 7th, 2016 wedding date. I hated the idea at first; thinking the weather (at times) is too nice in ON & BC to ask people to travel to Mexico but quickly realized that if this was the resort we wanted, June, September or October were the months we were going to have to settle with. Having been engaged late in October of 2014, we couldn’t imagine pushing the wedding back to September or October 2016. We locked in June 5th – June 12th, 2016 at a rate of $1560 for ON guests and $1735 for BC guests; slightly over budget for ON and slightly under for BC guests. We contacted our first TA at the beginning of January 2015 and had committed to our destination and rate by the end of March 2015.

The Meeting In July 2012 I switched employers; I left a company I had been with for 8 years. Little did I know this was the best decision I was ever going to make. A month after starting with the new company I travelled to beautiful British Columbia to meet my west coast team members. On day one I attended a store in Richmond, BC. Two hours into my training session, the most handsome man I had ever seen walked into the room. After the session had finished I found myself wandering the streets of downtown Vancouver with a co-worker from Toronto when I heard an email alert go off on my BlackBerry. It was an email from Michael – “It was great to meet you today, Ashley. Here is my BBM pin – add me!” I added him immediately. When I got to work day two after messaging with Michael most of the evening, much to my surprise, he was there again. We were only supposed to spend one day training together…but Michael showed up day two and then again on day three. When it was time for me to leave Vancouver and head to Calgary we had to say goodbye. Our goodbye consisted of non-stop smiles and a professional handshake. My first words when I returned to Ontario to my friends and family went something like this…“I met the cutest guy in the world; too bad he lives in Vancouver”. The Next Year The BBM messages continued for months; most times all day and late into the evening. Michael was going to Toronto for a week-long conference in October and he told me he would love to come down either the weekend before or the weekend after to spend some non-work time together. Neither weekend worked particularly well as I had my university’s homecoming the first weekend (not something you bring a “new” guy to) and a high school friend’s wedding the second weekend. Instead of saying I couldn’t spend the time with him I told him I would love if he extended his stay and come as a date with me to my friend’s wedding. Michael bravely accepted and the plans ensued. After our weekend together in October, it was clear to us that we had something special and needed to find a way to make the impossible possible. We planned our next visit for November and it is then, after a Toronto Raptors game, we decided to make this relationship official – we were now in a long distance relationship. The Next Step After countless trips from Toronto to Vancouver and Vancouver to Toronto and high cell phone bills, we knew this relationship would only last if we could live together, in the same province and same home. We both began the daunting task of applying for new jobs; me in Victoria where Michael was living at the time, Michael in Toronto. We both came close to securing new jobs a few times, but neither of us liked the idea of leaving the company we loved. It was late in October 2013 when Michael received a phone call from our company, offering him a transfer to the Toronto market. It seemed like a miracle for me – I was able to keep the job I loved and Michael was able to keep his, just in a new location. The Big Move January 14th, 2014 Michael made the move from BC to ON. YES! BC to ON, not the other way around – crazy, we know; people tell us every day. With Michael being so close with his family and friends I immediately recognized how big of a step this was for us and our relationship. The Engagement After living together for 10 months, Michael popped the ‘big question’; and he did so in the sweetest way any man could. I had been in Boston for a few days attending a conference and when I arrived home from the airport Michael told me he had made me something. This in itself was odd to me as I was a frequent crafter, not Michael. I put my luggage down, sat on the couch and waited to see ‘this craft’. Michael handed me a scrapbook that had my favourite photograph of us on the front. Inside I found pages upon pages of handwritten notes we had exchanged, tickets from events we had attended and various different items from all chapters of our lives together. The second last page contained the sweetest, most sincere letter I had ever received. Half way through reading it I found myself upset; upset thinking, “Wow, what a great way to propose – no way he is proposing – not yet, not now!” Much to my surprise, he was! The final words read “With that being said…” As I turned the page I saw the words “Will you marry me?” and attached was a beautiful princess cut diamond ring. MY engagement ring! Although neither of us recall exactly what happened or the exact words that were spoken, the answer was inevitably yes. We were engaged October 29th, 2014.

I LOVE reading planning threads for many reasons. Here are a few: They give me ideas I would have never thought of The provide answers to questions I hadn’t even thought of asking but definitely needed to know They make me feel like I am apart of someone’s wedding even though I haven’t had to do any of the hard work The give brides-to-be a rough guideline as to when certain things need to be started/completed They speak to issues brides-to-be run into and what to expect They let you know that how you are feeling or the situations or debacles you are running into are completely normal After being inspired by many other brides-to-be on this site, I have decided to start putting my planning into words. I am hoping by doing this it will motivate me to get the ball rolling again and iron out some of the BIG (and small) items I have been putting off. I hope you enjoy reading a little bit about Michael and I. I’m excited for you all to be reading along as we plan the wedding of our dreams. xo Ashley

@@TinkerSofi I've been trying to keep up with everyone's posts but have been falling way behind so I apologize if this has been said but... Canada Post will cut cheques for missing, re routed or late deliveries. When my FI was in Van and I was here in Toronto they screwed up every parcel I ever sent...and there were a lot. Whether it be a shaver he loved and forgot here, birthday presents, hand made photo albums...you name it. Everything always made it there...late...(even paying for express shipping). Every single time they reimbursed the full amount in the form of a cheque. I wrIte all this realizing it's likely less the money more the I WANT MY STUFF but I wanted to chime in that I have confidence you will get your money for shipping... AND to let you know my fingers are crossed all makes it to you ASAP so you can stop stressing.

We did a paper STD which cost us about $200 (print + postage). I'm in the same boat as some of the other brides. We may send information packages via mail to those that have put their deposits down, but not to everyone we invited. A couple will go to those older guests that can't make it...mostly because Nonna told us we had too lol

HAPPY WEDDING DAY!

Congrats! It sure takes a load off actually selecting a resort Good luck with the bookings!