It's here!!!

My wedding dress is in!

You would've thought Christmas came early in Guilford, I was basically a giddy school girl when I got the voicemail. I wasn't expecting it to be in until after the holidays!  I immediately called the White Dress by the Shore back, and Shana answered. She was very sweet and patient while I asked ridiculous questions - like where does my dress live until I get it fitted? And explained to me how the whole process works! Yes, they keep it safe until I come back for fittings.... yes, I can visit it if I want to (how did she know that was my next question!)... I could come in for an accessories appointment anytime, etc. etc. etc... yay!

I pretty quickly made an appt to go in and and see it.  My sister Alison and my mom went with me...and in case you were wondering, yes I am still madly in love with it!! It is actually bigger than the sample, so it doesn't fit me as well (the sample had been an ALMOST perfect fit, aka a little too snug for comfort)....But that will give us the room we need to tailor it perfectly, especially in the bust region! While we were there we took pictures of the back, so I can make sure I buy a bra that matches the silhouette.  Shana also gave me the belt that originally came with the dress! In my opinion that belt dresses the gown down, so the day I bought it I had chosen a different belt that I will be wearing for the wedding. But the original belt is beautiful...I can't let it go to waste! My plan is to find a dress for my bridal shower or rehearsal dinner that I can wear the belt with as a fun and special way to add some sparkle!

Unfortunately, I can't post any of the pictures from that trip, since they all include the dress....but I've attached one of the belt! What color or style dress do you think would compliment it well?

Also, if you missed my initial post about finding the dress, you can read about it here.... Or on TWD's blog here!

5th anniversary - #becomingmrsmascia

Happy Wednesday!

Today, November 20th - is our 5 year anniversary! It is the day that our trial period ended and the rest of our lives began...

When Ant and I first started dating, I had just found out I was going to be spending the following semester abroad in Spain - and I thought he was crazy for wanting to commit to a relationship while I was on the other side of the world!  He had just transferred up to UConn, and I thought he would regret   being tied down while I was away for four months...so one of the terms of our relationship was a "trial period"...a period of time where he could change his mind and take it back, no hard feelings!  I had just met the cutest boy ever and did not want him resenting me - I am not exactly a patient person but I was willing to wait until I got back to see where things would go! Less than a week into said trial period, Ant, with a bit of exasperation, asked me if the trial period could be over and we could just date.  That's one thing I learned pretty quickly about Ant, and have learned to absolutely adore...the guy knows what he wants! So anyway, long story short...November 20th has been our anniversary for the last 5 years.  and it's our last official dating anniversary!  Next year, 8/8 will become our date.

A quick photo dump of the last 5 years, primarily previous anniversaries...

*Our first picture together, ever.  This is the one I showed everyone when they wanted to know about my new boyfriend.  We look like babies...

A few shots of us in Spain.  Yes, he came to visit me, a whopping 3....4? months into our relationship.  Whatta guy.  (THANK YOU Bettie & Tony) :)

First anniversary:  Road trip to Niagara Falls & Toronto

...and then we graduated! UConn Class of 2010.  Can we go back??

To be honest, I can't find a single picture of our 2nd anniversary....but we had just moved into our apartment together!  Here's a pic of our first Christmas in the apartment in the meantime.

Our 3rd anniversary - my grandfather had just passed away, and we took a much needed mini getaway to Providence, got fancy in the Biltmore. and fancy for us means opening bottles of wine with toothbrushes.......yep.

Year 4...took a long weekend, this time to Mt Snow, VT!  Oktoberfest there (AMAZING foliage), followed by Brewfest at Mohegan Sun. 

As a way to transition from our old anniversary to our new one, and start the official wedding countdown - I am going to document the next 261 days through pictures on my instagram with the hashtag #becomingmrsmascia! (if you don't already - follow me! @theshorelinebride) If it is blogworthy, you will also find it here.  Anything wedding related will certainly be the priority - but otherwise you'll get a snapshot of whatever other exciting things are happening in my life! (exciting being a relative term, of course)

My first official #becomingmrsmascia pic is just me and my guy.  Keeping it simple :)

Our EMoon - Switzerland & Italy with the Fiancé!

