holy crap we’ve been BUSY! Three showers, two farewell parties to single hood and one new rehearsal dinner location later we find ourselves NINE DAYS AWAY!!!!
People keep asking me if I’m freaking out or nervous but honestly, I think because we did most of this wedding ourselves, there really isn’t any worry about people flaking out or third parties not following through which eliminates most of the possible sources of stress. Anyways, here’s what we’ve been up to:
1. We met with our amazing officiant Seth to hear what he’s got for the ceremony, it’s freakin’ solid, I can’t wait for everyone to hear it, it’s so us.
2. We finalized our guest list and completed our seating chart. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from planning a wedding it’s that you should NEVER assume people will think to put their name on something. We had so many RSVP’s without a name on them, luckily we were able to figure most of them out but if you’re planning on having a seating chart for the event you are throwing, make sure you designate a spot on the return card for names, it will make everything so much easier. The seating chart was also a little difficult just because we have large families and could only fit 8-10 at a table so we basically just filled each table with as many couples as possible, there’s really no rhyme or reason to the arrangements. I also created little name cards for everyone using the same table number images, nothing fancy.
3. Will and I sat down and went through our music collection to pick out specific songs for the reception. It was really fun to sort through nine years of songs that remind us of one another, trust me, we have stuff to get everyone dancing!
4.
Our thank you video for the showers, we created it the night we got home from the shower but I didn’t want to post it or anything for that matter, until I sent out all the hand-written thank you notes to all the amazing people in our lives. Thank you, thank you thank you to everyone involved in the epic shower weekend. Both the sister-in-laws traveled to share the experience with me and it really meant a lot to me (and I appreciate the boys came with too), plus my aunt and uncle from Wisconsin came which was unexpected and very sweet. The first shower was thrown by my old neighborhood, there were delicious brunch items, veggie Quiche, hand-made gifts and lots of catching up with people from my childhood. The second shower was thrown by Kay, it was the perfect second shower, she went all out and created some really gorgeous desserts and touching gifts including a recipe book that everyone contributed to and owl themed treats. Will got a surprise ‘man’ shower thrown by all the men at the Johnston residence, he got tons of great tools and mucked around with the guys and Digital all afternoon.
5. Last weekend we had our joint bachelorette/bachelor parties. The ladies spent the night enjoying potluck style snacks, inappropriately themed olympic games, dancing, bonding and reeking havoc on downtown Minneapolis. The boys (and kelsey 
) spent the night at Psycho Suzies tiki bar smoking fine cigars and drinking cocktails. We met up at our favorite bar at midnight and everyone dispersed from there. It was the perfect bachelorette party, everyone was so generous and helpful, I can’t thank everyone enough. We have incredible friends, I hope everyone else had as much fun as Will and I did!
6. We decided to change the location of our rehearsal dinner. We wanted to have it at Pizza Luce but they didn’t have the room for our 20-25 person group. Minor panic moment until we decided to just rent out our loft’s community room and bring the pizza Luce to us. Problem solved!
7. We have one new addition to our wedding party.
Say hello to our dear friend Darren Jackson. He’s doing double duty by playing us up and down the aisle (and even agreed to play my favorite Decemberists song!!) and is a groomsman for Will. Will met Darren back in 2006 when Will needed to work on a project for school and timidly emailed Darren’s band Kid Dakota. Darren took poor little intern Will in to his studio and quickly became his mentor and golfing buddy. Darren has the coolest little dog in the world named Dante, he’s a bedlington terrier, if you don’t know what it is, google it RIGHT NOW. We are so excited to have him involved in the wedding.
I think those are the biggest updates, we are going to get our marriage license tomorrow and I’m going to finalize all wedding crafts this weekend. HOME STRETCH PEOPLE!! HERE WE GO!!
