No, not our cake!

This past Tuesday was our wedding cake tasting!! We are working with The Baking Institute, a bakery that works closely with our venue. A couple months ago, Adam and I selected three flavors of cake and three flavors of icing that we wanted to try, and they put them together in samples for us. My mom, sister, Adam and I were eager to try them all!

I’ve never been a girl with a million wedding fantasies. No, really! When my fiancé and I got engaged, I believe my first wedding venue idea was “picnic in the woods?” That didn’t fly… but once we started planning, I realized that what I did want was one heck of a party with everyone in our families in attendance. I never imagined  that a  matter of a few minutes could make the difference between my fiancé’s family attending our ceremony, or not.

See, Adam and I looked up what time sunset was on the day we booked our venue because we knew that his family wouldn’t ride/carry/travel/work etc. before the end of shabbat on Saturday night. Sunset is at 4:46 p.m. the day we’re getting married so we booked our ballroom for 4:30, which left just enough time for our relatives and guests to get from the hotel to the venue in time for the start of the ceremony at around 4:50. The contract got signed, and the time was set. But we forgot about one thing: havdalah.

Apparently, havdalah ends 15 minutes after sundown, and THAT marks the point at which riding/carrying/traveling/etc. is again “OK.” Adam and I are both reform, and neither of us have actively observed havdalah since we were small children.  My thoughts turned to “what ifs”… What if they’re late? What if they don’t make it? What if they get angry if we start without them? What if we HAVE to start without them?

Adam and I thought we were being observant enough by waiting until sunset for our ceremony… but now we realize that we weren’t and we can’t move the time of the ceremony. Now his entire family, including his 85 year old grandmother, are planning to walk over a mile from the hotel to our wedding venue to get there in time. I’m truly thankful that they’re willing to do that for us, because the day wouldn’t be the same without them.

We joined our synagogue months ago, but we hadn’t yet attended services. We seemed to come up with excuse after excuse, and always had conflicting plans.

Finally, last Friday night my fiancé Adam and I went to services at our new synagogue so that we could meet and experience the rabbi that will be marrying us. The rabbi was great, and we got along well, and the service was quite nostalgic for me. I grew up going to similar types of services, and the familiar prayers and songs brought part of me back to being a 12-year-old at my friends’ Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

Towards the end of the service, though, something unexpected happened. As is the case in most (if not all) services, towards the end of the service, all those in mourning were asked to rise to say Kaddish. When the words started, it hit me. I hadn’t been to services since my grandma passed away… and we said that prayer every day for a week. The tears started, and didn’t stop until well after the last word. It’s so hard for me that my grandma won’t physically be at our wedding… but I know she’ll definitely be there in many other ways.

I pulled myself together, and we met with the rabbi to confirm that he had our wedding on the calendar. Indeed he did, and ours is the first his first wedding he is officiating as the new rabbi of our synagogue! We’ll have a few meetings with him in October, and get to know each other more before our wedding on November 28th.

So many women try to lose weight for their weddings. They get an engagement ring on their finger, and frantically try to be at their thinnest for their big day… but my journey started over three years ago, and while yes, I’d like to lose a bit more weight before our wedding in November, I’m in this for the long haul–not just for my white dress!

My own food and cooking blog has been instrumental in helping me “stick with it” this time, as I’m constantly coming up with new recipes and food ideas to keep things fresh, rather than getting bored like I have in the past. My weight loss story is below… by no means am I a registered dietitian or nutritionist, but rather a normal woman trying to get myself to my healthiest point.

I was born small, 5 lbs 7 ounces to be exact, and I was a full-term healthy baby.

Just days old...

I always loved food, and was always adventurous in my tastes. I can remember being about seven years-old, on a road trip and going to a nice restaurant. My four year old sister ordered age appropriate macaroni and cheese. I ordered a filet mignon–medium rare, and roasted vegetables. We always got to choose our birthday dinner, and my mom would make whatever it was we chose. For my eight birthday, what did I choose? Steamed Asian sesame whitefish with sauteed spinach!

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One of the only sources of stress in our otherwise stress-free wedding planning process has been the question of “who is going to marry us?” Originally, my thought was “I’ll call the rabbi who has been a part of every important life cycle event in my family since I was six years old––he’ll marry us, no doubt!” The Rabbi performed my sister’s naming, my consecration, my sister’s Bat Mitzvah, and my grandmother’s funeral. When I called though, he told me he was retiring and moving across the country. Oy.

I asked everyone I knew if they knew of rabbi that could marry us. Their reply? “Well, only if you join our synagogue.” My fiancé and I weren’t about to join a synagogue an hour away and pay $3,000 a year in dues just to be assured a Rabbi for our wedding though.

I called one rabbi, completely desperate and crying because every independent rabbi we found was charging upwards of $1,200 for a 25 minute ceremony in addition to us having to pay their per-plate charge for the reception! The rabbi gave me a couple of other names and numbers to call. After I hung up the phone, my fiancé suggested that we contact the temple just up the road from us before calling the other rabbis on the list.

Fast forward a couple weeks. I called my fiancé after work like I always do, and he didn’t answer his phone. That usually means one of two things: he’s on the phone with his mom, or his phone is on vibrate and he doesn’t hear it ring. He called me back a few minutes later though and said “GUESS WHAT?!”

Apparently, he’d been playing phone tag with the new rabbi from the synagogue up the street. The old rabbi is taking a new position elsewhere, and this new rabbi is taking over in July–so we will, as of right now, be his very first wedding! We really liked the synagogue to boot, and decided to join after visiting and touring! It was right under our noses the entire time.

I’m quite excited, as joining a synagogue somehow seems more “grown up” than getting engaged even did! Maybe it had something to do with wandering around the synagogue and looking at the classrooms, imagining that some day our children will one day study there, or maybe it was the realization that we are indeed getting married!

