We have a venue!

At long last, the wedding is booked. The ceremony will be held in the "Serene outdoor wedding chapel (weather permitting)" at The Inn at Rose Hall in Eureka Springs. It will be a small wedding, but it will nonetheless be a fairytale wedding with all the trimmings, including a Victorian horse-drawn carriage to carry us off into happily-ever-after. And then it'll bring us right back because we also get two nights in one of their honeymoon suites. Rowr!

The inn takes care of everything from the minister to the flowers to the cake and champagne to arranging the photography. All we have to do is show up in our regalia with our wedding license and my bridal bouquet in tow. We can also provide our own unity candle and special candle-lighting music, but if we decide not to bother they'll take care of that, too.

After all of the crying and hair-pulling (my own, not Matt's) I've done trying to make my dream wedding fit my budget, this all seems too good to be true. But true it is. I'm so excited I don't know how I'm going to get any work done for the rest of the day. Yippee!

Change happens

It's been a while. Certainly not because anything's been called off. We just took some time off to do some venue shopping, number crunching, soul searching, crying and compromising, all of which has resulted in a few changes, which are thus:

The name change: After a lot of criticism from a few folks (my mom in particular), I've retitled the blog to something a little more romantic and older-generation-family friendly. I think this title will also cross over nicely into a newlywed blog, so it's all good.

The change of plans: After looking all over our corner of the state and failing to come up with a venue that makes both of us happy AND fits into our budget, we've decided to move the wedding itself to Eureka Springs, where we have a lot more to choose from in our price range. This necessitates two major changes, starting with the date. The wedding ceremony will now take place on September 9th. It will also be a much smaller wedding than originally planned -- the chapels all have a very limited seating capacity, which means that only the wedding party and our immediate family will be able to attend.

However: what hasn't changed is that we still want all of our friends and family to join us in celebration, and so we will have a great big reception party at my mother's house on the 15th. We'll have the big cake, the champagne punch, the bouquet toss... the whole works. And probably also a lot more food than we'd have been able to provide otherwise. It's a win-win.

We've got the Eureka Springs venues narrowed down to a couple of choices, but I think we're ready to make a decision and book our reservations. I can't tell you how relieved I'll be to finally have a location booked. Or how relieved I am to have found a venue in our budget that doesn't necessitate me spending all of my spare time on wedding DIY, because they'll do all the work. Hooray!