Freak outs and accommodation basics.

It's been a month since my last post, and longer than that on anything really to do with planning the wedding. My WP was MIA for a good minute, and then I became enthralled in planning for my I's 3rd birthday. I guess that is the major downside with planning a wedding from abroad, you can only go do as much as your coordinator will let you. I can only think of ideas, come up with concepts, and outlines, but in the end, I need her for the nitty gritty. So when there's a little gap, you gotta just wait it out. Which has caused me some anxiety, and every time I come to this blog or my wedding website, I feel like I should delete the counters. 6 months and 1 day to go?!.. 185 days until my wedding? DEAR GAWD! ... because then I start thinking, I have even less time because I actually leave for the Philippines 15 days before my wedding! AHHHHH! (insert image of breakdown here). So I'm trying to not be stressed out, but I think when I'm chatting with my coordinator its coming off as cold. Well, I feel cold, when I re-read our convos so I can make a summary. (Yes, I do that. Can you imagine what I was like in University? O.C.D.!)

So the major hurdle at the moment is accommodation. Let me tell you, I'm ecstatic that this is a concern, because this means, I have people that are COMING to the wedding. Seriously! Two of my girls from uni are coming and let me tell you, I was trying to be calm when in reality, I am jumping for joy! My aunt and uncle from California, ALSO coming!.. (and they also made sure to tell my parents to their face they were coming, and threw in, itstheirweddingnotyours). Love it!

Anyways, I looked up vacation rentals, as well as different rates for places, but of course I needed to talk to my WP. She gave me a quote from the BE that is alot more than what I've seen, so she's going to go back and get that lower, if possible. She also mentioned something called Pension Houses. I have never heard of this term in my life! When I looked around at some research, it looks like its just another hotel without any frills. Some stoop to the sleeze of what we know as a Motel, but some don't really.Of course, this got me thinking into class. Maybe they created these Pension Houses to clearly draw class lines. Is this where the middle class stay?

So I have a few that I thought looked nice, that I will get her opinion on. Actually, my homie's girlfriend is in Cebu, so maybe I'll ask her opinion as well. I haven't met her yet, but she's there so I feel like I don't want to overwhelm her with questions. But I desperately need the help of locals.

I'm feeling more like bride self, so hopefully, I'll have more to blog about. Will definitely have more to report on accommodation as I narrow some options. Stay tuned!

Inspiration

So building a theme for a wedding is really tiring and difficult to describe in words. I got really lucky as one of my closest friends, former roommate, and to throw in some more goodness 2006-2007 President of the Students Administrative Council at the University of Toronto, and 2007-2008 Ontario Chair for the Canadian Federation of Students, representing over 700,000 students, has volunteered to make my e-vite and paper invitations! I am so happy she volunteered (I didn't even ask her...well, not really), and I know she may not be able to come to the wedding but having her be a part of it, makes me smile inside.

But to describe what I wanted to her was a challenge. I wrote as much as I could, pulled different pictures of sample invitations, colour pallets, Filipinana themed items, pictures of barongs, even tribal tattoos. I hope she's got an idea of what we want now.

I came to the realization, that this is going to be a future endeavor : constantly trying to describe my theme and look. So how else do you mitigate this need? You make an inspiration board!
(I'm sure you didn't see that coming)

Board number one encompasses everything right now. What do you think? Do you have a better idea of where we're going with this now?

While looking for everything I needed to send her, I went through lots of DIY wedding blog sites and have become really excited at that prospects of printing and embellishing invitations on my own. I actually went to visit Michel's to get some ideas of tools and jewels and ribbon. The paper I need isn't there but I did find a super cool paper place in Toronto to go check out. I suggest to everyone to do your invitations yourself. Even if you can't design, you could get something printed flat from a cool site like Wedding Paper Divas and soope it up yourself. They even have a blog to show you how. I'm so excited, I ended up getting things for scrapbooking and got crafty on some pages for Isabela's scrapbook.

The Wedding Website

Many brides have wedding website but for destination weddings it's a must. There is so much information to get to guests that you have to find a way to disseminate it. Cutting to the chase. I've created a Wedding Website on mywedding.com. Here it is: http://www.mywedding.com/balikbayan/.

The point of the wedding website is much different from this blog. Right from the beginning, I said this blog was so that I can document my balikbayan wedding experience, and maybe even be a resource for people who are looking for suppliers or information on planning a wedding abroad. This blog is becoming less that :P That blog is specifically for invitees who need to know all the information I'm going to fill up on it. I did link to this blog, as a "behind the scenes" look into our wedding.


