We have had a busy couple of months as we get ready to tie the knot! We've been going at the complicated project of planning a wedding from lots of angles all at once.
On a whim I took a trip to David's Bridal, armed with a huge bridal magazine (a Christmas present from my mom and just about the only thing that she managed to fit into my Christmas stocking!). Despite torturing my mother and sister by making them help me into and out of dozens of dresses, it was a successful trip and the wedding dress was the first thing I got picked out. On the chance that I'd been getting off easy I agreed to do a second trip to try on more dresses just in case and on that visit I came home with not only the dress I'd had my eye on before, but shoes, a veil and a pretty good idea of the bridesmaids dresses.
We then started in earnest to figure out what we needed to figure out - and by spending three hours sitting on the floor at Borders pouring through wedding planning books (I did anyway, Todd was at work). I found a few that were possible candidates, but for Tres Reyes Mica gave me not only a much better book than I'd been able to find on my own but two books - one was a binder in fact. More invaluably Mica provided me with a cheat sheet of the comparable sections of both books.
With wedding book and binder in hand Todd and I set out to explore and evaluate Unitarian Universalist churches. We decided that although neither of us is currently involved in a particular church, we wanted to find someone who would say something meaningful to us at our wedding and to convey a sense of seriousness to the proceedings. Starting with the nearest sizable church according to the UU online directory we spent a few weeks attending two services a Sunday. After visiting the Unitarian Universalist Church in Westport (
http://www.uuwestport.org/) and hearing the Rev. Frank Hall give two sermons we knew we had found what we were looking for.
After that we had sort of a chicken and the egg problem regarding a reception hall and a date. After some deliberation (and some apparent deafness when we asked a friend for unavailable dates) we tentatively set the date as Sunday, May 24th, 2009.
From there we started with reception halls near the church and work our way through a list of 33 possible locations. We actually visited 8 places in one weekend and had it narrowed down to two that same weekend. The difficulty came in deciding if we wanted a place with character or a place with a beautiful setting. In the end we managed to find an elegant old mansion that fit the bill: The Fox Hill Inn (
http://www.thefoxhillinn.com/index.cfm).
