Happy Birthday Mother of the Bride!

At the reception

We wanted to wish, MaryLee, the mother of the bride, a very happy birthday today!  We won’t say how old she is, mostly because it gives away how old the bride is as well!

Today is Mom’s birthday and not only did we want to wish her a very happy birthday, but to thank her for everything she did for our wedding from touring endless wedding venues crammed into a very short weekend, buying the beer for the engagement party, trekking all that wine home from the shower (8 or 10 cases!), letting the house become wedding central (hotel gift bags in the kitchen, wedding flowers in the living room, menus in Jennifer’s old room, steaming the rehearsal gown (unsuccessfully with Dad, Patrick, and Melissa – no one knows how to use that thing), and sucking it up to buying a dress for the big day.  (Anyone who truly knows MaryLee knows what a chore that actually was…)

Mom, Bride, Maid of Honor

On this very day last year, not only was it Mom’s birthday, but it was a very wedding-oriented day.  I found all of the bridesmaid dresses at Gainesville’s Urban Thread! (Gorgeous J. Crew wedding gowns for the girls and I picked them up for a steal for all 4 bridesmaids – another post on that sometime.)  After picking up the dresses and hitting the turnpike, I also had a genius wedding moment and stopped at the service plaza and cleared out all the “Things to Do in South Florida” packets to include in the wedding welcome bags!

Happy Birthday, Mom!  Hope you’re enjoying the day!

XOXO
M, J, and S

P.S.  The box with your birthday present is still sitting by my front door!  It will make it there eventually!

Happy Birthday ET, er, Jennifer

Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday to you!
You look like a monkey!
And smell like one too!

Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday dear Jennifer!
Happy Birthday to you!

Today is Jennifer’s birthday, if you didn’t already figure that out.

I think she has some pretty awesome plans with Melissa, Sam, and some other people in Gainesville.

Happy Birthday, ET…oops, I mean Jennifer!

XOXO
M, J, and S

Happy Shower Rebekah!

Taken at our shower in July. Bride-to-Be on left.

Today my new sister-in-law, Rebekah, is having her bridal shower. She will be marrying Eric on November 8th.

The shower will be a brunch in Florida and I did try to plan a quick trip down, though we just couldn’t swing it with all we have going on.

The invitations went out after we came back from our wedding, which was only 3 weeks ago, so there wasn’t a lot of time to plan a second trip to Florida so soon.

Hope you have a great time. Oh, and have a happy birthday tomorrow, Rebekah!

XOXO
M, J, and S

Dead Bug Doug

That's Doug driving and me holding on for dear life!

A few months back, my brother Douglas, got his first set of wheels. Two wheels in fact. He got a motorcycle. A Honda CBR F4I to be exact.

It wants to go fast. Doug wants to go faster.

Back in June, when I was down for my mom’s birthday, he decided to take me for a ride. He promised to go slow around the block, and maintained about 15 mph most of the time, but felt like showing off and I caught a “35″ on the speedometer once!

I knew I had something to fear immediately. As soon as I got on the back of the bike, all Doug said was, “Don’t. Let. Go.”

And you better believe that I didn’t! I held on so tight to my brother that my sweat outline was on the back of his shirt and my fingernails had left impressions on his ribs! He wasn’t the only left scarred that day…every time I tried to yell to him to “SLOW DOWN” I got a throat-full of dreadlock!

You’ll meet him at the wedding. He’ll be pimpin it in a blue pinstripe suit.

XOXO
M, J, and S

Baby Bayfield: Blog Savvy Little Bugger

I’ve been meaning to mention this since the end of May, but as you all probably know now, I am not so good at keeping up with the MANY things going on in our lives right now. The whirlwind is upon us and those of you who are near and dear to me know just how well I actually deal with whirlwinds…

As you know, our Non-Bridesmaid Karla and her husband Justin, are expecting their first baby in early

October (October 3rd), which is why they won’t be able to make it to the wedding on September 13th! While this saddens us, as Karla has been a part of SO MANY pivotal moments in my life, we completely understand and are already planning our first baby visit in October (don’t worry, I have already cleared this with Karla.)

