Day 511 - HOLY MOLY!

This week I've hunkered down hard on the wedding to do list. I finished paying for David's ring today, I bought my wedding dress lingerie yesterday, I've been finishing up my DIY list and sent out the last of the invites. I am also tieing down all those extra details that aren't physical.

As I did all this I realized today marks 101 days before our wedding meaning that this Sunday we hit the double digits! OH MY GOODNESS!!!!!! I don't even know how I feel about that!

<3 your overwhelmed hippie bride

Day 502 - Productive!

I love when my maid of honor is around. I seem to get right into wedding mode when she is around. I think mostly because she typically is focused on it. Today I checked off so many things on my wedding list. They may seem small and trivial but at this point there are just a lot of trivial things left.

Bought the girls headdresses, designed the open dance invitations, bought lingerie for the honeymoon, bought another bouquet holder for the bridesmaids so I could finish another bouquet! Oh and made a payment on hubby-to-be's wedding band. :) All-in-all super awesomely productive day.

Now to lose these last 10 lbs...off for a night jog.

Only 110 days left!!!!!!!

<3 your excited hippie bride!!! 

Day 288 - Extreme Couponing Wedding style

All my couponing and sales watching has paid off. Today by paying the rest of my ring off and placing David's back on layaway plus combining my coupon for signing up for their e-mails I was able to save $232.5 off our rings! :) that's not including the original $300 I saved on them initially so all-in-all $532.5 saved.

Better yet, I will have my bridal set in time for the the engagement party. Had to get it resized down 2.5 sizes.

47% through our engagement! That day just keeps getting closer, as days typically do. Now if only my best man would hurry up and submit his RSVP. ;)

<3 your couponing hippie bride 

Day 249 - Money, Money, Money, it isn't funny!

It's been a while, I've been busy. But lately I feel like I'm at a standstill. I have all the planning done but can't move forward until we have the money. Having budgeted for $300/month towards the wedding this means I can only take care of so much at once.
For instance, right now we are making 2 payments a month. One for our rings at a little over $160 and one for my dress at a little over $150. So I'm already over budget by $10. This means no payments on my selected venue, dj, invitations, flowers, favors and everything else.
Well I broke the rules this month. My bridesmaid and I went looking at flowers and got a great deal that we would otherwise miss out on. what would have cost me $370 minimum to have done cost me $35. I spent $35 and acquired the flowers for myself and all my bridesmaids. So this month I am over budget by $45 but that's not too bad considering it saved me a hella lot in the long run.
The venue deposit we have saved and waiting for us to go over the contract. There is only one more payment on my dress and so that will open up payments for other things. Scarily though, the payments on the venue will be $250 a month. meaning we are going to remain over budget by $100 for the rest of the year. This also means we won't be able to start payments on anything else as we will already be over our head with the other payments. I guess I will have to reassess our budget. My guess is we were under budget a few months and thus confused our schedule. :)

Long story short I am sitting here with everything sitting in front of me waiting for me to move forward with them but I can't until the toothfairy leaves money under my pillow at night. Something tells me getting my wisdom teeth pulled would lose more money than it would make though.

I have my invitations designed but I can't afford to start producing them. I have to buy ink, paper and craft supplies to start production. As much as we're saving money on them by my making them the ink itself is about $65 at most. What we decided to do was to send the invitations out in spurts of 10-30 invites. Three separate months of invites being sent out to budget our postal service into it.

Next month the money maker is on vacation and so overtime is not an option. What ever will we do? 

Day 234 - Too tiny

I just finished looking through old photos of myself from 7 months ago and beyond chatting "whale, whale, whale!" Now I'm going to parade around in booty shorts chanting, "you know you WANNNNNNNTTTTTT it!" until hubby-to-be notices. ;)

I pulled out all my old university clothes, not only do they fit....they are too big! Yes! Teenage body here we go!!!!!

I did learn an unfortunate lesson. Well a fortunate and unfortunate lesson. When folding the freshly washed stored university clothing I learned that I should not wear my engagement ring when folding clothes. It flies off whenever I shake out a shirt. Whoops. I'm not having the ring resized because in a few months I shall have the bridal set and wear half of that as my engagement ring instead. The former engagement ring will go on a finger it fits.

<3 your tinier hippie bride

Day 218 - Extreme Couponing

I have been couponing where I can and shopping for a bargain everywhere. Today I managed to save our wedding budget $133.90 by acting on a tax free event. This meant rushing my poor daughter outside in such a hurry that.... well let's let the video tell you the story

Worth it in the end...hoping to save another $300 plus dollars soon. I took some of that saved money and bought her new shoes. :) 

Day 106 - FOUND IT!

Lately I've been thinking it's time to narrow in on a venue. I've narrowed down some possible suspects and think I should set up some appointments to go downtown and view them in person. I'm so nervous to fall in love with something and not be able to afford it or lose it because I can't foot the deposit for a few more months. But I'm going to have to get past that and start looking.

I'm now down 21 lbs and back into some of my old university pants. I've lost so much weight that my engagement ring keeps falling off. I guess we'll have to hurry and get our wedding set purchased before I lose the ring for good. That's a fearful thought!

Today, though, was productive. My bridesmaid, Jenny, has been insisting I try on wedding dresses for a while now. She has been frothing at the bit trying to get me in there. I don't know what size I am and I don't want to be this size when I buy my dress. But she was so excited so I thought, "well...we cant at least see what store I want to shop at when I buy my dress." so I pulled up two names of local stores and we were off. We foolishly had the girls with us so there was some amount of stress in trying to get things sorted out. Not to mention it was a Saturday and the store was really full! We were given 5 rings and sent on our way. I pushed and browsed and was saddened to see the dresses I could afford were....well there was a reason they were so cheap and on clearance. The dresses that were prettier were $$$$ way off course of my budget. My budget being $600 I knew this was a bad idea. Finally I found one dress that made me smile. It was almost twice my budget though. *Wimper* but we decided I should try it on and see how it looks before I completely rule it out.

It was gorgeous, it is gorgeous. After having searched through all the dresses, even the original dress that I fell in love with I think I found a winner. Now to lose another 20lbs and come back. As for the girls, they did pretty good all things considered. And Jenny's daughter was still running around the store in her dreams as you can see below.