Hey, everybody, look at us!

Mr. Spaniel and I just got back from our first dance lesson. Why dance lessons, you ask? Are we going to rock the reception?


(An aside: aren't they amazing?)
Well, not exactly. We actually are just learning a simple waltz—no mean feat, given my two left feet! (Nyuck nyuck nyuck.)

Incorporating my family's wedding traditions has been pretty easy—I've been to Jewish and Pakistani weddings, and there are so many aspects of each that are highly visible, but also totally secular. If the groom smashes a glass at the end of a wedding ceremony and the crowd shouts, "mazel tov!", you know you have just witnessed a Jewish wedding! Wearing henna and playing Indian dance music easily signals to guests that we are bringing in aspects of other cultures. But since Mr. Spaniel is a bit further removed from his Scandinavian heritage (his family has been in the U.S. a lot longer than mine has!), we had a harder time figuring out how to incorporate his culture in an obvious way. A search for "Danish wedding traditions" yielded this:

In Denmark, there is a traditional wedding custom of building an arch of pine branches, called the Gate of Honor, in front of the bride's family home. Another Gate of Honor is built when the couple celebrates their silver anniversary.

At some point during the marriage celebration the groom will disappear and the male guests all kiss the new bride. After the groom returns his bride eventually leaves the room and all of the female guests kiss him.

At a traditional Danish reception the guests will all gather around the groom, during the dancing and festivities, to cut his tie and socks with scissors.

The Danish marzipan ring cake is the customary wedding cake in Denmark. Also called the cornucopia cake, it is made with almonds, pastilage and marzipan. On the outside, the cake is beautifully decorated with sugar work. On the inside it is filled with fresh fruit, candy and almond cakes.

To avoid bad luck, the newlyweds cut the cake together as a married couple and all of the reception guests must eat a piece.

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Well, we're Angelenos, and that means that until we're pretty much millionaires, we'll be apartment dwellers. And that means that building pine arches in our common areas is not happening. And the groom's tie is rented, so it probably wouldn't go over well if it was cut when it was returned! (The socks, which we ended up finding at golfknickers.com? Way too awesome to cut!) And worst of all, the bride is allergic to almonds and marzipan! We want to leave our wedding to go to our honeymoon, not the emergency room!

We kept searching around the ww web for ideas until we struck gold: the Danish wedding waltz! Mr. Spaniel read that the traditional first dance at a Danish wedding is a bridal waltz, and that guests line the dance floor, gradually moving closer and closer to the couple until there is no more room for them to dance. While we can't really verify the authenticity of this tradition as a general rule, we did find this awesome video, which inspired us.


We also found a really nice version of the Brudevalsen (the particular piece being played) that FBIL-Spaniel was able to cut to the correct length for us, since we won't have our own orchestra playing behind the DJ stand. ;)

We're currently circulating the video around for our wedding party and hoping they can help lead our guests, with a few extra cues from the DJ. We won't be bringing the house down with our killer moves, but I'm pretty excited about what we were able to learn in a lesson, and really jazzed that we found something from Mr. Spaniel's side to include!

How did you incorporate your FI's cultural traditions into your wedding?

What's old is new again

Remember when I was worried that I wouldn't have enough old family wedding pictures for my "something old"? Well, I decided not to use them as table numbers, but instead to display them next to our guest book, but not because we didn't have enough pictures—my family came through BIG TIME—just because I thought the effect was more awesome when they are all together. I picked up a whole bunch of mismatched frames on clearance at Target (ranging from $0.98 to $3.48) in mostly 5x7" sizes (with some 4x6" and 8x10" thrown in for some variety) and went nuts.

Want to see? Here are a few of my favorites. I'll start with the newest.*

(Photos by Kenny Backer and Ken Portnoy)
My mom was remarried this summer, and his daughter married just a few months later. I was in both of their weddings, which makes these two extra fun to display! These were easy to come by, since both were taken in the digital photo era. After these two, it gets more complicated!


