The Wedding (the abridged version w/ some asteps & aladders)

Planning the Wedding

My only hope was to have a wedding that made people think the following words:

Sweet, Funny, Love and Creative…

One thing that I didn’t expect for the wedding to be is magical. There were so many things that came together that made you just go, “I had no idea THAT was going to happen”!

There were quite a few good omens, I’d say.

Beginning with my earrings from Israel, also purchased from Etsy. Another bit of awesomeness is that Trist is Jewish, making these earrings a MUST wear. I ordered them a couple weeks before the wedding and the week of, they still hadn’t shown up. I even tried reaching out to the post office in Israel, yeah… I know…BUT it was my something Blue! I had to give it a shot.

I gave up Friday afternoon the day before cause I figured what are the odds, ya know?

and then..

BLAMO!!!

I’m at the hotel getting my hair did (yeah I said did) and Mama Jude (that’s what I call my mother in-law) called and said they arrived! Good sign that we’ll be together doing senior citizen mall walking? I think so!

Our Rabbi hit it right on the nail for all 4 (Sweet, Funny, Love and Creative). She made sure to get some laughs out of the guests and that everyone understood how deeply in love we are with one another.

For cake toppers, I was against the letters and the damn human figurines, besides none of the females had the right amount of Norma hair. In love with Etsy, I scoured cake toppers and came across  these lil guys!

I knew right away they were IT! The only thing that wasn’t “IT” was the price, $125. OUCH!

SOLUTION – Make them ourselves! With a little investigative work, I figured out what they were made out of and paid a visit to HOBBY LOBBY (it’s like Michael’s). We bought a few packs of Paper Clay, for practice trials, and got to it!

 

Here’s version 1:

 

  As you can see, SOMEBODY decided to take the simplicity of the birds and tried to make a character fit for Gumby! Certainly a nice try on both parts but not quite what I’d envisioned.

I am pretty proud to say that that it took another trial pair (image lost somewhere) before we got the 3rd ones just right.  Yes, one might immediately reach for the, “3rd times a charm” card but I’d say it was more “pressure is a mother..”! We were two weeks away from the wedding when we said, “Holy Crap! We need to get the birds done ASAP!”.

Here are our Final Mr & Mrs Molina Birds:

Not bad right? He made his and I made mine. May I just add that I don’t know too many fellas that would spend their days off sitting at a table hand sculpting and painting a cake topper. Just when I didn’t think I could have a bigger crush on him, I crushed a lil more.

 

We had quite a few folks put in their creative touch in our wedding. My mother in-laws best friend, Debbie The Great, did all the flowers for both the wedding party, ceremony and reception! She and I were corresponding via email and shooting each other images of flowers we both liked. Never once was I present to see her physically doing the arrangements but like most of the things in our wedding that magically came together, I knew we were on the same page. Take a look..

 

We also found this incredible artist that does fingerprint trees. Instead of signing in, guests put their fingerprints on the tree and its later framed to be a very sentimental piece of art:

Additional creative touches and inspirations:

I realized late in the game that the gazebo we were going to be married in was incredibly plain. I didn’t want to add to the flower cost, so I tapped into my creative brain and into the wedding blog of the couple I absolutely fell in love with and now religiously follow the wifes blog (can you say blogger stalker?) and got the idea of Flower Garlands!

First you MUST check out this couples wedding! Be prepared to fall in love with their ideas AND with them, cause if this ISN’T Love in its rawest, purest, sweetest, organic-est form, I don’t know what is.

http://greenweddingshoes.com/real-wedding-golriz-devons-super-creative-wedding/

Anyway, with a little patience & some good music, I made these:

I added yellow and some other colors and they looked amazing:

The craziest part was, I didn’t know the Chuppah, the beautiful cloth held up by the lovely ladies holding the banches, matched the garland perfectly.

 

There were a few glitches, that I will spare discussing here and instead let the world know on Yelp, but all in all, we had a great time with all our close friends and family. The rest of the evening went like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then there’s the last dance, which those of you who know our story, can understand why we chose this one:

here’s to happily ever after!!