It's all in the details...

I keep thinking over our wedding in my head. I often find myself thinking about what made our wedding different and personal. I think for us with every aspect of wedding planning we looked at it and asked, "How can we make this more personal."
We decided that in order to pull off a personal wedding we had to state that right in the beginning. We decided to do that with handmade invitations and a personal website. As people began to RSVP they got to see some of our personal touches. We wanted to know what kind of music people enjoyed hearing at a wedding. This was the basis for our DJ list. (Even our DJ was a friend of ours!)

After that we had to figure out how were we going to convey who we are as a couple. Our favors/ center pieces were photos of us over our 7 years (some taken by us and some from others). I had also decided that I wanted to put my abilities to the test and began doing things like making wine charms, creating a card box, embossing napkins by hand,etc. We even made sure that everyone who checked into a hotel (that we knew about) received an Out of Town bag with goodies and a welcome letter that included directions to the site. Looking back it doesn't seem like much but during the planning process it seemed like a ton to do.We also needed to make sure that in the wedding planning process we did not loose sight of the things that we love and what we believe in. We provided trail mix in cups made my the students at Acheivekids (where I work) to represent our love for the outdoors. We jumped a broom that we decorated with our old rings to represent our leap into the future. We ate a sweet potato in honor of the different cultures we have learned about in higher education. As many people already know we wrote our own vows that included the thigns important to us such as Health, Equality, Love and a list of other things.
We even had a special cake topper that were manatees made from a nice lady in Florida (for some reason manatees are special to us. I adopted one for Mario one year). We had a kids table that let the children that were there know we were thinking of them even during the planning process.
It's funny because as I think of what we did I can't help but think about the personal touches others also put in. Our Officiant is a dear friend of ours who preformed and contributed to our ceremony so beautifully!Our engagement photos and signature board were put together by my cousin Raquel. My mom made both the ring bearer pillows and the flower girl baskets. My dad built signs to let everyone know where the site was. My Cousin Anita (and maid of honor) wrote us a beautiful poem to toast our new marriage. Mario's cousin as stated before, used her photo journalistic style to document our day. The ladies in our wedding party helped put together invitations, tie bows on favors and to also help decorate and set up (never mind the countless hours spent on the phone we me). Not to mention the monetary help that Mario's parents offered us. The amount of help we received really did fill us with love!
Family and friends the day of our event even chipped in. We had Uncle Art and Uncle Rob from each side of our families speak as part of our ceremony . We luckily had people helping from making sure we had what we needed for our cake cutting, to people taking gifts back to our room, to even helping us break down and packing up. Everyone's help was just so greatly appreciated! It was amazing the out pour of support we had in planning and making this wedding happen!

~N
(Photo Credits in Order: Meg Perotti, TheBubs, Sabrina Lott, Meg Perotti, Raquel Walton, Meg Perotti)

The Bubs made a blog!

It has been so crazy getting back to real life that I keep forgetting to post this!

We were featured on Meg's Blog. Please head on over to see her beautiful work and look at our day. She's amazingly talented! While your there leave a comment they make her smile!

http://megperotti.com/blog/

A Bride's View Part 1

Today I feel like talking about the wedding. It’s funny heading into the wedding I tended look down my nose a little when people would tell about their wedding and how it was the “Most Special Day of their Life”. I had a hard time believing that. Well, I have to say that it was one of the most special days in my/our lives.I cannot even pin point one moment that was the most special, the entire day just makes my heart sink in love every time I think about it.

The ceremony was beautiful and wonderfully unique and emotional. Carey a.k.a. Squirrel did a marvelous job. I got to be walked down the aisle by both of my beautiful parents and so did Mario. Our bridal party and groomsmen all looked GREAT! Meg (Mario's cousin) was an easy and very pleasant photographer to work with.

The reception was a lot of fun. The introductions went smoothly to the Friends Theme (if you don’t know Mario is a Friends fanatic). Then we got to jump the broom and neither of us fell on our faces :) Our cake and cupcakes were amazing (the red velvet with chocolate chips yum). For me hands down the best cupcake I’ve ever had in my life!

Our first dance (I don’t Want to Miss a Thing by Aerosmith) was cheesy at first then Tommy had our guests come out and it just became this grand emotional moment for Mario and I. We filled with tears of joy and love. A moment that I will not quickly forget.

The food was tasty, the beer and wine flowed freely. People danced and we had a blast! I know I'm glossing over the events but it really was just so special and great!

And best of all the general consensus was that people had fun and felt the amount of personality we put into our wedding planning.

~Nicole Perotti

(Photos in order taken by Mike Graben, Meg Perotti, and Sabrina Lott)

Mr. and Mrs. Bub

9.27.08 We did it! We are married and now sitting in our condo in Maui. We will definitely blog about all of our wedding details as we have time. As of right now all I can say is that we had a blast! And from the sounds of it our family and friends also had a great time. Our day was beautiful. Things went wrong and details feel short but all in all we had a wonderful time. Our ceremony was emotional and truly special! The reception was a blast and we danced like it was the thing to do. I'll say it a million times over but Thanks to all of our friends and family's hard work we got to have a beautiful day that was tons of fun.

Anyways,. right now we are running on island time and it's 9:40 in the am and we are just watching the waves roll in from our ocean front condo. Enough of this computer stuff we are off to put our feet in the water.

~N
(Photo taken by Sabrina Lott)

and breathe...

