Countdowns.

Everything is a countdown right now.

2 days until my bachelorette party.

8 days until a 2 week vacation from work.

9 days until his bachelor party.

1 day until final suit measurements must be submitted.

12 days until my mom, step-dad, and brother arrive from Nevada.

16 days until the wedding.

16 days until the wedding.

Six. Teen. Days. Until. The. Wedding.

Of course I know that it's important to keep sight of what's really important. So many brides seem to focus so much on The Wedding that they forget about The Marriage. I haven't forgotten that in 17 days, I'll be Clinton's wife, and we will start a whole new adventure together. While I'm excited and ready for this, I do have to admit that at this stage in the game, I can see how people make the mistake of not thinking that far ahead. Wedding planning: I'm in the thick of it. There's at least one vendor meeting per week, there's last-minute DIY projects, there's parties and new beauty routines and a whole lot of checks being written (oof!). I am so glad that I took the week before the wedding off. I still have one more week left of work and I just don't know how I'm going to do it. I can't concentrate on anything right now. I have a constant to-do list running through my head. It's like I'm watching TV in my head - what's happening in my regular life is the main show, but the bottom of the screen is scrolling a ticker with a whole bunch of wedding info on it 24 hours a day, and halfway through the show I realize I have no idea what's going on because I've been reading the ticker for the last 15 minutes. It's a little bit overwhelming, but I'm a Type A Personality if there ever was one, so I've at least been keeping things organized pretty well.

Right now I'm just trying to make sure that I have as much information as needed readily available and organized for anyone who asks so there's no confusion. I've spent the past few days re-organizing all my vendor info, writing up several different itineraries, and creating charts to help make decor easier. They might make people think I'm crazy when I hand them out but hey, this day is important to me and I would like for things to go relatively smoothly.

What, doesn't everybody do this? They should.



Guest Table layout.

Something really cool that we are doing that I don't think I have mentioned here is a very unique favor/activity for guests. It's become quite popular to have photobooths at weddings - what we're doing is in the same vein, but about 589546875 times more awesome. Last year while attending a bridal show we found a company called Fun In A Flash. They do the standard photobooth, but they also offer a second, very unique option called a Flipbook Studio. Basically you go and stand in front of a greenscreen for 7 seconds and do whatever you want while a camera takes continuous photos. Once that's done, everything prints and is stapled into a small, business card sized flipbook and BAM - you've got your own tiny 6-second movie in your hand. They print unlimited books for as many guests that want them, and at the end of the night they put all of the "mini movies" onto a DVD for the bride and groom to keep.

I am so excited about this because not only is it super fun and silly, it is also a totally awesome little way to tie into our film theme. Earlier this week we had our last meeting with the owner and tossed around a few design ideas for the cover of our flipbook. Below is a photo of the 1st draft (with some info blurred out so it doesn't show up in a Google search).

I mean come on, is that not awesome?! It is, it's awesome. Inside, the picture that will show up from the green screen is basically just a curtain like in an old-fashioned movie theatre. I'm so excited to see how this turns out - I really hope it is received well by our guests, and I think that it will be.

Also worthy of update this week is a couple more DIY's. Both are really simple but things I'm happy with. In our Engagement Shoot/Save the Dates we used chalkboards. Now before you ask - yes, that is a crab on the chalkboard and no, it doesn't have anything to do with our theme, but trust me when I say that cute little bitty crabs are a totally adorable inside joke kind of thing in our relationship, so they had to be integrated somehow. In the E-pic session, the chalkboard was just plain wood. To spruce it up a little and make them fancy-wedding friendly I just slapped a few coats of gold glitter on the frames. These will be set out with props for the Flipbook studio so that our guests can write on them for their photos if they want to.

Photo courtesy of Erica Shurter

Write on me, please! I peench!

And DIY #2, also extremely easy, is a Movie Night Basket for our Anniversary Dance. Basically the DJ calls all of the married couples out to dance and the last one standing gives us a little advice on a happy union and wins this little prize pack we put together - it's got 3 date night movies in it (Crazy Stupid Love, The Princess Bride, and No Reservations), movie theater candy (Whoppers, Junior Mints, Raisinets, Milk Duds), popcorn, little popcorn containers, some butter flavoring, cheese powder, and 2 tickets to Harkins.

Despite the stress of the last minute, everything seems to be coming together nicely and I'm not anticipating anything going terribly wrong! Now all I have to do is clean out my spare room so my family has somewhere to sleep. I don't know how I'm going to do that, exactly, since my spare room currently looks like this:

Please don't judge me! It's all wedding stuff, I swear!

But, um, I'll figure it out. We just won't have a living room for a few days. =P

Now if you'll please excuse me, I have to go count the days on my calender again.