Creative concerns - Patt's Recap Part V

I have to start out by saying how ridiculously proud I am that I remembered the roman numeral for 5. At least, I think 'V' is the roman numeral for 5. Either way, I feel totally badass and medieval (except that I had to use spell check to find out the way to spell 'medieval' for some reason and that cancelled out the original awesome so this sentence doesn't really need to be here. Moving on!).

So. my update is moving along pretty nicely, although I don't know that it's all that interesting, but whatever! The good stuff is yet to come. Happy back-to-work day for those who are back at it. And for those with children who are back in school, hooray, hooray!!!!

2011

At this point in the story, theGuy and I had been together for 11 years (ah!). We met in highschool, at 17, and let me just tell you, I was smitten like a kitten. He totally looked (to me) like a bad boy (let's freak out dad!) but he was so kind and nice and smart and awesome.

Me and theGuy - young and in love. And for the record, my hair was very cool at the time (as far as I was concerned, anyway).

 
At 17, we were creative, misunderstood dreamers, and dream we did. One of those dreams was that, if we were ever to get married, we would have a camping wedding, where all of our friends and family could camp with us and we could get married in nature (I also wanted to have bunny rabbits hopping around freely, because I thought that would be super romantic, and I was young and stupid).

I don't think that either of us thought that would be a reality, but when we booked our venue in 2011, we saw our teenage dreams come true We found an amazing venue with two cottages (built mostly from materials found on the property), campsites nestled along the Saugeen River, a beautiful pavilion in the center of it all, and even a labyrinth area in the forest, with beautiful row-planted trees that could act as my aisle. SOLD. The first place we saw, it was better than we could've dreamed of, and the casual but beautiful wedding we wanted to have was beginning to come together.

The signs I had IMAGINED myself making were already THERE!

This got me started for the wedding planning! A rustic but beautiful space where I was only limited by my imagination (oh yeah, and money).

I adore planning parties. Absolutely. However, I have a tendency to get a little wound up - once I get hit by creativity, my mind spins a million miles a minute and it jumps from one idea to another. The closer I get to any party I've planned, the higher around my ears my shoulders sit, the stronger my inability to sit still, and the higher my voice goes (which is already pretty high, so this is not attractive to anyone, except the neighbourhood dogs). It totally consumes my thinking, and I become more and more consumed as my sleep-bank wears thin due to the midnight inspirations swirling around in my head.

That being said, I love it. Hallowe'en consumes me and I love it! I get stressed, I get amped up, I get wound up, but man, I get creative. Once those creative juices start flowing, it's like someone turned on a tap and they come at me everywhere. Something as simple as walking down the street could lead to a whack of ideas, and they swirl around and around in my head, driving theGuy insane [I haven't seemed to be able to grasp the concept that 1. He doesn't live in my head so when I say "oh my god! We can totally do that paper thing in the corner by the room, and it'll bring the other things together" he has NO idea what I'm talking about. 2. He loves me a lot, but he doesn't really care about colours and textures and decorations (or so he says - "Those wedding colours look like bathroom colours" - thanks!).]. Basically, party planning makes me ridiculously, absolutely, blissfully CRAZY. I love it.

With the wedding planning, I knew that I was going to have to watch it. I knew that I would get worked up at least for the 2 months before the wedding, but I wanted to take it easy and put off the crazies as long as possible (I did, after all, want to make it down the aisle). So in January I decided that it was full steam ahead. We'd lost so much time because of the previous summer and fall, and I didn't want to let a second go to waste. I wanted to enjoy as much of it in as calm and serene-like state as possible. I wanted to be the poised, gracious bride who had it all figured out and looked good in the process. I wanted to start with designing our save the dates.