mucho progress.

_

Wedding planning wears my boys out. :)

Yeah! What a weekend. Nate worked Friday night and Saturday morning so as soon as I got home from work on Friday, I got back to work! I tackled trimming the bushes (my forearms are always so sore after holding up the electric trimmer), cleaned the entire house (really cleaned … even the inside of the refrigerator!), organized all of the wedding supplies into boxes, put up a mirror in the hallway, bought a rug for the side door, and started making tags for the 138 Jones soda bottles.

We were trying hard to think of a way to decorate a sort of backdrop, and all we could think of was to use tulle (which is not that cheap) but after some Googling, I came across gossamer, which is supposedly easier to work with than tulle and cheaper. Plus it comes in different colors. I never buy anything online without looking for a coupon code, and with a few clicks I knocked down the $10.93 shipping cost to $0.00. Yeah!

Yesterday we went to Walgreens and scanned some of Nate's baby photos. Then we hit up Walmart for a few things like 3M hooks and wrapping paper … and our best find of the day was at Dollar Tree. We came across some battery-powered LED white paper lanterns for $1 each. Lanterns online are selling for like $7! We just bought one so we could see if it worked. When we got home, it worked great and looked good so I went back and bought 19 more, all they had on the shelf. I also picked up another vase for my bouquet. We bought one on our first trip to Dollar Tree, but when we were getting out of the car at home, Nate was carrying all the bags and let's just say the bag with the vase had a spontaneous and fatal rendezvous with the driveway.

We are 19 days out and I am not stressing at all! I think we are doing great and we are still under budget. I'm going to have to do a post sometime with tips for saving. We saved a lot of money by reusing decorations from Nate's sister's wedding, I made all the jewelry for me and my bridesmaids, and we have just been able to find great deals on most of the things we needed. Plus we are keeping it simple and not worrying too much about impressing everyone. (We are also saving money by using Rapid Rewards points for free flights and since we are staying five nights, we got our B&B to give us the fifth free.)

I'm sure we are going to be making progress on small details every night. Small details are kind of my favorite part. I think they make things really special. We still need to get our marriage certificate but we got our pastor to sign a paper saying we did premarital counseling (because we did) so we are saving $60! (OK, I'm getting a little crazy with saving but I don't think that's a bad thing.) It will be great to see all of our family and friends. I'm so excited! It's going to be fun!!!

(Nate thinks I use exclamation points too much! :) I disagree.)