Anyways, there are a lot of wedding website builders and I decided to go with this site because:

1. It's free.
2. Had lots of templates
3. Has privacy options if I feel like I want to password protect it.

So check out http://www.mywedding.com!

The Fairy Godmother Coordinator

Wednesdays is Wedding Wednesdays on my favourite channel Slice. Part of why I love this channel is its abundance of wedding shows - thats why they can dedicate a whole day to wedding show episodes! Wedding SOS, Rich Bride Poor Bride, I Do Let's Eat, Newlywed Nearly Dead and Bulging Brides, hit at every aspect you'd need to think about for your wedding.

As I write this, I am watching Wedding SOS. If you're not familiar with this show, the show follows Jane - a wedding coordinator who they dub a Fairy Godmother - who assists couples whose planning have gone wild and grants them three wishes to make their wedding a success. It's an interesting concept and usually she's fixing either the completely disorganized, or the kind of "out of the box" kind of couples. From what I can draw from this show, is the importance of a Wedding Coordinator. 

In high school, Wedding Planner was on my short list of careers. Seriously, right behind lawyer, politician and policy maker/analyst. So right now, I'm on a path to the last one (as I write this, I am on personnel leave as I write an exam for a policy analyst), but most of my jobs before my current career path involved event planning - not wedding planning - but it has the same principles. I headed my prom committee, coordinated events on boats that toured the Toronto harbour for a cruise company, and most importantly, I was VP of my university's students union, representing 41,000 students and with the portfolio of campus life...a.k.a all social events for the union at the university.

I naturally had assumed it wouldn't be that difficult planning a wedding. Well, I'm sure if we had decided we wanted to do some thing in Toronto, it wouldn't be that difficult. Since it would be my first wedding I'd be planning, I think I could have made it unique without fitting into some cookie-cutter mold of what a wedding looks like. I would have hired someone for the day or at least the month leading up to it because it is a full time job to get all the things together. The point is, everyone planning a wedding needs help, and I would recommend to everyone to get a planner. My friend, who is also planning a wedding, said to me: the last thing I want on my wedding day is for someone to come up to me and tell me a vegetarian meal is missing. I want to be in lala land on my wedding day so I'm hiring someone because I don't even want to know if the kitchen is on fire.

In terms of my fairy godmother planner, we had our first skype meeting the other night. I had worked a 12 hour day 7am - 7pm (working some overtime to have some extra Christmas/Wedding money) and when I arrived home, I googled "Time in Cebu". Where I thought they were 12 hours ahead, they are actually 13! So I adjusted my plans and chatted with her upstairs. The good news is that we're moving along to try and get BE Resort for the ceremony and the Shangri-La for the reception. Second, she says its completely possible to have my dress made in the Philippines (I am constantly jumping for joy at the thought of it!) and finally my task for the week is a wedding budget. Just because I am abroad, I'm not a rockafeller, so I do have a limit. Of course theres going to be some adjustments to account for the difference of how much things cost in the Philippines but I think its doable.

The wedding planning train is chugging along and I'm glad I'm blogging about it. Out of all the events I had planned, I am out of my skin with excitement!

The Wedding Planner

In my last post I mentioned I had emailed potential coordinators and was awaiting a response. I had emailed on a Thursday, so I was allowing most coordinators to get back to me by Monday morning EST (or Monday night in the Philippines) to get back to me. That's pretty reasonable.

I got this list from Regina, and did some initial googling to narrow my list down too. Looking at photographer's sites and catching the coordinators name was pretty helpful at getting a feel of an planner's style. It was also important for me to email the coordinators to get an idea of response time. I also was sneaky and put my personal email (I emailed from work) in the cc, to see who would reply all, and would notice.

Coming into work Monday morning, I was anxious to see what responses I would get. To my surprise, only one planner email was awaiting me on Monday. It was from Tisha of Bliss Unlimited, my first choice. It was a good intro email that was detailed, and her quote documents attached and she did click the reply all! I was excited to hear back from her and replied to her email right away, and my next response from her was Tuesday at 10am (10pm in the Philippines!). By Tuesday, I did get another email from another planner, but it was sort of unprofessional and not inviting, with no quotes or details. Tisha also mentioned that she had abroad clients before and has a Skype strategy. And like I mentioned before, I was hoping Tisha would pass my test because I had already read her blog and felt as if I knew her. 

Anyways, I passed the contract to Rodney to review. I can't make big decisions without him, what kinda precedence would that set in our relationship! But, I doubt he's going to have a problem with it.