Anyway, Baby Bayfield, boy or girl (who knows!!! I wish I did!!!), is quite the blog savvy little bugger. He/She already has his/her own website!

I check it frequently, but it looks like Mummy and Daddy are just about as good as I am about updating the blog regularly — eh hem, hint hint.

The countdown is on Baby Bayfield. We’ll be married in 21 days! But, we’ll see you in about 41 days!

XOXO
M, J, and S

Maid of Honor Hits College

This may be very hard for some of you to believe.

Yesterday my parents drove up with Jennifer, our Maid of Honor, to Gainesville. She is temporarily staying with Melissa and Patrick (more on that later…) until the beginning of September. Jennifer will be attending Santa Fe Community College this fall. The semester begins on Monday, 25 August 2008!

My parents will be back in Gainesville in two weeks to help Jennifer move into her new apartment. Something I didn’t even do when I was a freshman in college! (I got stuck in the yucky UF dorms…something I would recommend for anyone, despite its grunge.)

Today I believe Jennifer will be registering for her classes — how exciting. Melissa and I were on the phone for a while trying to come up with a good game plan for Jen to get adjusted to a new way of life in a college town – without failing out of school!

Anyway, we wanted to send you our wishes of GOOD LUCK JENNIFER!

XOXO
M, J, and S

New Addition to the Family!

Hi everyone! We have some very exciting news to share with all of you!!

Since we are finally engaged and on our way to a wedding (going through the whirlwind as you already know), we’ve also been thinking about adding to our family for quite some time. We would have done it sooner, but were worried about our Star-cat. We thought about it long and hard and now that she’s about 10 years old, we think it’s time. It’s finally about time to get her acclimated to another presence in the house, so we got a new pet.

I know some of you may have just been thinking a baby! Well, sorry to disappoint you, but we are having a baby of our own kind – another animal.

We’d like to introduce you to Rocky, and have included his picture below. We always thought Star would do well with a baby brother. He’s half cat, half squirrel. We figured this would be so much easier since she would only have to acclimate halfway…

Isn’t he cute?

We love him lots! We hope you do, too.

XOXO
M, J, and S

P.S. Happy April Fools’ Day!!

 

 

 

New Direction for Wedding Whirlwind

(Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride)

Hi to all of our readers! We’re very excited to know that some of our readers extend well beyond family and friends, which makes keeping the blog up even more fun. We’ve gotten some great comments and some really fun emails from people all over! I guess the blogging community really is a “small world”.

Anyway, now that you all know our engagement story, so to speak, and have followed all the installments in the Wedding Whirlwind saga (so far), we are going to take it in a new direction. We won’t be abandoning anything to do with the engagement – because there is still a lot more now that we’re “official” but it’s now time to get into the nitty gritty of planning the wedding.

We hope you stick around for all of that. Also, this weekend we’ll be putting up some much needed photos within posts like “Happy Birthday to the Bridesmaid Emily!” and “Almost Engaged…The Christmas Countdown” to name two.

We also know that a lot of these events took place weeks (or months) ago, but my sweetie and I are both very busy with work, planning, and other happenings (like our weekly wine class that we’re doing till the end of April). We promise to keep everyone posted as much as possible. (We have a whole list of topics and post ideas to come, so we’re crossing them off one by one.)

But, if any of you have any ideas for posts or questions you’d like to read about, leave a comment here (or send us an email – if you know our personal emails, use that, if not, you can find it on About Wedding Whirlwind.)

Until then!

XOXO
M, J, and S

Christmas 2007 Morning – Engagement Day Part Two

Quick flashback – I was like an adult child on Christmas morning, waking up excited about the day. I had gone around and gotten all of my siblings out of bed and ready for the day by about 7:30ish. They were none too pleased, but in an overall good mood since it was after all, little baby Jesus’ birthday.

Plus, there was the promise of presents and breakfast. To most people, that isn’t a half bad way to start the day.

So, you’ll remember that I had made my rounds, waking up Jennifer, Christopher, Douglas, and then finally Dale. As soon as everyone was downstairs, they asked where Jon was…to which I replied with a swift motion pointing upstairs toward the bedroom. He was still sleeping, and I just couldn’t have that!