A lot of my parents' wedding pictures were discolored from age and looked very red and yellow. I wish I could have corrected the color after my step-dad scanned them for me (we printed all of these pictures at Costco on matte paper so that no one had to worry about their originals), but I almost am happier with the old, aged effect. It's less obvious this way that we're looking at a picture printed in 2010 instead of 1978. :) Just in case Papa Spaniel's spiffy suit didn't give it away!

These pictures were a little touchy to include—my parents divorced about five years ago and I didn't want anyone to feel bad seeing them. I compromised by using smaller pictures (but using two of them... they are my parents, after all!).


Mr. Spaniel's parents didn't have any prints from their wedding, or any formal portraits. We had to take a teeny-tiny slide to a photo lab to get this one printed! It will be displayed next to the picture of Mr. Spaniel's grandparents, one of only two originals that will be on display (so far). I think Mr. S looks just like his grandfather.


The couple on the left are my great-grandparents: the photo was taken on their fifth wedding anniversary in 1932 and was colored later as a gift to my grandmother. It's the other "original" we'll be displaying. I think I get such a kick out of this picture because it's fun to see my great-grandfather—the lone blue-eyed blond in my family tree. :)

The woman on the right is my beautiful grandmother. Doesn't she look great? She's 80-years-old now and still looks amazing. This is the photograph that inspired me to give this project a life after the wedding, by hanging up the family wedding photos on our wall with our own wedding portraits. I kind of can't wait!

Did you find a place in your home for any of your wedding "decorations"?

*All images in this post are personal photos, but the photographer of the original photograph is credited where known.

We want to see their pretty faces

One of the compromises we had to make to keep our wedding somewhere in the neighborhood of the budget was to get only six hours with our photographer (instead of the full day or the duration of our eight hour event). That doesn't seem like a whole lot of time, so we expect that we'll have to focus on portraits and the major events of the evening (although maybe if everyone gets on the dance floor, we'll get all of them there!). But one of my favorite parts of going through old pictures from my childhood are seeing everybody else! There are a lot of guests who probably won't turn up much in our professional wedding pictures, but that doesn't mean we don't want good pictures of them!

For a minute we thought of putting disposable cameras on the tables à la Miss Cola, but the quality of those photos never seems to be that great and we figured we'd spend a lot of money on developing 20 rolls for maybe six useful pictures, if we were lucky. We also thought about renting a photobooth (or setting up a fauxtobooth!), but financial and time restrictions sort of precluded both. Then, finally, it hit me: put the guests to work!

Hopefully not (source)
Like many a bride before me, I decided it would be great(!) to have an online photo sharing space where guests could upload their photos and I could see them! Not all of our guests are on Facebook, and I didn't want to download every small, low quality JPEG file, anyway, so I started exploring my photo sharing options.

First, I tried Flickr. I had a really hard time figuring out how guests could share their photos without creating a new account with a username and password, so I kept looking.

Next I found iRave. It looked promising, but I had absolutely no idea how much storage space it offered and I couldn't find the information anywhere I looked on the site. I didn't want to find I'd run out of space after I'd given guests the information!

I kept getting recommendations to try Picasa, and that was the one I ultimately chose. Upgrading the account was less expensive than with Flickr, and Picasa let me choose the email address for guests to send pictures to (as well as the URL to share photos, via my username), which I think will be easier than the random email addresses I hear Flickr uses (not that I could set one up!).

The next challenge was how to let everyone know where to send their photos. I put the information on our wedding website, but the truth is, out of 361 visits to the site, I'm sure about 350 of them were from me. ;) So I got the idea awhile back from Weddingbee reader kjpugs to create business cards with the information!

After going to VistaPrint and downloading their business card template, I went back to my invitation proofs and yanked the border image for one final project.


Crowning glory? Replacing the dot on the exclamation mark with a tiny little ♥. Of course, given that it's only 3 pt, I doubt anyone will notice!

Here's what the final result looked like.


