Back From the Dead

As Britney Spears would say, "Hey y'all!" Man alive am I tired!! I don't think I've ever been this tired in my life. I imagine it's a small fraction of what new parents feel, only if you're a new parent, I feel like you get to sit more. My new job has me working late, working at home, AND working on my feet quite a bit. Needless to say I come home so exhausted each day, and of course too exhausted to blog. Then I had a ton of family drama, and blogging seemed...selfish. But now the fam's doing better and I'm getting into more of a routine with work. So, back to blogging more regularly. I can't quite promise my regular features quite yet, because I barely even have time to check the blogs I love, let alone put together a weekly roundup, but I'm hoping that in a couple of weeks, I'll be able to get back to dancing on Fridays.

In the mean time, I do have some wedding planning news. For one thing, A.P. and I have begun to rethink our original excuse to get people to show up for the surprise wedding. Because there's no way I can have a new job and plan a wedding in a short enough amount of time to pull off the engagement party pretense. So we came up with a new idea, and one that I think will serve us better in the long run. Here's the thing, the surprise wedding thing was something A.P. always liked, but he was always worried about making sure his family was going to come in town from Florida. He was really worried they wouldn't come into town for an engagement party, especially his one brother who is a bit cash poor these days with a new baby and a new dream job for which he had to take a slight pay cut. So here is the new plan: have a slightly longer engagement, and plan on marrying in spring. Then, have a fake wedding reflected on the invitation, get everyone in town for said fake wedding, and actually get married at the rehearsal dinner the night before. This way, his family will for sure be in town, I still get my surprise wedding, and yeah, I'm still happy, and he's happier. I think it will be better this way, too. We have also been tossing around the idea of having a relaxed "after-party" the next night (the night we would have as our supposed wedding night) at our place. So it's like a fun-filled, surprise wedding weekend. Plus we get to hang with our friends and family and enjoy a bunch of time with them. The more I think about it, the happier I am about the whole thing. I feel more confident that we won't be excluding A.P.'s family in any way, and I envision this awesome, super-chill, wedding weekend wherein I wear a pretty dress, and jeans. Does it get any better than that?

So we've thought that part out, but now we need to figure out other details, like a date, and an idea of what our budget will be. I gave A.P. the old stack of wedding mags, the binder I started keeping with crap I picked up at the Bridal Expo, and had sent to me because I signed up for The Knot (ughh...what a mistake that was), and a wedding planning book I picked up at a book fair that is really ridiculous because it actually says on the checklist of important wedding things that you need to hire a wedding planner, but it has good budget sheets and flower lists and sort of helpful stuff for A.P. to look over. Then I gave him a stack of post-its and told him to get to marking that text and finding things he likes. Then I told him that our deadline for picking a date, narrowing down a budget (or at least figuring out what we want to save on and what we want to splurge on), and him looking at the mags was end of next week. He says he resents the fact that I am ordering him to look at magazines, but let's face it people, A.P. is A.P. I love him, but if I didn't put a deadline on it, it would never get done. Instead, the whitest white boy would download rap music and read his econ blogs. Instead I told him that he should look at it this way: there are tons of magazines and blogs and books, and I, in the past few months, have narrowed it down for him to these few resources. I made his life easier by doing more than half of the work for him. That sounds nice, right? Engagement has made me a nicer significant other. : O )