Sorry for the delay! I’m back with some ceremony pictures and I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking here.  But imagine us walking down the aisle to Erev Shel Shoshanim and Dodi Li, as performed by our seven piece jazz band.

First down the aisle were Yoni and his parents.  Our Rabbi was already at the chuppah.

Followed by our bridesmaids and groomsmen
(Yoni’s brother and best friend, and my two best friends.)

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We finally got our professional wedding pictures back! I’m going to start from the beginning and work my way through the event post by post, so as not to overwhelm you with photographs.

The first ceremonial order of business was the bedecken. The pre-ceremony traditions seemed very casual to me, but festive at the same time; a lot like a bris that takes place in someone’s kitchen (except  that everyone left with all their body parts in tact!)

Somehow, I look dazed and confused in almost every bedecken photograph, so these are the best I could post without embarrassing myself!

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I’ve taken  a break from constantly refreshing my photographer’s website, hoping with each click that my professional wedding pictures will be up.  With my new free time,  I’ll give you guys a sneak peek of a few of the more Jewish elements of the wedding:

Our chuppah, which I left totally up to the florist.  I think he did a great job!

My mother in law knit yellow and gray kippot  for immediate family.

My non-Jewish friends loved dancing in a circle… no coordination necessary!

Sorry for the quality… but I think you can tell what’s going on here!

Israeli dancing… anyone recognize this dance?

I hope to get the professional photos of my wedding soon to share with you!

Our wedding was about three weeks ago, and although things did not go perfectly, we had a wonderful time and hey, we’re married! I can’t wait to get my pictures back and start blogging about our big, fat Jewish wedding but for now I’ll just share a funny story from our honeymoon in Ireland.

While on line for a pub crawl in Dublin, we were participating in one of our favorite activities, eavesdropping.  An older couple was in front of us, and the wife was talking to the cashier. Yoni leaned over to me and whispered, “I bet she’s Jewish.”

Something some of you may not understand is that seeing another Jewish person is really, really exciting for Jews in our part of the country.  Southern Jews have an automatic, unspoken bond and I’m not sure if that excitement translates to those of you in places with a large Jewish population.  I think we spent a good chunk of our vacation in New York last summer gleefully pointing out people on the Subway wearing kippot. But I digress…

I thought about the couple in front of us and agreed that they “seemed” Jewish.  And that was the end of that – they went off and we promptly forgot about them.

Two weeks later we were eating dinner at a pub in a tiny town on the opposite coast of the country.  I had my back to the door, and Yoni’s eyes lit up.  “It’s the couple from the pub crawl!”

We started chatting with them over the unlikely circumstances that we had seen them two weeks ago across the country, and it was purely small talk until Yoni coyly asked the gentleman where his accent was from. (We had recognized his accent as Israeli from the moment he sat down.)  He told us that he was Israeli, and Yoni mentioned that he was born there, we shared our incredibly Jewish names and all of the sudden we were best friends.  Our talk went from “So, the Irish are really bad drivers, huh?”  to Yoni receiving valuable advice about practicing medicine from the older gentleman, who it turns out is a world renowned physician.  We talked to the couple for around two hours and left them with huge hugs; they were like family.

As a song I learned at summer camp points out, Wherever you go, there’s always someone Jewish…

At this point in my 23 month engagement, I have owned 7 wedding dresses. Yep, you read that correctly–I’m a 7 dress bride. I’m almost the Henry Vlll of white dresses. Allow me to give you a little back story and introduce you to my conquests:

When I got engaged, I was excited about every little detail of wedding planning– tasting cakes, mapping out DIY projects, picking postage for reply cards–pretty much everything, except wedding dress shopping. For some reason, I just wanted to get it over with. I was convinced I was too much of an ice princess to have that tearful “THIS IS THE ONE!” moment. I’ve also inherited my mom’s bargain shopping expertise and challenged myself to buy the cheapest wedding dress possible. So when I heard that my favorite store in the entire world, TARGET, sold wedding dresses… oh, it was on.

Dress #1

I ordered this dress at Target.com for the low low price of $90.00. Part of me wanted it just so I could tell people that I bought my wedding dress for less than a hundred dollars. My future mother-in-law and one of my bridesmaids were with me when I tried it on, and agreed that it looked good on me… but in hindsight, none of us were too excited. Again, I just figured I wasn’t sappy enough to be excited about a dress. {FYI – That thing around my waist is my future mother-in-law’s scarf used as a stand-in sash}

Dress #2

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“Did you know that most temples are built with move-able walls so that on the one day of the year when everyone comes to repent they can actually make the room big enough to hold everyone?”
–Andrew Largeman (played by Zach Braff), Garden State

This fact is turning out to be pretty important in considering our ceremony.  The sanctuary in our temple is only about a year old, as the original sanctuary before that was destroyed by Hurricane Rita.  After enough money was finally raised, the new, beautiful, and modern sanctuary was built in its place.

Here’s the problem though–the seats are benches as opposed to chairs, and everyone I ask has a different idea of how many people the sanctuary can actually seat.  I was originally told 250, which was fine since we were planning to invite about that many people.  Then after speaking with the rabbi, the synagogue’s administrative assistant revised that number to 180 seats at the absolute most.  I knew we would get a few “no” replies to our wedding, but not that many! I mentioned this to my brother who is the president of the Men’s Club, and he estimated the number of seats to be closer to 120.  I even went so far as to send a Facebook message to  the architect of the sanctuary, who gave me 190 as his best guess.  Well, it’s official: no one knows!  Also official: no matter if the number is 120, 180 or 190, we will still have more guests than the sanctuary will seat.

