Florist Booked - More Honeymoon Information...

Hey everyone!

Quick update - the florist is booked! Anna did it this past weekend while she was at a family picnic near the wedding site. Very excited that just one more part of the wedding has been taken care of.

Also, Anna came home with some travel magazines that one of her bosses gave her about St. Maarten, which is an island in the French West Indies. It looks from the map as though it is about 200 miles (maybe) east of Puerto Rico... It is only 27 square miles, but has a lot to do. There are two sides to the island - the French side and the Dutch side, and there are a LOT of beaches. Both sides are apparently very nice.

Check out the web sites of two of the hotels we're looking at...

Click Here for Hotel L'Esplanade, which is ranked the #1 hotel on the island by Tripadvisor.com. It has only 24 rooms, and overlooks the Caribbean from atop a hill on the French side of the island. While you have to walk down the hill to the beach, it is within walking distance of a number of great restaurants and a beautiful beach.

Click Here for Le Petit Hotel, a 10 room hotel right on the beach. These two hotels are owned by the same company, and both look awesome! It is ranked #2 on that same web site on the island of St. Maarten, and is also on the French side of the island, in an area known as Grand Case.

Anyway, we have pretty much decided that we are going to do one of these hotels, and definitely St. Maarten for the honeymoon, and we can save Hawaii for another time - perhaps our 1 or 5 year anniversary!

Down to 9 months and 2 days until the wedding! Thanks for reading!

-Bruce

New Honeymoon Idea

Aruba... If we go there, we will stay here. Looks like a pretty darn nice place, and it would be all paid for by my travels throughout tha last 4-5 years... Thanks ONU and Delta Sig!

Anyway, we're looking at it as an option as well, and we'll see what happens. We have done some research, and it looks like there is a lot to do, and it would be a nice place to go.

Anyway, heading to Ohio tomorrow for a bachelor party of a friend of mine, so I'll look forward to reading any thoughts on this on Monday...

- Bruce

BTW, we're only 9 months and 7 days away from the BIG DAY!!! It is coming quickly, and we are getting extremely excited!

Take Part in our Honeymoon Poll

So we are are talking about two different options for our Honeymoon, and we need your help. Please vote for the option that you think is best:

Lihue, Hawaii (Island of Kauai) - Can stay in a Marriott hotel for free with all of my points from my travels. However, we would only essentially be able to be there for about 5 and a half days, because we wouldn't be able to get there until Monday, and our question - is that really long enough for a trip to Hawaii? Will we be too tired for our entire trip?

St. Thomas, Virgin Islands - Again, we can probably get a Marriott hotel for free, and since it is in the Eastern time zone, we should be able to get there on Sunday night. In addition, we will be used to the time alerady. The flight will be cheaper, so if we wanted to, we would even be able to stay at the Ritz Carlton for our trip, which would be nice. Only problem - is there as much to do in the Virgin Islands as there is in Hawaii? I don't know...

Please vote, and your votes will comprise about 3% of our decision. You have more say in this than you do by voting for American Idol... So, instead of calling an 800 number 50 times to vote for the next Clay Aiken, why not vote for our honeymoon location?

-Bruce

Wedding Planning Update: Photographer Has Been Booked

Hey everyone-

Two posts in two days... How about that?

Today, we booked our photographer - Suzanne Hall of Hall Photography. You can check out the web site at http://www.hallphotography.com/. She came highly recommended, and her prices are within the range we set at the beginning. We think she'll do a great job for us.

Everything is moving forward, which is a positive. Hope you all are well.

- Bruce and Anna

Update: Wedding Dress has been Purchased

Couple updates to share:

1. Anna has purchased her wedding dress! It is quite exciting for her... She did say that as much as she likes to shop, she couldn't believe that she only found 2 dresses that she considered purchasing - one of which she said was way better than the other. I can't wait to see her in it!!

2. This weekend is a big one for us - we're heading to Chicago to meet with the photographer that we have pretty much decided upon for the wedding, and we are also going over to Naperville, IL where we're going to be moving to find a place to live! We have a number of places that we'll be looking at, and we'll update everyone once we decide where our home will be for the next year... In addition, on Sunday, we'll be going to the Dave Matthews Band concert at Toyota Park where the Chicago Fire soccer team plays. It's going to be awesome!

We'll report back again soon. Big stuff happening!

-Bruce and Anna

Marriage Prep Class

So we went to our marriage preparation class yesterday in Auburn Hills, MI at the St. John Fisher Catholic Center on the campus of Oakland University... It lasted 6 hours and 45 minutes (12:45 pm - 6:30 pm.)

Let me guess - you're asking yourself what we learned in all that time?

Well here is the top 5 culminating in the #1 most important thing (according to the Catholic Church) we learned during the session:

5. Have many, many Catholic babies (We MUST procreate and bring the children up in the Catholic church. If we don't, we have broken our vows because we must be open to accepting children into our home.)

4. We speak the same love languages (Physical Touch and Quality Time were our top two "love languages" according to a test we did)

3. Joining finances is hard (We did some case studies to help us learn how to do it, and heard from one of our fellow attendees about how he has his own business and doesn't get a regular paycheck.)

2. Natural Family Planning is 99% effective (No joke according to our session leaders, who in a fit of TMI - Too Much Information - talked about how they used to use "artifical birth control measures" and it nearly ruined their marriage... Alrighty then...)

... and the #1 thing we learned in our pre-marriage seminar yesterday is...

1. Cohabitation = Divorce (According to our session leaders, who by the way are a Corporate Development guy for a hospital and an MBA from the University of Michigan who home schools their children, only 15% of couples who cohabitate before marriage don't divorce. According to Anna, our resident Social Scientist, the data that was used to formulate the 15% number was skewed and was misrepresented by the people leading our session... I have heard this many, many times since the session ended...)

By the way, if anyone wants to borrow our "Contraception: Why NOT" CD, we got an extra copy to share with our friends and family if they are interested...

Honestly though, this session did help us to understand a little more about the marriage process and some things we needed to think about, and so it was worth the time. And, it's done!! YAY! One more thing done and taken care of!!

Talk to you all soon! We're down to less than 11 months until the big day!

Wedding Photographers

Who knew wedding photographers were so expensive? Maybe everyone else, but not me... We have been getting quotes from people with a difference of like $2,000 for the same services... Let's just say right now that we won't be going with the ones that are on the high end of that. Anna's mom said recently something to the effect of "You shouldn't go with the highest costing photographer because you really only pull your wedding photos out every once in a while after the wedding. Once you have kids, you'll be taking more photos of them, and the wedding photos will not come out except for every two or three years just to look at them and put them away again..." Makes a lot of sense.

Anyway, we're on the hunt for wedding photographers right now, so if anyone knows someone in the Michigan City, Indiana area who takes good photos and doesn't charge an arm and a leg, please let us know!

More soon, including honeymoon stuff... (I've been put in charge of that portion of the big wedding festivities, so I'm really looking forward to sharing with everyone where we're going to go and what we're going to do!)