With only 5 days to go, life around Camp Bub is a bit stressful and tense. The motto of this past weekend became "Take a deep breathe"

This weekend was filled with a billion little details, writing our own vows, going to half moon bay and a slew of other projects. We were dealing with wedding from the minute we woke up till the minute we went to bed. Talk about wedding overload!

Now we are on to the point in this planning process that we have to finish a few loose ends but mostly we sit and wait. And stress and over work all the details and time lines over and over and over *lol*.

On the bright side the stress is about to melt away and we will find ourselves on a beach in Maui. Participating in all the glorious Honeyfund gifts that are and have been given to us. We have some massages in store, a beautiful luau, eating at Cheeseburger in Paradise, Snorkling and a bunch of other wonderful activities.

1 month till the big day!

It is so crazy how quickly a year of planning can dwindle down to being one month away. We are in the home stretch. The majority of the stressful wedding planning is done. Now we are just finalizing and confirming a lot of things. Oh, and hounding people for their RSVPs (such a tedious lame job to do).

I have a feeling this month is going to fly by! Then suddenly we will be sitting in Hawaii. Ahhh, this is so exciting.
~N

Celebrity response #1

It's official we are in our last month until the wedding. The past two weeks have graced our door step with wonderful gifts, cards with honey fund gifts and lots of nifty things.

Yesterday, we received a letter from the Governor. Oddly, it was very exciting. It has our wedding date and Mario and Nicole Perotti on it. Wow my name in print with my new last name. Exciting.

Needless to say yes we did send him an invitation and this is what we got in return. It has his signature on it and we keep debating if it is a stamp or something. It really doesn't matter, the fact that we got a response is good enough.

While we know that they will not be showing up to the wedding (thank gawd it'd be a total media circus) it was still nice to be recognized by our childhood friend.

I think it excited us more knowing that Kindergarten Cop signed the paper than the actual Governor. What can I say we love Kindergarten Cop!

A labor of love...Part 2

First I must say that I have the greatest mate in the world and he helped out with this "labor of love" sooo much. I can proudly say that this was a task done by both of us. At times I felt as if i was doing it alone (only because I embossed for months) but then we got to the RSVP portion of the invitations. This was largely done by Mario.

Once we had decided to make our own invitations we also decided to be non-traditional and do a website where people would RSVP and get the most personal experience possible. It was also a neat little way to show Mario's talents, save some trees, and not have to wait for snail mail RSVPs.

So, that meant that by the time we sent out the invitations our website had to be done and all of the personal urls had to be set up and ready to go. Then he had to make each persons RSVP card with their personal url. I was so proud of Bubbie! Not only did he get all of this done on time he also clipped all of the edges on the RSVP cards and all of the purple cardstock.

Granted, we did have a few rough spots along the way, like the mook at Kinko's who did not cut the RSVPs correctly. This was a lesson in wedding planning 101 on "don't sweat the small stuff". We just ran with the mistake and went with another option. To our guests they wouldn't know the difference. And the guy felt so bad that he didn't charge us for all the cutting he did.
After all of the cutting and prep work was done I headed up to my girl crew in Modesto (Mom, Tena, Rosie, Neet, Idie, Re, and Raquel). Mario and I cannot begin to thank these ladies enough. They sucked it up and assembly line style whipped these bad boys together. We ran out of glue at one point so Tena ran to the store and saved our production line.

After about two hours of assembling, addressing and embossing envelopes we were done. They were proudly boxed up and were sent out on that Monday. And by Tuesday we were actually already getting RSVPs.

A labor of love...Part 1

Since our wedding invitations are out I figured it was time to talk about them. Mario was a great support of making sure that I had the invitations that made me happy. The only problem was that with a theme like stars there was nothing that made me happy. After hours and hours of looking at disappointing invitations, I decided I wanted to have a try at making some invitations.

Granted, I'm not the most crafty person in the world. I just knew that if i didn't at least try to make an invitation then I'd be settling. Bub and I had agreed that the invitation was the first glimpse of what our wedding would be like. We really wanted it to reek of love and intimacy.

I gave it a try a couple times on my own. I got some inspiration from a few websites and just went with it. The two prototypes seen did not do it for me or Bub. They were missing something. For some reason the invitations still were not looking the way we wanted.

Finally, one day I was talking with a then co-worker (now friend) about embossing. She gave me some tips on wet embossing and then told me about dry embossing. (Oddly enough the link uses the materials I used).

I took her advise and thought about it some more. Then she brought me a light box and a few stencils to see if it was something I enjoyed. From that moment I was hooked. I was able to make the most beautiful stars. This started me on a very long journey that took me several months.

My bright idea was that I would work on them for a long time so it wouldn't seem as long. I really wish I would have logged the hours I spent doing invitations. I just know that I started them while still in school and graduated and they still were not done lol.

Overall, it was a pretty lengthy process. All of the paper had to be cut and the corners cropped before they could be embossed. In the end it took about 7-10 minutes for each invitation to be embossed. And a product that Mario and I are both very proud of.

California says it's ok!

Its official the State of California is allowing us to get married. We went on 8-8-08 to get our license before Mario's Uncle Ed's wedding. There were tons of people there. I guess the date had some magical and special significance.

All went very smoothly due to the fact that we were both born here in California. It was so exciting to get this silly little paper that allows us to do the deed.

In all of the wedding blogs I read, the couples take the obligatory marriage license picture. So, why be different?