On the back, we printed our monogram, just because we didn't want it blank. In hindsight, this would have been a great place to put table numbers and use them as escort cards! Since I didn't think of it in time, I insist that (at least!) one of you go make adorable business card-sized envelopes using this template (or you can buy pre-made plain ones) with your guests' names on the outside, and a cute photo sharing business card on the inside (with the table number on the back, of course!). This will ensure that your guests at least pick up the card... whether they remember to take it with them is another matter. I think the awesomeness of this idea is impossible to deny... so much so that I haven't actually ruled out reprinting these cards and doing it. I'm still looking for ways to justify the time and expense. :)

Did you come up with any genius ideas after the fact? Share them here, so that maybe someone else can take advantage!

One month before (by February 20)

• Put RSVPs into guestlist database and phone invitees who haven't yet responded
  I've been adding respondents as we go along, and am ready with a list of people for my parents to nag after the RSVPs are due!
• Get marriage license
  Done! It was somewhat anticlimactic.
• Mail rehearsal dinner invitations
  They are mailed, and they are awesome.
• Have final dress fitting
  My second dress fitting is scheduled for next week.
• Stock the bar
  Our venue provides the bar.
• Send out as many final payments as you can
  I guess this would be smart.
• Assign seating
  
• Purchase bridesmaids' gifts to hand out at the rehearsal dinner
  I ended up selling the imitation pashminas and buying real cashmere ones from The Pashmina Store when I couldn't find the right brooches (and other miscellaneous items) that I wanted to add to their gifts. I am spending a little more this way, but I like the gift a lot better!
• Write vows, if necessary
  We're not writing our own vows, but we did write our ceremony. It's been handed off to our officiant already.
• Get hair cut and colored, if desired
  I'm getting my last trim before the wedding tomorrow!

This is not a dress rehearsal

The Spaniel-in-laws have been really supportive throughout the wedding planning process, and are throwing us this awesome rehearsal dinner to boot. So last night, Mr. Spaniel and I decided to help them out a bit by throwing together some invitations.

I really wanted to keep the rehearsal dinner vibe fun and festive and colorful, which means I tried to resist the draw to my usual clean, simple aesthetic and not just copy these invitations.

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Even though I really, really wanted to.

Instead, I focused more on invites like these.


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But good intentions are all for naught when your color ink jet runs out of red and yellow inks! "Black and blue" is not exactly our theme for the evening, so I was able to indulge my inner boring invitation girl, and I came up with these.


Without illustrations, these couldn't have been simpler to make. I created a 4.5x6.5" document in Word and used the Jane Austen font from Dafont, which I love and have been dying to use for something. I had a lot of leftover blank invitation cards from a previous project (non-wedding related!) that I got from Cards and Pockets that I just threw in the inkjet (my laser printer can't handle such small paper), and then I used some leftover double-sided tape to get them onto black mats—made from scraps from the programs (which were conveniently 5x11"... now if only I could think of a job for the 5x4" scraps that are left!).

(personal photo)
The part of these invitations that I got really excited about were the black envelopes. I'd wanted to use black inner envelopes for our wedding invitations with names written in gold, but by the time I thought of it, I'd already printed return addresses onto the cream envelopes and didn't want to spend any more money. So instead, I addressed the rehearsal dinner invitations in gold ink—an excellent test for the black place cards I plan to make! I used a gold calligraphy pen with a 1.0 mm nib—it was a little thick, actually, but I couldn't find a finer point.

What did you do for rehearsal dinner invitations?

Dress Stress, Part II: The First Fitting

(Are you a guest at my wedding, or Mr. Spaniel himself? If so, please go away now. kthxbai.) :)

I've already told you about my little meltdown about the bridesmaid dresses. For me, the late bridesmaid dresses (and the missing sash) felt like major catastrophes, even though I objectively knew that I had tons of time and a million options for resolving the problems. My rational brain was just not switched on when it came to the girls' dresses. But my rational brain was on when it came to my own dress—I didn't panic when the dress came in months after it was promised; I just got angry.

