Sing a new song unto the Lord: Ceremony music

As with ceremony readings (previous post), the Catholic church has certain rules about what music you choose for your ceremony.  The most important rule is that the piece is either classical or was written expressly for church.  To the church, music is an integral part of worship, so walking down the aisle to "All You Need Is Love" is a big fat no.  There are also other minor rules, like appropriateness of season (no Easter music during Lent, etc.), and some songs are actually expressly banned because the composer was anti-Semitic or they are otherwise offensive to the church (the Bridal Chorus is one).

St. Francis Xavier does a lot to help you choose music for your ceremony.  They have a music director who sends you a CD of the most popular songs to choose from, but you are also allowed to choose other songs, within reason.  The church coordinates cantors (lead singers) and instruments, which is somewhat restrictive and expensive, but also means that you have someone who is used to playing this music at this church and don't have to worry about finding competent musicians or singers.  The cantor we chose sounds like he came straight from a Disney musical!

We had a ton of fun picking songs.  If you are a parishioner with little involvement in the music ministry, this is the only time in your life that you get to basically design your own mass, so I've been saving up songs we liked for years!  If you're into Catholic/Christian or even just classical music, this is what we picked:

Prelude: Laudate Dominum

Seating of families: Canon in D

Bridal party processional: Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring

This song is often associated with Christmas, which is appropriate.

Bridal processional: Gesu Bambino

I was so happy the music director let me use this, because it's a Christmas song and technically we're still in Advent.  Mine will be instrumental, but I love her voice in this song!

Responsorial Psalm: 148, Praise the Lord from the Heavens [I liked this one for its reference to "all you creeping things" on the earth :) ]

Gospel Acclamation: Festival Alleluia

Preparation of Eucharistic gifts: Set Your Heart On the Higher Gifts

This is a sneaky way to fit in 1st Corinthians without actually reading it.

Communion Song: The Servant Song

Communion Song: We Are Many Parts

We also considered "Blest Are They", which is based on the Beatitudes, and "Lord of All Hopefullness," which I love.  There are a lot of great communion songs.

Recessional: Ode to Joy

Lance picked this one.  Personally, I can't hear it without singing "Starz has movies, Starz has movies..."  It is upbeat, though!

Postlude:  

Choosing instrumentation also took a while, because Lance liked all the songs on the sample CD with trumpets, but neither one of us wanted a trumpet.  The music director said that she could do a lot with even one more instrument, but she couldn't find duet music for the strings that we were interested in, so we settled on the piano and the violin.  So excited for the violin!

Ceremony readings

With three weeks to go (wait, what??), it's a little embarrassing to say that we just picked out ceremony readings last week.  For those of you who don't know, the Catholic mass contains three readings: the first reading, which is from the old testament; the second reading, which is from the new testament; and the gospel, which is from Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.  The church provides guidance on choosing your readings; namely, there are wedding mass planning books (like Together for Life) with all of the suggested readings, and you basically go through and pick the ones you want.

For the first reading, we already knew that we wanted to use Ecclesiastes 4:8-12:

Two are better than one: they get a good wage for their labor.  If the one falls, the other will lift up his companion.  Woe to the solitary man!  For if he should fall, he has no one to lift him up.  So also, if two sleep together, they keep each other warm.  How can one alone keep warm?  Where a lone man may be overcome, two together can resist.  A three-ply cord is not easily broken.

For the second reading, we had to do some digging.  This is the slot in which people often use 1st Corinthians (love is patient, love is kind), and we really wanted to avoid that cliche (although it is a beautiful reading).  It's no wonder people always choose that one, though, given the paucity of options!  We ultimately settled on Philippians 2:1-4:

If there is any encouragement in Christ, any solace in love, any participation in the Spirit, any compassion and mercy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, with the same love, united in heart, thinking one thing.  Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out for not his own interests, but everyone for those of others.