Thankfully the synagogue does have a move-able wall, as described in the movie Garden State.   So I just want to thank those Jews throughout history who only attend synagogue once a year, thus necessitating the move-able wall!  It will help me out greatly in my wedding planning, even if we do end up with guests seated in giant orange plastic chairs at the back of the sanctuary.

I mentioned earlier that we didn’t get to take advantage of the engagement photos included in our wedding photographer’s package. Luckily, my wedding blog addiction finally came in handy because I noticed on one of  them that an  up-and-coming photographer (Jenna of Jenna Cole Photography) was offering free sessions in order to bulk up her portfolio.

Although Jenna is in Dallas, (a six hour round trip drive from us) road trips certainly don’t intimidate us!  I am so glad that we decided to make the drive, because Jenna  is an amazing photographer, especially for someone who is just starting out! She took some to die for shots of us. 

Here’s a teaser of her beautiful images, you can find the rest of them (as well as a fun write up about us!) here.

We brought our puppy along for the journey
(although we don’t think he completely enjoyed being a model!)

My fiancé and I love road trips.

The first two pictures were taken on our first adventure, a two week journey from Louisiana to California, and back again to visit my brother and his family in Louisiana.  The next three are from a month long trip that included stops in Florida, Tennessee, DC, Boston, Philadelphia, NYC, Niagara Falls and Chicago, to name a few.

Not only do we love combining multiple destinations into one vacation, by mid-May, we are pretty much sick of warm Louisiana weather.  Around here, the temperature reaches into the mid 80’s with 100% humidity by late March.   Needless to say, unlike most honeymooners, sipping fruity cocktails at a tropical resort does translate into the trip of a lifetime to us.

It’s only fitting that our honeymoon take us on a road-trip around one of the dreariest places in the world:  Ireland!  We’ll be renting a car and making a loop of Southern Ireland, starting and ending in Dublin.  Luckily, my fiance is half British so he’s got right-side driving in his blood.  On our to-do list: surfing, horseback riding on the beach, a fjord cruise, hiking, biking, and lots of time spent in pubs visiting with the locals and listening to traditional Irish music.  Check out a few of the places we’ll be visiting:

Has anyone else vacationed in Ireland? Any tips?

The first order of business in getting the word out about our wedding were Save the Date cards.  Since my fiancé rarely has a free moment (he’s a first year medical student) and we live four hours away from our photographer,  we weren’t able to take the formal engagement pictures that were offered in our photographer’s package and that we intended to include with our Save The Dates . We really wanted a current photo of ourselves on the save the dates though, so we had to improvise.  One particularly humid day, we headed out to a local art gallery and park to try and capture the essence of “us”:

As you can tell, it didn’t quite go as planned.  After 30 minutes we were sweating, the top 2 buttons of my dress broke off, and my fiancé and I were about to kill each other. So we called it a day and packed up.  When I uploaded the pictures later that day, I realized there was one shot that wasn’t half bad.  It was the one that ended up on our Save the Dates:

We printed these through Vistaprint.com, whose coupons are a valuable resource.  These were free, I just paid for shipping.  On the back, we included our accommodation information.   At the bottom of the card, we directed our guests to our wedding website {the address shown is not the actual address, though it was our first choice} which I created on Google Sites and bought the domain name for at Godaddy.com (which was really hard for me, given how much I loathe their commercials).

After going back and forth on design options for several months, quadruple checking the Hebrew, and catching a few printing snafus (I forgot to include the time of the ceremony!), we finally sent our invitations out a few weeks ago:

I cannot lie, I’ve been slacking.  I haven’t sent them all out.  There is one envelope left, addressed to Mr. Jon Stewart, whom we definitely don’t know.  My fiance thinks he’ll at least send a note.  I just smile and nod.

Spend any amount of time on wedding websites, and you’ll come across this common money saving tip: Get married on a Sunday. Since we’re holding our Jewish wedding during the summer and the sun sets so late, we don’t really have a choice in the matter and were forced to follow this advice. What those wedding websites neglect to mention is that this little gem of an idea doesn’t work if your entire city has never heard of a Sunday wedding — let alone a Jewish one!

The view from the interstate when you’re driving in from New Orleans

For the first month or so of wedding planning, I would contact potential vendors and always get the same response: “You told me June 28th – that’s a Sunday, I think you meant June 27th.” Thanks but I think I know the date of my own wedding! I quickly learned to specify Sunday, June 28th.

In Louisiana, Sunday is considered an “off-day” for a wedding. Neither our venue, caterer, or photographer cut us any slack for our Sunday wedding. One bakery refused to even do business with me once she heard the wedding was on a Sunday. The bakery we’ve decided to use charges an extra $300 for a Sunday delivery – that’s more than the cupcakes themselves cost! (FYI- We’re getting them delivered Saturday and storing them in someone’s refrigerator.)

Our deer hunting cupcakes… just kidding!

My current frustration is trying to find someone to do my hair. I think I called every salon in town, and they all gave me the same line: “Um, we’re closed on Sundays… but I’ll talk to the stylists, see if anyone is interested, and call you back.” It’s been 2 weeks and I’ve heard from 3 places. One girl sounded really, really irritated and was planning to charge me a ridiculous extra fee – not the type of person I want to be dealing with on my wedding day! The other two sounded promising, but all required an additional fee for working on a Sunday. Oy.

Me at age 7: THIS is why my hair desperately needs professional help!

And my final, slightly irrational concern has to do with alcohol. I’m not sure if this is common in other places or if it’s unique to our area, but until recently you were only allowed to buy beer and wine on Sundays – the liquor section of the grocery stores were roped off. I’m still a little worried that the police will shut down our party once they see people enjoying themselves on what is apparently the city-wide day of rest. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on what happens!