I bought my dress on layaway in late August, after declining the bolero, which I was quoted an extra hundred dollars for (I knew House of Brides included the bolero for Allure 8601 in the cost, so I didn't see why I should pay more for it when I didn't like it enough to pay extra money anyway), and was told the dress would arrive in late November—about 12 weeks later. In the meantime, I came in every month to dutifully make my next payment, and in November I asked when I could expect my dress.

"Oh, it should be here in 12 weeks... beginning of February."

o_O Wh...WHAT???!!!

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I usually go with the flow, even when I don't like the answer, but I think I had a mini-stroke right then. It was probably the first time I ever actually confronted a wedding vendor about the discrepancy between what I was promised when I forked over my money and what I was being told now. Would that be enough time to finish my alterations? What if it came late? How would they make me whole if I didn't have a freaking wedding dress to wear? And how was I going to think of enough to blog about with three more months to wait for my dress? (You can see I managed to think of a few things!).

So thank goodness when I called the shop at the beginning of February, I got the response I expected the first time I asked the question: "It has already been shipped and will be here by the end of the week." And even better when it did, in fact, arrive at the end of the week and I was able to schedule a fitting for this past weekend!

(personal photo)
The first thing I noticed when I walked into the dressing room with my gown hanging in front of me? The bolero. (It's that little lacy thing you see hanging behind the dress.) It was included. Sneaky saleslady tried to get me to pay another hundred dollars for something that was free! (See, ladies? It pays to do your research!) The rage hat came back on, but this time I kept it to myself: I didn't want it to disappear by the second fitting and held for $100 ransom. ;)

But now that I got that part of the story out of the way, I can tell you that seeing my dress (again? for the first time?) was such a happy moment for me. With the weight of my wedding chores building up on me, I haven't been enjoying the last few weeks of planning as much as I think I could, but getting my beautiful wedding dress was just... joyful. It definitely needed some alterations (I had to order three extra inches of length even though I only needed one, and despite all my newfound buffness it still needed an inch let out in the hips and waist), but trying it on felt just amazing (in between gasping, that is... that bitch was tight!).

Oh, you would like to see?

The front
(photo by Mama Spaniel, who couldn't find the lens on my Droid camera and so took a picture of the mirror instead)

The back/French bustle
(photos by me, when Mama Spaniel finally gave up on the Droid camera altogether)
I love it. Do you love it? :) I still can't decide what I'm doing about the bolero, though.

How did your first fitting go, if you've had it? And if you didn't, how do you expect to feel?

Dress Stress, Part I: Bridesmaids

Aside from a few blips and the natural problems associated with wedding planning while law schooling, not too much has really gotten to me in the planning process. I have never been to a "perfect" wedding—have you?—so I wasn't really that concerned with throwing one. This made it easy for me to avoid stress about the details and most of the vendors.

Which of course means that when the dresses came in late, I freaked out completely.

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It all started with the bridesmaid dresses, which I ordered from House of Brides back in September because they were at least $25 less expensive per dress than any other retailer I visited. I got notification from them that the dresses would arrive in their warehouse at the end of November. Plenty of time!

And then the end of November came. The dresses did not.

And then the end of December came. The dresses did not.

I was too busy with finals to stay on top of everything at the end of the year, but suddenly it was 2010 and I was in a full on panic, but paralyzed by the start of a new semester and a gazillion other things to do. I sent one meek email (that went unanswered), worried a little more and did nothing, and then, finally, in mid-January I got the notice that my dresses had shipped. Huzzah!

I promised not to take pictures of the girls in the dresses until they fit!
(personal photo)
They looked fabulous, and since they came early enough, I was super relieved.

