As you can imagine, we have been busy bees lately. I wish I could write in this blog every day because it feels like something new happens every day! Sadly, this may be my last entry, though, as I'm unsure what the next few days hold for us...or how long we get to use this website.

We have been blessed with such an amazingly wonderful time planning this wedding ceremony, reception, and honeymoon. We're delighted at all of the progress, support, smiles, and details that have come out of all of this.

Our bridal shower was a spring tea theme and we enjoyed every minute of it. The food, tea, and decorations were lovely! All of the gifts were so thoughtful and perfect and the company, of course, made it a beautiful day to remember.

We had the bachelorette parties and that is enough said about that one!! LOL. Actually, it was so nice to be surrounded by people we trust and love and don't get to spend enough time with.

Jody came over yesterday and we got to play with hair ; that was super-fun! We tried on our dresses again (not showing each other, though!) and broke in our shoes in Georgetown looking for a shawl. No luck there but it was a lovely time with Tyler and the brides. We ordered flowers and food and packed for the honeymoon!

Things are all coming together and we're looking forward to seeing and even hosting some out-of-town guests this week. :)

Liz and I are so excited to start this new chapter in our lives together. We are continuously amazed at how our love grows and grows. We are both surprised at how very special these coming events truly are to us. Throughout the planning process, we have felt a shift in our family and even in our own relationship.

Liz put it into terms last night that made a lot of sense to me. At first, we questioned the meaning of a commitment ceremony. After all, we both knew we were committed to each other and we both had made the commitment to be together before we ever decided to have a commitment ceremony.

What we realized recently is that there is something to be said about taking that step TOGETHER and at the same time, in front of friends, in front of family, in front of God and the Universe, standing strong together and facing our future as one.

 

 

 

We are down to the details now and the big day is getting sooo close!  If any of you have been trying to keep up with the planning, sorry for slacking on the blog updates for a couple weeks!

We've hammered out all of the ceremony details (so excited for a beautiful ceremony) and most of the honeymoon stuff (so excited for a great escape). The reception is in pretty good shape (so excited for a terrific celebration), with wonderful people volunteering to take part in and/or help (you awesome people know who you are!!!).

We have decided on a new last name (THIS one was tricky), had a final meeting with our minister and venue contact, gotten RSVP's for the rehearsal dinner, decided on flowers, bought stuff, bought more stuff...we have been busy!! :)

We need to get the music figured out, buy MOH gifts, make sure we remember to have the food we need for the rehearsal dinner (Taco Bell!...just kidding!), um, there's the bouquets, cake, finish centerpieces, pick out some pics for our frames at the reception, oh!, make the guest book pages.

Some of this just has to wait ...flowers will be fresh so we probably don't want to make the bouquets this weekend ;). We need to wait to pick up the food, ice, and such, etc, etc.

Four weeks away seems so long sometimes. Right now, it seems perfecft. We am anxious for this spectacular day to get here but we want to wrap up a few more things before we start this next chapter together.

Thank you all so much for all of the loving, caring, thoughtful, and heartfelt messages you send us through your generous giving, generous words, and generous actions. We know that we are truly, truly blessed.

(you wanna know the new last name, don't you? teehee...after the wedding, we are both very excited to be Aishie and Elizabeth: FITZSIMMONS)

We are so excited that Kathy, Liz's mom, will be making our necklaces and possibly earrings/hair accessories for the wedding! We got to see an example over Skype this weekend and they are gorgeous :)

Laura & Tyler were very helpful and we had so much fun together as we created invites, addressed, stamped, and licked envelopes the weekend before last! We have already begun receiving some RSVP's...YAY! We can't wait to see you there! There are a few invites we have not been able to send out yet but hope to finish up this week.

We're still waiting to figure out how we are going to do our ceremony. The wonderful reverand that is going to be officiating at our wedding should be sending some ideas to us any time now. When we met with him,  he had some lovely suggestions and we're anxious to start coming to some decisions about this part of the festivities.

We were worried about being able to have a garden and do other yard work this year. We're focusing so much time, effort, and funds on wedding stuff. Never fear!! ;-)Looks like we will be able to go in on a rototiller with our neighbor and even get a great deal on hydro-seeding our lawn, too. We're so happy to be able to continue our dream of growing a garden this year!

I can't believe how close we are coming to this beautiful day! Planning this wedding has been such an adventure and a marvelous way for us to get to spend time together really learning how to communicate our needs, wants, and excitement with each other. 

 

 

There is such beautiful music in store for you all! We are incredibly blessed to have some unique and special pieces planned for our ceremony. We are honored that a few very special guests have agreed to join us in this celebration.

 

Another thing we were able to take a look at this weekend was the layout of the tables for our reception. Since we're looking forward to time mingling, dancing, and truly enjoying good company, we don't intend to have a formal seating arrangement. We're very pleased with the layout that we've decided on and hope that it lends to the celebratory atmosphere.

 

We are anxiously awaiting the paper for our invitations and will be focusing on addressing the invites and gettnig them out by the end of this week!

 

Back to the music...teehee...this is just a taste of how it has been in our household lately; we just can't seem to get our heads off the topic of music! We're keeping an ear out for tunes that we think will be fun for all at the reception. With all of the songs that we've said "that should be at our wedding!" to lately, we'll be partying for days!!! Of course, we'll trim it down a tad (just enough so that you aren't all stuck in dancefloor limbo for eternity) but we want to make sure there is something for everyone to enjoy.

