the location

I found promontory point in December of 2007, and ever since then I've compared everything to it. It's stunning. Promontory Point is part of the Chicago Park district. The building was built on a man made peninsula in 1909. You walk in through the tower door and then the open room with all the french doors is off to the left. There are flagstone patios on both the east and west sides of the building. It's not too big and it's not too expensive, but the parking situation is pretty bad and because the building isn't on a public road. It actually sits on a bike path so our guests would have to park on the other side of lake shore drive. It's about a ten minute walk so the our grandparents might have an issue getting over there. I've been looking at shuttle services, but I'm not sure how to coordinate that. I'm hoping that the park won't be too crowded for the holiday weekend. Brady keeps assuring me that we're getting married early enough that it shouldn't be a problem. I hope he's right.

the deal

We're going to get married in about 9 months, which seems like the perfect amount of time. I've always thought that i would get impatient if i had to wait more than a year after the engagement to get married, but now I'm afraid that i'm going to be pressed for time.

Thankfully I've been looking at wedding blogs for a year and a half, so i have a pretty good idea of what it is that i want.

The wedding is going to be small (less than 50 people), so it will be really fun to do projects. I have a really short attention span and there's no way that i'd be able to make my invitations if i had to pump out 200 of them.

Because almost everyone (except for his immediate family) is going to be coming from out of town/out of state, we decided that it would be easier for them if we had the wedding in Chicago. I'd found a ceremony/reception cite that I just loved (Promontory Point) that is in Chicago, and the boy's favorite restaurant (Topolobampo) is in Chicago.

The problem was that we were too late for any Saturday booking at Promontory Point in 2010, which I thought was ridiculous. So we did some creative maneuvering and decided that our best bet would to be to get married on a Sunday. We chose Memorial Day weekend so that all of our out of town guests would be able to use the extra day (Memorial Day Monday) as a travel day. But another problem arose... the restaurant isn't open on Sundays and they aren't on the approved caterer list, so we went the very non-traditional route and decided to have our reception the night before our wedding. We're calling it our PRE-ception. Crazy, I know, but listen... if we went the traditional route and invited our immediate family, bridal party, and out of town guests to the rehersal dinner, we'd be inviting anyone anyway, so why not make it the main meal and just cut the cake after the wedding the next day!? And because we're getting married early in the morning on Sunday, our guests would be able to take off whenever they wanted so they wouldn't need to book an extra night at the hotel unless they wanted to.

Problem solved.

the story

My boy and I went to the same college (a very small college) for four years, but didn't meet until the day before we graduated. We hit it off right away and started dating about a month later. I was living at home in Nebraska, and he was living with his family in Wisconsin. About every two or three weeks, we would make the drive (4-6 hours) to meet back on campus to hang out. My brother was living there for the summer so we had a free place to stay, and it was about as close to half way as we could get. We slept on the floor and made each other meals like it was something we did everyday. After four months, I moved to Wisconsin to be closer to him. I got my own apartment and worked a quiet office job for a year before we moved in together. Eight months later he proposed and now I have a blog to tell you all about it.

hello!

I'm here to talk about planning my wedding because i'm pretty sure that everyone around me is sick of hearing about it.

So take a look.