We liked the idea of putting the other first, so it seemed appropriate.  Finally, we got to the gospel readings, and the options were just terrible.  This is the place where people often use Mark 10:6-9 (what God has joined together, let no man put asunder).  We narrowed it down to Matthew 5 (the Beatitudes) and John 15 (remain in my love), but neither one of those was really inspiring.  The Beatitudes are great, but they're about suffering and don't really seem appropriate for a wedding, and John 15 has a weird line about slavery in the middle.  So, we asked Father Mike if we could use the reading from mass last week, Matthew 25, instead.  We thought we'd trade minor references to hellfire for a reading that's actually about love (caring for the least of these).  We're waiting to hear from Father Mike for approval, but then we've got the entire ceremony finished!

To Have and To Hold...

As you might have picked up by now, I'm kind of obsessed with little wedding day details.  So, I had this cute idea playing on the words of the traditional vows.  A while back, I saw these cute sweetheart table chair signs that said "to have" and "to hold," which I thought were adorable.

That's Italian.  Ours would be English.  :)

I thought this would be a cheap, easy, and fun little decoration, so I picked up some chipboard signs at Hobby Lobby to paint.  This got me thinking about other lines of the traditional vows that we could incorporate.  Remember those hospitality baskets I talked about?  I think this would be a great place to use "For better, for worse... in sickness, and in health."  I could design the explanation sign using that as a header and following it up with an explanation, which also helps me avoid all of those cutesy wordings.

Finally, I've seen people use scratcher's tickets as favors (another favor that you don't have to tote home and wonder what to do with).  To class them up a bit, people usually put them in little envelopes, which is a great place for "for richer or for poorer."

The first time I saw this idea, my initial reaction was, "Yuck, scratchers tickets at a wedding?," but I thought it might be a nice nod to Lance and his gambling hobby, plus I thought the envelopes were nifty.  After pitching the idea to my mom, though, she called them "the tackiest thing she's ever heard."  I'd hate to put that idea in people's heads, so those have been relegated to the "if we have time and feel like spending more money" list.  It would be a cute set of pictures if we did all of them, though (you know, except "until death do us part," because it's not a Halloween wedding!).

The website is done!

First, I just wanted to let you guys know that the comments you are leaving on the blog are not saving for some reason, so I'm not getting them.  There are a few things that we could still use input on as we finish up this trek, so by all means send your comments to us via text or Facebook.  Ok, now onto the post:


I finally finished the website today.  It's a little late, with just 24 days to go, but I finally got everything on there that I was hoping to have up before the wedding.

First, I added a song request window.  Essentially this is a website inside a website (website inception).  Google has a built-in survey tool called Google Forms, and essentially this window is a one-question survey.  It's not the prettiest thing, but it is kind of cool in that it automatically populates a spreadsheet with people's answers.  So, leave us a song!

Second, I added a photos page, which serves multiple purposes.  First, it gets all of those photos off the home page.  Second, it allows me to put up a few engagement photos, which we have not shared on Facebook (my hair was doing some weird wave thing that day that really bummed me out), so hopefully that's a draw for people.  Finally, we are still considering an unplugged wedding (final decision will come when/if we make programs), and I think having a place where people know they can find wedding photos might make that concept more tolerable for people.

Finally, I finished and put up a printable map!  I've seen these before in wedding paper suites online, and I thought they were awesome and totally doable.

I found a couple tutorials online, and was a little embarrassed that I didn't initially see how simple they were to make.  Essentially, you take a photo of the area off Google maps, import it as a background in Powerpoint, and then use the drawing tools to trace the important roads.  If you want to put more detail into an area, you can use a callout bubble to focus in on that area.  So, this is what I came up with:

Admittedly it's not as fancy as the ones above, so I may end up tweaking it, but graphics design is not my forte.  It's hard to balance the size and readability of each part of the map with all the details that make sense to include (like our names and the names of the ceremony and reception halls, which I just realized aren't on there!).  Originally I was planning this to go on the back of a third sheet of paper (more on that later), but clearly, it's much too big.  What do you think?  Any ideas to improve it or details you think are necessary?