Until one of my bridesmaids picked hers up last week and noticed that the sash was missing!!! HOB was a lot more responsive to me this time, and when I sent my ohmygodsodesparatepleasehelpme email, I got an email back within an hour and a promise that another sash would be on its way within two weeks. (This was great news, because I got myself so worked up in those few minutes between the discovery and the response that I swear my blood pressure doubled.) Amazingly, it took only a few days! They may be slow when your wedding is far off, but HOB totally came through when I needed them. Thank goodness; I will live to have my heart attack another day.

As for my dress... that was a different story...

Nailing my style down, Part II: A healthy canvas

Because I'll be wearing a new and special piece of jewelry and otherwise covering my hands with ornate designs, I think my hands will be getting a lot more attention than they are used to. I'm addressing that in part by prettying up my nails with polish, but I want to make sure that the nails themselves are healthy. For most of my life, my nails have been pretty strong and healthy (most of the time), so a simple manicure usually does the trick. But lately they've become really brittle and split all the time, even when I keep them really short. I don't want fake nails (just not my thing), so I've been hunting for some home solutions for brittle nails, and thought I'd share the three major tips I found to treat cracking nails with the 'hive.

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1. HYDRATE!!! No matter where I looked, the ENTIRE INTERNET told me I have to hydrate my nails if I want them not to crack. Soak your nails in tepid water, then apply moisturizers to seal the water in. Some sites recommended petroleum jelly (Vaseline), but I like to avoid petroleum products and will probably just use my coconut lotion. Re-moisturize after using detergents, washing hands, etc.

2. Massage. I read that massaging olive or vegetable oil to the nail (on top and underneath) a few times a day also helps with both increasing moisture and increasing circulation to the nail, and that this helps strengthen nails. You can also tell your partner and see if you can help foster the misinterpretation that, perhaps, a back massage will make your nails grow better. ;) It's worth a try, no?

3. Don't use nail polish remover. Acetone strips nails of necessary moisture, and it's recommended to use it no more than once per week. This will be hard for me, since my hands are always in and out of a backpack and it chips my polish a lot, causing me to redo my nails often. But I'll give it my best shot!

Do you have any tips for strong, healthy nails to share?

Nailing my style down, Part I: Polishing up

As the wedding barrels down on me (ZOMG, it's coming SO SOON!!!), I've had to start thinking about things that never would have occurred to me to put on a big to-do list when we first got engaged... like my nail color! I mean, who would let themselves get caught up in their freaking finger nails when there are so many other things to take care of? This Spaniel would!

I first started thinking that this decision would be a little more complicated than walking into a nail salon and out with a simple French tip when I saw this at Maharani.

(source)
After totally creeping out Mr. Spaniel ("Is that a FINGERNAIL? By itself?"—he is also horrified by hair and eyelash extensions) and getting a good chuckle out of that, I started to think that maybe some color wasn't a bad idea. After all, our wedding palette is pretty muted—heck, even my shoes are only gold—and next to the dark mehndi stain, a rich color might be a nice contrast as compared to some of the light, "bridal" colors I had first considered.

OPI "Time-less Is More" (source)
I've pretty much ruled out the light pinks and whites and pink-and-whites (am I the only one who just found that amusing?), but I'm now weighing the pros and cons of trying to recreate the red and gold reverse French tip (trial run required)—or maybe just gold tips with a red base?—or just sticking with a deep red alone (no trial run necessary!). What do you think?

Have you given much thought to your wedding nail 'do? What did you decide?

Cake-spiration

Please don't take away my bride card, but I am not really a lover of cake.

(source)
In fact, in (one of) my dream wedding(s), dessert is actually a scoop or two of gelatto. But Mr. Spaniel loves him some cake (and really, I think, so do most people), and it is a wedding, so I put on my research hat (what? I like hats) and looked for inspiration!

I got the idea pretty early on that I wanted a mehndi-styled cake, and there was no shortage of beautiful inspiration!

(source, source)
(source, source, source)
After tasting a few samples, though, we realized that we didn't like the taste of fondant, and we also really wanted to use our favorite local bakery, Porto's, for the cake—and they don't even use fondant. Buttercream doesn't really lend itself as well to intricate patterns, so I looked around for a less intricate henna-inspired pattern that would be easier to apply to a buttercream-covered cake, and I found this.

