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Wow, can't believe it's been about 2 months since my last Wedding Blog post. I'm certainly well overdue for a wedding planning update. Aside from actually helping in planning the wedding, a lot of my free time has been spent launching my new Zazzle-based website, WardTog (more on this in an upcoming blog post).
But I'm happy to announce that the wedding date is now official! September 5, 2010 is the day that Rashida will do me the honor of becoming my wife, and I becoming her husband. We have actually known that 09.05.10 would be the date since soon after the proposal (and after my short-lived wedding planning embargo). We've already booked the ceremony & reception location, chosen our photographer, videographer, DJ & wedding cake vendor, and picked out the wedding & bridesmaids dresses. Please believe that Rashida was very excited to cross off every single one of those items from our ToDo list. I'm actually going to try and give a spotlight to each one of our vendors leading up to the wedding.
So even though we've known the date for a few months now, it became "official official" when we created our wedding website and sent out the save-the-dates to those invited to the wedding. We're going to have (what I believe is) a small wedding consisting of a maximum of 115 people. This made it really difficult to pick invitees. For me, it basically boiled down to my close homies, relatives and church family, and even still I know I left out some people I would've really liked to invite. But in the end, when it comes to choosing between going over budget or making everyone happy, we've decided up front to stick within the budget. Weddings are expensive. Easily the most you'll ever spend for a single day. I dunno if it's possible to appreciate that until you're planning your own.
Our save-the-dates weren't your typical save-the-date postcards, magnets or photo cards either. If you didn't already know, Rashida and I aren't always going to go with the traditional approaches to planning and having a wedding. We want to be able to put our own stamp on the wedding with creativity & innovation. And to be honest, the traditional approaches aren't very cost effective either. This is why weddings are a $100 billion industry! With the prevalence of the Internet (and technology in general), there are many opportunities to be creative while simultaneously saving money. Now I call that a win-win situation!
Screenshot of the save-the-date email we sent
So instead of sending out the traditional save-the-date, we sent out emails that looked like what you see above. The subject of the email said "Save the Date - September 5, 2010! Bridges/Ilegbodu Wedding!" and the email itself contained a large envelope that was addressed to the invitee (in this case Mr. John Alabi). The envelope also featured our (future) return address as well as a custom Zazzle stamp with an image from our engagement photo shoot. But that wasn't it. When you clicked on the envelope (or the link below it), you were taken to our save-the-date video hosted on YouTube:
Many thanks to John who helped film most of the shots. It was fun getting to dust off the ole iMovie skills birthed at Stanford, even though I had to use Windows Movie Maker Live which is whack in comparison. I think the video shows our love for each other much more effectively than a save-the-date card. It definitely took many times more work to do it, but it was infinitely cheaper (literally).
With a lot of the big stuff out of the way, up next for Rashida are the floral decorations (bouquets, boutineers, centerpieces, etc.). It seems like a pretty big job, but I think she's got a couple of people helping her. I'm good with the logistics & and the technological aspects of the planning, but when it comes to flowers my usefulness is pretty minimal.
My focus right now is on planning the honeymoon (almost done) and the tuxes. You can guess which one I'm most excited about! Planning the honeymoon has been a big deal for me (aside from the fact that it's our honeymoon) because I've never even planned a trip/vacation before. But luckily Brandon put me on TripAdvisor and that's been a lifesaver. Maybe I'll do a whole blog post about the honeymoon planning process and using TripAdvisor...
If you haven't already checked it out, take a look at our wedding website: www.BenAndRashida.com/. It's got lots of information about us, how we met, the proposal story, and of course information about the wedding.
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