Family, Guest Lists and Monograms. Oh my!

Fun fact: My grandparents on both sides of my family were married on September 14, 19__. Same day, same city, different churches. Cool, huh?

Not as impressive but still kind of weird, my parents are both the 5th child of 6 children from the above stated grandparents. I love this kind of weird stuff.

So I come from a very Irish family on both sides which has always been fun for me. As I mentioned up there both of my parents have 5 siblings and every single one of my parents siblings got married and then went on to produce at least two children. This has ultimately led me to have something like 50 first cousins(I'm including spouses here because I want to). Then of course there is the extended family and close friends, people who I have known my whole Life and those that I have grown up with. Let's do some math:

I have 20 Aunts and Uncles, plus my 50 cousins and my Grandmother and two Great Aunts. We're looking at 73 people who are definitely family.

Then there are about another 15 people who just kind of show up because they are related to somebody who married into my family which brings us up to 88 people.

Can't forget the family that I lived next door to practically my whole Life, we kind of followed them when they tried to move away from us.

So that's another 5 people, so 93.

Plus the other really good friends who used to spend Christmas Eve at our house each year and share cookies with Santa.

95.

Plus my Mom's Best Friend and her family because I also pretty mush grew up with them.

100.

And another really good friend of the family.

102.

So as you can see with just people who are family or like family there is little chance that Pat and I can have a small wedding. Sure, I could not invite all of my cousins but I kind of want them there. I didn't even add in Pat's family or our good friends. Pat's family is about half the size of mine, which is still pretty big.

Here's what I'm getting at, Pat and I did a rough draft of our guest list the other night and we came up with about 170 people. We both know that we are missing people from that list and when we sit down to talk with our parents they are both going to start going on about who is not on the list that should be. We're assuming we are going to be inviting about 200 people to our wedding. That's a lot of people if you ask me! We've talked about it and we really want to avoid cutting people off of the list but I'm afraid we might have to because we are paying for the wedding ourselves and naturally we are establishing a budget of some kind. Blah. This is not going to be a fun process.

In other news, I got bored at work yesterday and decided to play around on Microsoft Publisher so I designed a monogram for Pat and I. :)

I'm actually really excited about this because I just love monograms! Since I come from big Irish family, we're the type of family that has a name like "O'Brein" or "O'Malley" but because my Dad has German in him I never had the pleasure of having the little "O" in my lastnite but I'm going to get it now! Pat also comes from a big Irish family, not as big but it's still pretty big and his family rocks the "O" in their name too! Yay!

That's all I got for now.

xoxo,

K

Thoughts, ideas, plans, I'm crazy.

So since we haven't really started planning everything and I have so many ideas that I need to just write down somewhere, I'm going to put it here. So as I get more and more ideas I will be posting random thoughts for the wedding. It should be fun.

I like to think of myself as a creative person so I plan to make my own invitations, save-the-dates, programs, aisle runner (if I decide to have one), etc. Oh and I'm kind of cheap so I'm hoping that doing a lot of this stuff on my own will save me some money. ;)

My favorite color is red so I plan to go with a bunch of different shades of reds, oranges and maybe some yellows. We'll see about the yellows.

Eventually I will be posting some inspiration boards but I haven't had the time or motivation to make those up just yet. Maybe next week? Or next month?

Because I plan to have outdoor wedding I am hoping to plan something that has a very earthy feel. I feel very strongly about doing all that we can to help preserve our environment so I'm going to try to have as little waste going into my wedding as possible. There are a lot of really awesome organizations who I'm hoping can help me along the way.

I just had an idea to maybe make my own paper products, and by that I mean spending lots and lots of time ripping up pieces of paper and going through the whole process of making my own paper. I'm probably being a bit over ambitious right now but who knows? Since the wedding is still so far away I might actually be able to take the time to make my own paper and dye it and everything. Maybe that could be one of my big summertime projects this year. Maybe?

Ok, I'm getting a bit wordy here so I'm going to leave this post as it is.

xoxo

"So when's the wedding!?!?!"

Ok, so we have officially been engaged for a whopping three weeks and I can't tell you how many times I have been asked what our 'date' is.

Give us a break people!!! Can't we just bask in the glory of being engaged for a little while? Were we supposed to set a date the same night that he asked!?!?! I just feel like it is completely nuts to expect people to have everything figured out within weeks of the actual proposal. Crazy!

The idea is for us to get married in September of 2010 but we have no date and as of right now, that's just the ideal. Things could change so quickly. The venue we love could be booked for September of 2010 and then we'd have to figure something else out! Or we could both lose our jobs and then we'll just be going to the justice of the peace! Haha!

No really though, we are in no rush to pick a date. I mean, sure we're going to start looking at venues and stuff in the next couple of months but picking the actual date will require picking the perfect venue first. I'll let you know when we figure it all out. ;)

xoxo,
K