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They actually had a very similar design in their portfolio already, which increased my confidence. Ours will have three tiers, a light cream colored background, and chocolate fudge decoration. I guess if it's that pretty, I will let them eat cake! HA! Ha, ha. Oh.

Did your cake design have any special significance for you?

A non-traditional mehndi

One of the first things that I knew that I wanted for the wedding was a mehndi, but I had a bit of a tough time figuring out how to go about putting it together. I was a bit handicapped because my mother is not Pakistani (some Jews also use henna as part of their marriage celebrations, but not where Mama Spaniel's family is from), so she was pretty much as clueless as I was, and there's only so much information you can get about a women's event from your father! I'd only been to one mehndi myself, when my cousin was married several years ago, but I did not have my wedding hat on yet. So armed with some fuzzy memories of a loud party with really fantastic Pakistani food, I did a lot of research on my own, starting with my favorite wedding movie!



I can't imagine having nearly so many people at the mehndi—where would they all fit?!—but this was the scene I'd had in mind: the VIWs (Very Important Women!), singing songs, goofing around... and eating Pakistani food. What, you didn't see that in the video? Well, half the point of this event is to eat good food, so you'll just have to mentally edit that part in.

As I tried to work out the logistics with Mama Spaniel, though, we started to realize that a big gathering of family members in her home the day before the wedding was going to be pretty difficult. So after giving the matter lots (and lots) of thought, Mr. Spaniel and I reworked the event quite a bit. Instead of a bridal shower-like event, my mehndi will be more of an open house, at our place, where our wedding party (boys and girls!) will all be invited throughout the day. My family can actually get pretty tightly wound before big events (weddings certainly qualify as those!), so I'm really excited to be able to relax and spend the day with our friends! I think it's going to be a darn good time... especially since I won't be able to use my hands for anything for a few hours. ;) Mr. Spaniel gets to do all the cleaning up before we leave!

How are you spending the day before your wedding?

Escapism

I'm one-third of the way through my last semester of law school, and all I can think about is taking a vacation. Seems to me to be as good a time as any to tell you about our honeymoon!

We had a few considerations in choosing a destination. First, I only had a week to travel after the wedding, so we wanted to stay somewhere close to home/quick to get to—we didn't want to spend our whole honeymoon just getting there and back. That cut most of the places we actually wanted to go out of the running (I was just dying to take a Mediterranean cruise!). Second, we didn't want to spend tons of money, so that cut out anywhere we'd had to fly to reach. Thus, the honeymoon road trip (to wine country!) was born.

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We'll be skipping the morning-after brunch to make the long slog up to Sonoma, where neither of us have ever been, and spending a few days there before heading west and south back home via Santa Cruz (one of my favorite places) and Carmel. What turned out to be really nifty was that the Spaniel-in-laws had taken a similar road trip for their honeymoon—we'll actually be staying at the same place in Carmel that they stayed 35 years ago (and telling the owners that? Got us a pretty sweet deal on the suite!).

I'm pretty excited about our road trip, but of course I have reservations (and not just for the rooms! Oh!). I love sunny-beachy vacations, and we won't get much of that by heading north in March! I also can be a pretty cranky travel companion (hey, at least I know my faults), and being on the move for most of our honeymoon—packing and unpacking, arguing about negotiating who gets to drive—was definitely not how I'd originally envisioned it. But we've already figured out the ground rules to keep us both happy: complaints about bathroom stops on the road are not allowed, the first person to get hungry decides when to eat, and all other disputes are to be resolved by playing Rock-Paper-Scissors ;). If that's not a recipe for success, I don't know what is.

How did you select your honeymoon destination?

I'm putting a ring on it

I don't think I've told you yet about Mr. Spaniel's wedding ring, so gather round; it's story time!

Once upon a time, Mr. Spaniel was reluctant to go shopping for a wedding band. He'd gotten the idea somewhere that the only acceptable men's ring is a plain white band.