Getting closer!

Living our vows

This has been, without much competition, the worst year of our relationship.  (Bear with me here, I'm going somewhere with this.)  For whatever reason, we have had the worst luck in 2014 than I can remember ever having in my life (a great feeling for the year you're getting married, as you can imagine).  You know how movies and magazines say when you get engaged it's all magical and sunshine and rainbows?  That's bull.  Wedding planning can be incredibly stressful, not to mention time consuming and expensive, even without additional issues.

So far this year, we spent several hundred dollars for me NOT to take a class (thanks, Mizzou); my computer crashed and lost 2 months of data right before my graduation, which meant I had to work almost around the clock to graduate on time; there was some shady political stuff surrounding my graduation events that I won't get into here; we've had car trouble ranging from blown tires to cracked windshields to fried alternators; Lance's aunt passed away; our teeny tiny apartment flooded all spring, so we lived in our living room for 2 months; we finally moved, and our new apartment had a severe flea infestation (10+ chemicals later and we finally gave up and are waiting for them to starve to death); we never got the puppy that we moved into the apartment for in the first place because of the fleas; I was on Accutane for 10 months (admittedly voluntarily, but I had nosebleeds every day for the duration and wasn't allowed to see the sun all summer); halfway through the year my health insurance deductible more than doubled because I changed my address; the city where we will be getting married is in the national spotlight for race riots; my grandparents RSVP'ed no to the wedding with no explanation; our church, which we chose and booked years ago, needed steeple repairs and is likely going to be completely under scaffolding on our wedding day; and finally, we've been pretty tight financially because literally every line item in the wedding has gone over budget (sometimes our doing, other times completely unpredictably).  In between all of the catastrophic things, we fit a more than a few random annoyances and misfortunes (the day we learned that a Batman ice cube tray does not belong in the dishwasher was a sad day).  We've had the occasional happy experience (I finally graduated, cake tasting, we took a short trip to Vegas, etc.), but overall, I have never experienced daily life to be so difficult as I have this year.

Now, I recognize that a lot of these issues are first-world problems, but some were not.  Case in point: probably the single worst thing that's happened this year was Lance's oral surgery last summer.

It was a pretty routine surgery.  Lance's dentist referred him to an oral surgeon to have a tooth out.  We showed up super early and went through all of the admission and aftercare protocols.  He was nervous because he had never been under anesthesia before, but the surgery went well and afterward the nurse had me come sit with him while the drugs wore off.  He said a couple strange things that would have been funny if he hadn't been so disoriented; he felt his face and commented that he was glad they didn't break his jaw (apparently something on the waiver he signed), he flirted with the nurse (bizarrely out of character), and he made a few jokes (like calling himself a "holebilly").  Between the nurse and myself, we managed to load him into the car to go home.

This is the point at which things started to go sideways.  The surgeon's office recommended that we fill his pain prescriptions at the Walgreen's down the street because it had a drive-through window (you can't leave patients in the car because they sometimes have short-term amnesia and wander off, and you can't bring them inside because they might fall down and get hurt).  So, off we went to Walgreen's.  I turned in his prescriptions at the window, and the pharmacist said that they would be ready in 15-20 minutes.  Not wanting to take Lance home and have to wake him up to go back out, I waited in the parking lot with the air on while I waited for the text alert.  Lance slept.  After 40 minutes, I went back to the window and asked if the medicines were ready.  The pharmacist said they had not filled it because of an issue with the insurance, but they never called and asked us whether to fill it or not.  The difference was something like $20, so I told them to fill it.  The pharmacist was extremely rude and told me in no uncertain terms not to come back until we received a text message, which should take 10-15 minutes.  After 20 minutes, I went back to the window and picked up the medicines, even though I never got the alert.  At this point we had been sitting in the car with the sun beating down on us for over an hour.  We headed home (with Lance loudly giving me his opinion on the uselessness of pharmacists), I unpacked Lance from the car, and we went inside to give him his medicines and put him to bed.