So I've been aggressively putting off this post because I am the worlds best procrastinator, and I seem to be struggling majorly with the best information to share about our EMoon! So I will start from the beginning, and do it as a series of posts.  And give you way more info than you could ever need to know :)  Our EMoon didn't start as an EMoon, because, well, we weren't engaged yet!  Ever since I studied abroad and Ant visited me in Spain, we've talked about going back to Europe.  The biggest issue was where to go... I'm DYING to go back to Ireland, there's nothing more romantic than Paris, and the list goes on. We ultimately decided on Italy! Ant is Italian, and even though I spent a week there while I was abroad, a. You can never eat enough Italian food, b. there are so many different places worth going in Italy - and we were definitely looking for a trip all about adventure! And c. Gelato. :)

From my trip to Italy I knew I wanted to take Ant to Venice and Florence, and the one place I hadn't made it to last time that had to make the list was Rome! Taking some advice from Katie, my roommate from college who has been to Rome numerous times, we were able to determine a timeline we felt pretty comfortable with. We decided to spend 2 nights in Venice, 2 nights in Florence, and 4 nights in Rome!  Ant was very excited about all of the history in Rome in particular, and since it was new to both of us we wanted to have enough time there to see as much as possible, without being too crazy rushed.  

Somewhere along the way we realized that if we were going to Italy, we were going to be in the same neighborhood (relatively speaking of course) as Ant's cousin Dan and his family, who are living in Geneva, Switzerland! They've always said to visit if we were in the area, and let's be honest...how often can you actually say you are! So we reached out to them and luckily they were available for visitors...so we were able to extend our vacation by a few days and start out our trip in Geneva! After looking at flights, and tweaking days a few times we decided on the following itinerary:

Wednesday night: fly from JFK to Geneva, with a layover in Ireland. We would land in Geneva mid day Thursday (not including all jet lag)

Thursday - Sunday: Geneva! Our flight to Venice was Sunday night. Dan recommended flying so we wouldn't waste an entire day on the train, and that was the only flight from Geneva to Venice that weekend, which influenced our schedule as far as when we arrived in Switzerland quite a bit!

Sunday night - Tuesday: Venice! We would be arriving in Venice pretty late Sunday, so we left our departure time on Tuesday via train for Florence open ended, depending on how much we were able to fit in on Monday

Tuesday - Thursday: Florence....again leaving the specific departure times open ended depending on how much time Thursday we wanted to spend in Florence.

Thursday - Monday: Roma!! We generally planned on arriving in Rome later in the day Thursday, but this gave us 4 nights and at least 3 full days in Rome, which was necessary since it was new to both of us and the biggest city!  Our flight home Monday was early enough that we didn't plan on doing any sightseeing, but not so early that we would kill ourselves waking up at the crack of dawn! With the time change we'd land in NYC by 6pm or so Monday night!

Ta da! Piece of cake, right? 

Next EMoon post I'll cover the process of deciding where to stay - especially when you're a rooftop terrace snob in the making...in the meantime, have you ever been to Europe?  How on earth did you decide where to go???

Wedding Apps - Organizing the iPhone

If you know me at all, you know that I am NOT an organized person....for some proof of this fact, feel free to visit my MOH's blog Balancing on my Toes! (Only if you promise not to judge me from then on...)  She is a professional organizer and often uses me for her pet projects! I'm not complaining :)

But anyway.....one thing that I have found I'm really good at organizing is wedding related things - all thanks to my iPhone!! There are so many apps available for wedding related things, I have been able to get them all in one place and can access SO many things right on my phone!  I thought I'd walk through a few of them with you, in case you hadn't already discovered them.

First: here is my 8.8.14 folder.  A folder! How organized.

AppyCouple:  I was so so excited when I found this app! I absolutely love the idea of having a wedding website that is a little different than your traditional free ones available to the masses.  This one had a super low one time fee ($28) which gets you total access to everything!  It is so easy to set up and creates such unique and fun websites! Plus, you also get an app version of the site for your tech savvy friends that want to download it.  I'll go into more details later, but for now here are a few sneak peeks of our site:

The only downside is you can't edit your site from your mobile device...gotta be at home!

WeddingWire:  I have not used most of the tools available in this app - but have found it supremely useful for searching for vendors - especially early on when we were looking at photographers, caterers, DJs, etc...WeddingWire has great detailed reviews and descriptions when you search by location.  We used this countless times while discussing vendors on drives around the state. (Some not so subtle shout outs to my vendors in the pics below!)

The Knot wedding planner:  Again, I have not used this one a ton, but it is my go to for a general idea of time lines.  Some great advice I got early on from a friend was to NOT stress about the "official" time lines, but do everything when it seems right for me, which has definitely kept me sane over the last few months....but this is still a great resource to fall back on.  As I get closer to the actual date and deal with way more of the little details, I anticipate this will be way more useful! (Yes this is my checklist. No I'm not freaking out about all the alarm clocks!)