Guest Comments/RSVP page:

If you have any song suggestions, we hope you'll leave them on our Guest Comments page!!

 We'd also love to hear about activities that you loved either at your wedding or another's wedding. Some examples are an Advice Tree, Tips Boards, Disposable Cameras for guests to use, etc, etc. Tell us what you have loved :)

 

We're more and more excited every day.

Some of the exciting stuff: we just got our cake topper and some matching napkins from Suzanne that we just LOVE! On top of that (no pun intended), Dad has set up the sound system so one more thing checked off the list!!

I think I have all of our documents ready to get our passports!! Hopefully we will be able to apply for them this week. Wahoo...passports!!!

After applying for passports, we have our work cut out for us. We're lucky enough to belong to a church that offered a seminar on non-traditional families and the paperwork involved in protecting them. There are so many documents and every one of them are so important to make sure we are taking care of each other, the kids, and even not putting our families in awkward positions if anything every happened to us. HOLY COW! The expense and work is a little overwhelming but HERE WE GO!

Oh!! ...and we finally ordered the invitiations!! We hope to have those out by the end of next week so stay tuned! :) 

We have been working hard and so much has come together so smoothly!! Here is a recap of the last few months:

We changed our ceremony plans and are so excited to say that we are going to invite everybody to both the ceremony and the reception! Originallly, we didn't think we would have the room for all to be invited to the ceremony; but as chance would have it, we weren't able to get a straight answer about whether or not we could do the proceedings in the spot we liked at Red Rocks so it was a blessing in disguise!

We have booked the venue and LOVE IT! The wedding will take place at the beautiful and unique Belmar Heritage Historic District...the ceremony will be at the lovely gazebo with the gorgeous Colorado Rocky mountains as a backdrop! ...then a short but interesting (so much history to see here) walk down the path to the old Heritage Country Schoolhouse for the reception. I will post pictures on the ceremony and reception pages appropriately. We are SOOO excited!

We also found a minister that we immediately clicked with and he is helping us shape the perfect ceremony for us!

Jody did some searching and found a great place for us to order the cake from!! Yum, yum!! PLUS Suzanne and Dad found a lovely cake topper and napkins, and are helping us hook up with the peeps for the music...so fun!

We also found a great deal on a photographer to join us for part of the ceremony and reception!

Yet another glorious thing we did recently is find Bride's and Maid of Honor dresses! We had a fabulous time shopping with Tyler, Laura, Suzanne, and Mary while Dad and Tomi went looking for the guys' stuff...they looked so handsome by the way!

Last but certainly not least is that we have booked our (almost) two weeks in Mexico!!  More about this on the honeymoon page.

 

Wow...told you we've been busy!! We hope you all will be able to join us for our special day. I hope to continue to make udpates to this blog page on Saturdays so stay tuned for more...

We had such a wonderful time last weekend! It was perfect to see so many of your warm and smiling faces; all of the positive energy was fabulous! We just adore every one of you and appreciate your support and company!

I hope you all got enough to eat!! Wasn't that food yummy? Thanks to my mom, Suzanne, Kate, Kevin, and Tomi for the tasty forms of nutrition!

The decorations were fun and inviting! We had tons of help from Jody, Scott, Tyler, Tomi, Kiana, Kate (GREAT picture board...it's hanging in our hallway), Kevin! Blowing bubbles is always a favorite and everybody seemed to have fun with it. It was great to watch the children playing with the beach ball (FOR HOURS!) and great to see the horseshoe pits being used.

Did you all get some squash? We have had such a great time with our garden and thought we'd share...hope you got some if you wanted some! Remember: spaghetti squash can be cooked by cutting it in half lengthwise, scraping out the seeds, placing each half face down in a caserole dish with about half an inch of water and bake for about 30 min at 350. That should make the "meat" tender enough to use your fork to make spaghetti-noodle type strands. We like it best with spaghetti and meat sauce added directly to the squash. Yum! Yum!

I'll be posting a link to our video toasts/picture loop in the next couple days so stay tuned!! :)

We were busy busy busy this weekend getting ready for our engagement party. We're so excited to see you all! We've got the food lined up (Kate has a delicious recipe for the pulled pork sandwiches, my mom and stepmom are both bringing delicious salads, and Liz's brother Kevin is bringing the dessert!).

A HUGE THANK YOU to everybody who is making this party possible: Those folks just mentioned for getting the food together, Tyler and Tomi for their extremely helpful attitudes this weekend and much hard work, everybody who supplied us with toasts for the video loop, Jody and Scott for the lawn chairs and fire pit, Monica for the shade, Kate for your help in planning and both Kate and Kevin for their help preparing, and last but definitely not least, Dad for the financial help.

Yay!! We FINALLY got our evites out for our engagement party, which I am SO excited for.

We went back and forth about having it for a bit since this summer was so busy and we didn't invite people as early as we would've liked.

But then we decided YES! this is what we want...we want to have a celebration with our friends and family!! :)

Now: Yay!! :)

Liz and I hammered out some details for the engagement party last night. There are so many people we want to attend but we'll have to trim down the guest list so everybody can fit! ;)

...almost cancelled it because of all of the busy weekends over the summer but we are so looking forward to this celebration!

It has been fun (and draining!) to set up all these pages for you to read.

We REALLY hope you enjoy them, though!

*Sigh* Life is good! :)