I made my way back up to the room and nicely told him to get his butt out of bed. He was awake because he heard me waking up the rest of the crowd and dreading for his moment of “Good Morning”. So he casually hugged and kissed me good morning and told me he would go get ready for the day.

This meant some clean teeth, washed face, and clothes. Because we all know my sweetie won’t go downstairs in my parents’ house in anything less than a clean t-shirt, jeans or shorts, belt, and sometimes even hat, socks, and shoes! He’s so formal.

Minutes went by which seemed like an eternity. I went back upstairs and he shut the door (now fully dressed and ready for the day.) He got down on his knee, took my left hand in his, and asked away! He used my full name – the first, middle, and last!

He was so nervous and shaking that it almost occurred to me to taunt him, much like he had taunted me with the ring in his pocket for the previous several days, but I didn’t have the heart. I was too excited to have been formally engaged with the ring on my finger!!

And after all the preparation, to be engaged in my high school bedroom is the highest of all ironies, in my opinion.

I quickly kissed him and we hugged and I asked if it was really my ring now – officially…and promptly ran right down the stairs shoving my left hand into everyone’s face. Demanding that they get down and kiss my ring.

As if I were infallible!

Upon seeing the ring on my hand, the first and only think my mother said was, “Where did you get that?!” Thinking I had stolen it without permission.

I, of course, informed her (and everyone else there) that it was official and I was rightly wearing my ring. Mom and Dad refused congratulations until my sweetie came down the stairs and verbally confirmed that it was true.

As if I were a sneak!

And with that, my friends, was the first official day of what was to become known as our Wedding Whirlwind!

More to come, stay tuned.

XOXO
M, J, and S

Christmas 2007 Morning – Engagement Day Part One

6:30 AM EST – So I woke up like a little kid on Christmas morning. Ok, alright, so it technically was Christmas morning. And I’m not quite a little kid – maybe just a big one. I leaned over and said to my sweetie, “Merry Christmas! Do you have something for me?” I shouldn’t have to remind you that I was half-expecting the ring to have already been put on my finger in my sleep.

All I got was a groan that somewhat resembled a “Merry Christmas and no present for you, not now.”

With that, I got up, went downstairs and greeted my parents, who were the only ones up, aside from the six cats, dog, parrot, and turtles. We chatted for a little while. We looked at the explosion of Christmas gifts on the floor of the living room underneath the redwood resembling tree smothered in black and red ornaments, black birds, and lights. I showered and headed to Jennifer’s room.

Like I mentioned in a previous post, poor kid…

She was sound asleep; I armed myself with the knowledge that a sleeping Jennifer is one that will allow me to wear just about anything I choose from the closet. Currently, and in wide awake states, I am allotted only 3 to 4 t-shirts and a single blouse, which I paid for. The kid has about a hundred tops. And with this, I am not embellishing in any way.

And I chose the shirt I would be wearing when I would become engaged – a cute little red number, which Jennifer appropriately wore the weekend of our engagement party. (For those of you who recall my engagement dress – I did, for a half-second think about putting that on, but I thought it might give my expectations away…I had been drawing the line for the last several days.)

I checked back on my sweetie at about 7:00 AM – still sleeping.

Went downstairs, had a snack. Hung out with the family. After waking up to my rifling through her closet, Jennifer joined us. Then, it was getting late. And my mom did say if we wanted breakfast or any presents, everyone had to be up.

Like we were four years old…waiting for Sandy Claws.

(Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas)

So I took it upon myself to move the day along. First it was Christopher, who had relocated to Mom and Dad’s bed. BODYSLAM!!! Two minutes later, he’s up for the day.

Next is Douglas, asleep in his cave bed – he has removed his closet doors and has shoved the bed into the closet, as a built in wall headboard. Jumped on his bed and poked him with my toes till he awoke.

Then it’s time for Dale to be awake. We must always wake Dale up as carefully as possible otherwise, there could be an atomic outburst from him, with everyone running. So, I woke him up quietly and gently saying “Merry Christmas, there’s breakfast” – which was a small lie; Mom hadn’t really started cooking.

So, I went downstairs and informed my parents that everyone was up. Everyone, but my sweetie that is…

XOXO
M, J, and S