It’s been a rough past week for me… my stepdad was ill in the hospital (he’s back home now), I  came down with a nasty cold (thanks a lot, Fi!) and I’ve been extremely busy with overtime at work (benefitting the wedding fund, so woo hoo!). However, being the relentless planner that I am, I still managed to get a few wedding details out of the way. For starters, we booked our HONEYMOON!

(Photo Credit: RoyalCaribbean.com)

You may have read my blog a few months ago about us wanting to vacation on the brand new Oasis of the Seas cruise ship. However, after re-evaluating our finances and priorities, we ultimately decided to opt for the next best thing. And I’m ecstatic to reveal that we finally booked our honeymoon on the Freedom of the Seas, a 7-day cruise with Royal Caribbean, visiting Cococay in the Bahamas, St. Thomas, and St. Maarten! The ship is just four years old and boasts many of the same amenities as the Oasis… an ice skating rink, rock climbing wall, Ben & Jerry’s, Johnnie Rocketts, Flow Rider surf simulator… not to mention that we have a balcony room, so we’ll be able to enjoy a beautiful ocean view any time of the day! We’ve already begun browsing island excursions, and I’ll definitely blog about them as soon as they are chosen.

(Photo Credit: Google Images)

REGISTRIES! We’d been planning to wait until it was much closer to the wedding, but we couldn’t stay away from those nifty scanner gun any longer. So we finally made registry lists at Target and Bed, Bath and Beyond!! We weren’t too sure what to register for in all honesty, since we have already lived together for two years and have all the basics, and also because we’ll be moving next year and it’s difficult to choose items for a house you haven’t even seen yet. We considered having a “honeymoon registry” and asking for items we could enjoy on the cruise, but the only honeymoon registry websites I could find charged fees on top of the gift and I wanted to avoid added fees at all costs. So we were able to come up with a few things for the registry that have been on our “wish lists”. For one, I’ve been wanting a quality set of luggage for a few years now, and we figured there was no better time to use new luggage than for our honeymoon! I found an amazing 3-piece set at Target, and Joe picked out his own set at BBB. With Joe being a trained chef, he has very expensive tastes in the kitchen, so we had to be very careful with the scanner gun in the cookware aisle. I mostly let him take care of all the must-haves for the kitchen, considering I barely step foot in there anyway. We didn’t even have to search long before we found the perfect linens and table settings that we both just loved. (It makes it so easy that we have similiar tastes!)

We first visited BBB, which was an extremely eye-opening experience considering the never-ending selection of housewares and the dozens of decisions needing to be made. Bone china or stoneware? 6 piece set or 8 piece set? White food processor or black food processor? It was pretty overwhelming, but we had a wonderful registry coordinator to help guide is through the whole process which helped to ease the stress. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to actually use the scanner gun ourselves until we got to Target. I liked this process a little better because we entered our registry information on the kiosk in customer service area all on our own, then had free range (and no pressure) when browsing the store and choosing whatever we wanted. While the two store registry processes were very different from one another, both were tremendously fun.

(Personal Photo)

For our CENTERPIECES, we’d been prepared to do something very simple (and of course, DIY) to stay within our budget. But since I’ve been earning padded paychecks with all the overtime at work, we decided to spend a bit more than originally planned on centerpieces. We’ve decided to keep the same basic idea of floating candles inside three tall cylinder vases, complete with rose petals and Swarovski crystals sprinkled around the candles. But we’ve added a newer, more extravagant element that I am crazy about! We picked up a 15” cylinder vase to add to the center of each table, which will be filled with rustic, towering branches accented with crystal garland. Inside each smaller vase, we’re going to be adding gemstones with submersible floralytes underneath to give them a romantic glow. Last week we ordered most of these table supplies from www.save-on-crafts.com and will hopefully get them in the mail soon so we can build a “sample” centerpiece. It shouldn’t be too difficult to construct our idea — Joe already created a 3D image on our computer of exactly what the entire centerpiece set will end up looking like… and I LOVE it!