We made it up the path to the apartment alright, and went to the kitchen to get some water and read the prescriptions.  As I'm reading the aftercare directions, Lance says, "Hold on, I think I'm feeling nauseous from swallowing all this blood."  He leaned over and braced himself on the kitchen sink, thinking he would vomit, and I stood off to the side, out of the way.

All of the sudden, his entire body went limp.  I felt like I was watching in slow motion as he collapsed, his fingers sliding through the water in a bowl in the sink, and his head slammed onto our tile-over-concrete kitchen floor and bounced back up 6 inches with the force of the impact.  His eyes rolled back into his head and he seized.

It took me about a second to decide to run for my phone and call 911 before starting CPR.  I thought he had had an allergic reaction to the drugs and could be in cardiac arrest, and I figured he could survive for a few seconds unconscious having just had air versus after any attempt at CPR.  When I came back with my phone, already dialing 911, he was staring up at the ceiling, totally confused, and asked, "Where am I?"

I was completely freaked out that he may have a brain injury, so I made him stay on the floor while I called the oral surgeons to ask what to do.  The nurse was completely bored with me.  "Well, is he awake?"  Yes.  "Does he know who he is?"  Yes.  "Ok, so he fainted.  It happens all the time.  Just don't let him go anywhere by himself for 24 hours."  Apparently being upright (like in the car) after anesthesia can cause your blood pressure to drop and you faint.  Nowhere on the aftercare sheet did it say that fainting is possible, let alone common.  Also, when people faint, it's not that graceful, eyes-closed, fall-to-the-side bit that the damsels do in the movies.  It's a horrible dead-weight seizure.

Against Lance's protests, I followed him everywhere the next time he stood up to get something.  He gave me about 2 seconds of warning the second time he fainted, saying simply, "Huh.  Here comes that nauseous feeling again."  This time, I hugged and caught him from behind, slamming into a wall as he collapsed and sliding us both down to sit on the floor.  I held him for what seemed like forever, watching his eyes loll back and just praying that he would come back to me soon.  After a bit he woke up, declared that he felt like hell, and never complained about me shadowing him again for the next two days.

I tend to think I'm pretty good in emergency situations, but I have never been so scared in my life as watching Lance fall and crack his head on the floor and seize.  Between both events, he was probably unconscious for less than a minute, but in that time I felt everything that he means to me, how little direction I would have in my life without him, how much he is integrated in all my future plans and dreams.  He is my anchor.  He is my everything.  I need him, and I have never loved him more than I do now.  To lose him would be unfathomable.

In the days that followed, Lance tried to recover from his surgery and the giant knot on the back of his head, and I tried to recover from the shock and the guilt that I didn't catch him when he fell.  He kept apologizing for freaking me out, and I kept repeating, "In sickness and in health, babe."

For all that this has been a total shithouse year for us, we have had great practice in living our vows.  For better or for worse?  Check.  For richer or for poorer?  Check.  In sickness and in health?  Check.  Even though this has been the worst year of our relationship, it has only served to make us stronger as a couple.  There have been doubts and stresses about the wedding, but whether we chose the right partner or whether our marriage will succeed has never been a question.

Everyone says that the first year of marriage is the hardest, and my friend Sarah says we just got that hard year out of the way early.  If that's true, I guess we should look at it as a blessing.  From that perspective, the worst year of our relationship has forced us to grow together in a way that happier times did not.  Maybe it is our best worst year.

Sign me up!

With less than a month left, we are down to the final details (and a lot of procrastinated DIY).  I keep trying to remind myself that we have all of the "big stuff" done, and we will still get married if we decide to scrap everything else to the "eff it" list.  (This includes some of the plans we've shared on here; after all, if I hadn't written about it, no one would notice, right?)