*Warning: This may be a rant of sorts!*

So, everyone and their mother, brother, sister, and whoever has been asking me “Are you so stressed out with wedding planning?”

My answer: “No, should I be?”

My fiance and I got engaged July 11, 2008. We set our date for November 28, 2009.  That left us with a mere oh, 505 days to plan.

I decided very early on that I didn’t want my bridesmaids to be matchy-matchy clones of one another, because they’re different people and should (I think) dress differently! There went the stress of finding matching dresses, which from what I’ve heard, can cause major issues sometimes!

We booked our venue in early October, 13 months before our wedding date, and the venue supplies:

• Ceremony room
• Bridal suite
• Champagne toast
• cocktails (top shelf!)
• appetizers
• dinner
• wedding cake
• dance floor
• transportation to and from the hotel block

Honestly, we didn’t need much else! We used friends’ references for our florist, photographer, and DJ, and booked those by early November, 2008. A friend at work is designing and making our invitations, and the only thing left we really need now is a ketubah and Rabbi, and that meeting is today!

Save-The-Dates were made and addressed and sat there for almost 2 months before we mailed them! Am I overdoing the planning far too ahead of time? Maybe. Is it keeping me sane? Absolutely. Am I tired of people asking me about how stressed out I am? DEFINITELY!

*Rant over*

My point? Wedding planning does NOT have to be super stressful!!

Our Save-The-Date!

It started months ago. We booked our wedding venue for 11/28/2009 and promptly started to worry about the fact that our wedding falls on Thanksgiving weekend. What if people are going out of town for Thanksgiving? What if the people we really want to come our wedding can’t come? What if… then we took a deep breath, and realized there was a remedy to this perceived problem:  Save The Date cards!

Everyone and their mother sends Save the Dates nowadays, but originally they were designed for weekends such as, oh, Thanksgiving weekend, so people can plan ahead and attend whatever event is called for to save the date. We started looking into Save the Date ideas. Emails? No, too impersonal. Regular cards? Nope, more likely to get lost. What would be a bit more “permanent” in peoples’ minds? Magnets! I found a company that allowed custom designs to be uploaded then printed on a magnet, so I went ahead and designed our Save the Date “cards.” We decided on the one in the picture above and about a week later, 100 magnets arrived in our mailbox!

Was it that easy? Stick a magnet in an envelope and… crap. Addresses. We needed lots of addresses. Many people don’t worry about addresses until invitation time, but alas, we had to get them and get them NOW. Facebook became our best friend! AAH then another realization: we had no envelopes. Nor did we want to just stick a magnet in an envelope for fear it would get lost. Enter my friend, who with her sister, runs a stationery store. She got me card stock and envelopes for very little money, and I set out assembling magnet-on-cardstock-stuffed-in-envelopes.

Finally, months later, it’s time to send out our Save the Dates. The stacks of envelopes are sitting here ready to get dropped in the mailbox tomorrow. It’s real now… WE’RE GETTING MARRIED!!!

I joined JDate in 2003, just out of college. I lived with 2 non-Jewish roommates, had mostly non-Jewish friends, yet desperately wanted to meet my “bashert” who, ideally, would be Jewish. I did the whole “not paying but looking” thing for a good long time (okay, a year), then decided to pay for 2 months. A measly 2 months. In that 2 months, I met and “met” loads of guys who just were… well… eh. Most still lived at home with their parents, and I wanted nothing to do with that.

Literally the day that I cancelled my paid account, I got a message from this “AdamRo777″ guy. He looked really familiar. The subject of his message? “You look familiar.” He went to the same college that I did, at the same time that I did.  And at a school as small as Bradley University, I can tell you that the pool of Jews was really quite small. It turned out, after days (okay, weeks) of talking online and over the phone we discovered that we knew LOADS of people in common. We set a date to go out on December 17, 2004.

That night we went out to dinner, laughed, ate, talked about people neither of us had seen in years… and next thing we know, it’s two-and-a-half years later and we’ve made the decision to move in together!

Fast forward: July 2008.
On July 10, Adam sent me an email that said “Matt (a friend) and his girlfriend are joining us for sushi tomorrow night, so I got us a tea room.” I didn’t think anything of it. That day, Adam went to a Cubs game with work, and called on his way home to say that Matt had gotten way too drunk to come to dinner, but the restaurant was going to charge us $20 to cancel the tea room reservation, so why don’t we just use it? Still, I didn’t think anything of it.

When we got to the sushi place, we were led to the very last tea room, and it was already set with beautiful plates, chopsticks on tiny pink paper cranes, and water in wine glasses. I still thought nothing of it, and assumed that this was what they were doing in tea rooms now.

We had a great dinner (as always), but I noticed that Adam was very anxious and not himself. He blamed it on not eating enough during the day and having a few too many at the game. After dinner, the maitre ‘d came in with a HUGE platter of fruit and cheesecake and said that it was a thank-you to us for being such loyal customers for 3 years (Did I mention we go there every Friday?). There was a whole pineapple on the plate, and the pineapple had a handle on it. Adam opened it up, and my ring was inside!! He got down on one knee, and said “I love you, will you marry me?” I of course started crying and said “yes!” The host came back in with a huge bouquet of gladiolas for me, and the whole restaurant applauded when we left.

I came to find out that night that Adam had been in cahoots with my dad, a jeweler, for months. He had my dad help pick out a diamond, and together they designed and made my ring. My mom had known for months too! Adam later told me that when he had “gone to the bathroom” during dinner he was really going over details with the sushi chef, our waitress, and host.  I later realized that the waitress had come by our table a few too many times during dinner… and the sushi chef did smile really big when we walked in.