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While I really like the simple, modern but also classic style of a platinum or white gold wedding band, it didn't strike me as being particularly Mr. Spaniel—which he confirmed by his lack of enthusiasm for it. Instead, I figured I knew Mr. Spaniel better than he knew himself, and dragged him along to another jewelry shop to get him to try on rings. I had a feeling that if we found the right one, he'd get excited about the prospect of wearing it, and doesn't everyone want their partner to be happy wearing their ring? I also had a feeling that the right ring would be two-toned.

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As it turns out, we were both wrong! A plain platinum band actually never touched his finger (he had no interest at all once he saw all the other options), and he seemed to gravitate toward more "interesting" and complicated designs all on his own. But he didn't go two-tone...

personal photo
He threw some rose gold in there too and went three-tone.

That Mr. Spaniel. Such a diva.

Did your fiancé(e) have any preconceived notions about the wedding band? Did the choice surprise you?

(C)holy smokes, the ketubah is (c)here!

UPS delivery is always a race against time 'round these parts. We've had the delivery person walk away in the amount of time it took me to run from my living room couch to the front door (a distance of a whopping four feet). Since I got the notice from Ketubah Ketubah that my order was on its way, when I heard the knock on the door I was on my feet and running like a bat out of hell (in my bathrobe and sweatpants, no less) hoping that would be it.


I hadn't ordered anything else poster-shaped, so I knew what I was looking at, and I patiently waited for Mr. Spaniel to get home from work to rabidly tear into it to see the goods. Just kidding; I did wait for him to get home, but I opened it without him when he left for the gym. ;) I did open it slowly and carefully, though—I couldn't let anything happen to this paper, which cost WAY MORE than its weight in gold!

I love it I love it I love it!
A closer shot of the custom, hand calligraphy
I am SO. EXCITED. We ended up ordering the Ardyn Halter papercut ketubah in ivory with custom text.

On [DATE], in the presence of family and friends in Malibu, California, [Miss Spaniel], daughter of [Mama and Papa Spaniel], and [Mr. Spaniel], son of [FIL Spaniels], affirmed their union of marriage and made these vows to each other:

As beloveds and friends, we choose to walk life’s path together. We will appreciate our differences as a source of richness and build a life together as equal partners and supportive companions. We will be slow to anger and quick to forgive. We will celebrate life’s splendors together; we will brace each other through its storms. May our love provide us with the freedom to be ourselves and the courage to follow both our mutual and our individual directions.

We promise to honor our ancestors, families, and all living beings; treasure, enjoy, and continue the traditions we have inherited; create a home filled with love and peace, freedom and compassion. We will shelter each other; our home will be a place of openness and generosity. With our community of friends and family as witnesses, we now combine our separate fates into one.

Signature spaces were included for two witnesses (my MOH and Mr. Spaniel's Best Man), the bride and groom, and the officiant.

Our mission now is to not touch the ketubah all the time so that it doesn't get discolored (it's been re-wrapped in acid-free tissue and put back into the mailer tube), then to mount it to a piece of acid-free foam core or mat board with hinging tape to get it ready to sign before our wedding ceremony. We also have to find a good acid-free pen—Ketubah Ketubah recommends the Sakura Pigma Micron Pen, so I will probably pick some up from Amazon during my next shopping spree. ;)

Working with Ketubah Ketubah was a bit of a mixed bag. They have some amazing and beautiful options, but the customization process was a little confusing—they have a whole wizard for personalization (adding your name to pre-written text), but no clear process for customization (I just added it to the notes/comment section at the end of the wizard), and I got some really unexpected snark from the person responding to my email about a correction on the proof. BUT in the end I got what I ordered, and relatively quickly for a custom job. I'm so happy with the finished product that I'm willing to forgive some blips in the ordering process—normally I wouldn't forgive a rude response from customer service so easily, but I guess my ketubah is so beautiful that I'm feeling generous!