One thing that we have neglected to choose is our guest book.  Honestly, "guest book" is a bit of a misnomer these days, because modern couples hardly ever have actual guest books, whose purpose once upon a time was to record who attended the wedding.  Nowadays, guest books are more creative and artistic, and are usually displayed in the newlyweds' home.  Many of them aren't even paper!

There are ones that ask you to doodle or draw (which is great for scrapbooking!):

Or etch:

Or stamp:

Those thumbprints are tiny colorful balloons

Or type:

Or snap a photo:

Or sign a photobook:

Or a coffee table book:

They make some neat Saint Louis ones that would work.

Or art:

Or a keepsake:

I read about one quilted guest book where the guests actually supplied the fabric.  How sweet is that?

As for us, we like the ones where people can leave you notes OR simply sign it and be done:

We got a lot of fun notes on our RSVPs, but we also recognize that some people get writer's block (or are just old and crabby) and don't like to spend the time on the guest book.  We'd rather have a signature than nothing!

Lance's mom pointed out that I could use my die-cutter to create shapes for a wishing tree (which are fairly common now).  Snowflakes are too cliche, but maybe quatrefoils or just circles?

We also like the trend toward signing something meaningful or representative of you as a couple to display:

This couple sprayed their signed river rocks with sealant and created a rock garden!

The idea that caught Lance's attention was the baseball or bat guest book:

I really love the idea of having something to display rather than a book to gather dust in a keepsake box.  My only hold-ups are that 1) baseball is woefully out of season and 2) they take up a lot of space for the rest of your life, and we are budding minimalists.  Good thing none of our ideas are terribly complicated, because we will have to pick something quick this month!

Hair

I had my hair trial last weekend, and I was pretty happy with how it turned out!  As I mentioned in my last post, I had originally wanted to leave my hair down.  However, I ended up choosing a dress that requires an updo, so I had to choose a new hairstyle.  I collected photos of bridal updos that I liked (and a few that were similar that I didn't like, to try to figure out why) and generally tried to identify trends.  I figured out that I like braids:

And unstructured curls:

And shape is important:

As is the ability to stick a veil in it:

Given all of that, this is what the stylist came up with:

(My mom has better pictures on her camera; excuse the phone photos!)  I liked the braids (kind of subtle Katniss/Elsa) and the overall shape.  I think I'll ask for it to be a little tighter underneath and more curly than just pinned on on the day of, but overall I really liked it!

Headbands

So, this post is mostly just going to be wedding porn for those of you who like pretty things.  If you're not here for pretty things, you can skip it.  :)

For a long time, I wanted to leave my hair curled down with a bridal headband and veil, like this:

So, I've been looking for headbands on and off ever since we were engaged, and there are some really gorgeous ones out there!  Unfortunately, the "wedding" word makes a lot of them obscenely expensive, and a lot of them don't really go with my dress.  I tried on a ton of them and figured out that I really prefer the thinner ones, which are much harder to find, so I opted for a more elaborate updo instead.  But, now I have this collection of pictures of headbands, so I thought I'd share.  :)

Kirs​ten Kueh​n, "Alex"

Untamed Petals, "Sage"

Sara Gabriel, "Vera"
(I love this one!)

Elizabeth Bower, "Downton"
(The leaves are so pretty!)

On Etsy (my friend says most of these are craft store beaded trim glued to a ribbon):

SunKissBridal, "Julie"

IngenueB, "Claire"

EdenLuxeBridal tiara

ForHerSpecialDay

Brass Lotus, "Elsie"

And finally, some "real weddings" pictures from the internet:

Even though a beautiful headband was originally the plan, I'm not too sad that I never found one.  I love my updo and my veil, and a veil and a headband might have been too much.  Also, apparently headbands are the new tiaras (they are often even called that), and I really never wanted to be a princess, anyway!