Blogger: This wonderful blog here! This app allows me to write posts, edit posts, add pics, etc.etc.etc.  One thing I have learned about myself since starting this blog is that I am really bad at sitting down and writing a full post start to finish.  I do much better when I start something as soon as I think of a topic, and then go back to finish it at a later date.  It allows me to get my thoughts out and edit them as I go along...

Restoration Hardware: This app only allows you to read the catalogs, not actually manage or edit your registry, but it is still helpful as we have moved into our house when we want to look at new things we might want to add to our registry! Also, the new holiday catalog just came out. So. Many. Warm. Winter. Things. Insert a million images of our cozy home with its roaring fireplace.  Love. 

Macys: the Macys app DOES allow you to manage your registry, 100%! You can see what items have been purchased, add and subtract items from your registry, and so on and so forth! If you regularly shop at Macy's, it's not just for registries...it is also their normal app for everything Macys related. 

Wanderable: my favorite registry, our honeymoon registry!! The Wanderable app also allows you to add new items and view which items have been purchased. It allows you to send thank you cards with pics from your honeymoon straight from the phone! The only things you can't do are reorder and delete items already on your registry.

Rachel & Ant: My personal favorite! :)  This is a direct link to our engagement shoot on PASS, where we can download our pictures directly, order prints, and generally enjoy the gorgeousness that is Rachel's work! (Our wedding photographer. I am not talking in third person.)

What do you think?  What apps are out there that I'm missing?  Have you found any as addicting and helpful as I have?

Planning our engagement pics

Planning our engagement pictures was SO much fun! It was the first time we were meeting our photographer Rachel, which we were so excited about...and she could not have been more help in the planning process! In the almost 5 years that Ant and I have been together we have a LOT of pictures together...but it's a totally different ball game when you get to do it with all the bells and whistles! The most important thing was that I wanted the pictures to be US...nothing too cheesy and nothing too fancy, just a slightly more put together version of us :) 

The easiest decision was where to take our engagement photos....when this is where your fiancé proposes, it's sort of a no brainer. 

Could Chaffinch Island Park be any more beautiful??  Rachel was totally on board! The next thing we talked about was themes. Ant and I are big wine-os... We love sharing a good glass of wine at our favorite restaurants, or exploring the local vineyards....Ant had brought a bottle of wine and picnic to the park when he proposed! So a wine picnic complete with blanket was not a stretch for us.  I wanted to keep it SUPER simple with props, again nothing over the top, so when I searched Pinterest these were a few images that jumped out at me.  We bought a new blanket at TJMaxx (any excuse to buy a new blanket is good in my book!) - and bought the same bottle of wine Ant had brought to celebrate when I said YES! If you're going to have a bottle of wine in the pictures forever, it's gotta be a meaningful one!

I asked Rachel for suggestions on cute ways to incorporate our date into the images, again without getting too cheesy, and she sent us a number of great suggestions! This is one that immediately stood out to me as an easy one to incorporate into what we already knew we wanted to do...

 

How cute are those glasses?? A great way to personalize with our date and blend into the shots. I thought we we were going to make them ourselves at first, but I googled chalkboard wine glasses (brilliant I know) and found them at Pier 1 for only $3 each! Done!!

These images were pics I pinned as inspiration for poses - I love how natural and sweet they all are! It is all about the couple and their closeness. 

The next thing to figure out was our outfits!  These were the outfits I pinned for inspiration - I wanted to keep our outfits coordinated without being matchy - and make sure they wouldn't be things we'd look back at and wonder - what were we thinking??? I know, who ever thought I'd spend so much time thinking about a couple of outfits! I just knew there were a few things I definitely wanted us to wear - like my fabulous new mint heels, and Ants pink and blue plaid that I adore! Luckily, one day my sister and MOH were over and they helped us make our final picks!  We did have three picked out, but only ended up using two. Our best two, I think :) 

The day of the shoot, I went and got my makeup done by Jennie Fresa in Clinton, CT.  She recently opened up a blow dry bar, so I got my hair done too! It was the perfect way to ensure a good hair day - and I couldn't have felt better when we met Rachel at the park! Jennie did an amazing job keeping my makeup natural, in such a way that came out amazing in the pictures! I'm glad I took Rachel's advice and did get my makeup done professionally. 

Anddddddd here are the final products!! I know I already showed you a bunch of them, but I'm showing you again, now that I walked you through all the nitty gritty details that got us there!  Now that you've seen our thought process leading up to the shoot.... What do you think? How did we do?