Day Three - Part One: Let's Plan this Wedding!
Our day started off bright and early again the next day as we prepared to head out for our planning session. Well, it started off early... The weather was grey and rainy that morning, which means we are 2 for 2 experiencing rainy mornings while doing wedding related things at Disney. (And that also means I am already thinking what are the odds of it being 3 for 3?! Please don't rain on the morning of my wedding day!) While I prepared my binder and bag for getting down to business, DF heated up my leftover picnic burger thus helping to prove our theory that all restaurant burgers taste even better reheated up in the microwave the next day. Yay DVC microwave and Disney breakfast burgers!
We took the bus to MK then switched to the monorail, same procedure as when we headed to Francks for our site visit. We even wore the same ponchos we bought at the GF during our last visit, for our walk over to Francks. It was like deju vu, except we weren't being pelted by rain to the point of blindness. (No rain on my wedding day morning pleeeease!)
When we arrived we quickly shed our ponchos and took some new outside Franck's photos.
I think the biggest change from our last visit seven months ago is my hair. Or wait? Is that a new mat?
AUGUST 2012
MARCH 2013
While we were taking photos I could see Franck's receptionist through the sheer door coverings. I wonder how many times she watches couples take the same photo over and over again. And then when we go in she has to smile and pretend like she hasn't seen us standing just outside for the past five minutes.
Inside she directed us to the back center of the Studio to look at the albums while we waited for our planner to arrive. And I snapped a few more photos, but last time I had felt entirely too shy and self-conscious to document the moment.
And then our planner arrived. Or actually, she didn't arrive. Our stand-in planner arrived to announce she would be taking care of our PS because our planner was called out of town with an unexpected emergency. I would say this is the only negative of our experience. But what can you do? An emergency is an emergency, and we won't fault her for it or hold it against her in any way. If we hadn't been able to manage a trip to Disney for our PS we wouldn't have met our planner until our wedding day anyway. My only concern would be if things are lost in translation between our planner and our stand-in. But we shall wait and see when we receive our BEO. I'm sure it will all be fine though!
Our stand-in planner (from now on simply to be referred to as "our planner") welcomed and congratulated us and then led us over to the Merriweather room. I didn't get a photo of the little placard outside the room, but I spotted this halfway through the meeting:
The little theming details extend even to the weddings department! Cute!
Let's get down to business!
Once we were seated and settled in, we launched into the details following along with the planning kit we'd filled in and sent back. I think if I were to have a do over I might have considered printing out that planning kit form and bringing it along to organize my notes. As it was, our planner gave us each a paper with all the important dates and deadlines and I used my copy to take a couple notes.
First we covered our rehearsal. We've requested doing the rehearsal on Saturday morning at Morocco (two days before the wedding). We won't know until 30 days out if we will get that location. If it's not available for whatever reason, we are going to be doing it at SBP. We'll all be at Boardwalk and it's an outdoor location, so that wouldn't be too bad. But I'm still holding out for Morocco, mostly to plan out where everyone will be standing and which way around the fountain our aisle will go.
We are not booking a private rehearsal dinner/meal through DFTW so we breezed through that. I've made a reservation for our group of 10 at Be Our Guest that night. I made the reservation for pretty early (5:45pm) so hopefully if they can't accommodate a 10-person table we'll at least all be seated near each other. (Although I'll admit I am not looking forward to dividing the group up if we're at separate tables.)
Next up, transportation. We are doing limos for the bridal party and a motorcoach charter for the guests. Originally I wanted a Rolls or other similarly vintage 1940s car to fit the theme, but I decided I could live without it. So we didn't bother to ask if it could even drop us off at Morocco, I'm going to pretend the answer is it definitely can't. The charter price is obviously the one thing I'd like to reduce if I can. So far guests are only staying at two of our three resorts, and even though only one family of four are staying at Caribbean Beach (the rest are all at Boardwalk). If that changes and a bunch of people decide to stay at CBR in the upcoming months, we'll suck it up and do the charter. If not, I may pursue other options.
Then we talked for a long while about photography. Since it is a completely in-park wedding we are using Disney photography and videography. And because of that we already have dates booked for our MK and DHS photoshoots. Yay! The pricing is still a little up in the air, because we don't want any prints or albums (I want to make my own). So the planner said they would price out how much we could get back for all that and apply towards the park shoots and hi-res disc.
The ceremony was pretty straight forward. We aren't doing any special ceremonies and we're using the CD/Ipod set-up for the music. And that about covered it.
Reception time. Monsieur Paul receptions are basically like going to the restaurant, except you have to order your entrees ahead of time. They sent us a copy of their wedding entree options (I'm pretty sure most are directly from the everyday menu) and once we find out our exact numbers we'll get all our guests to choose which entree they want. I'm glad we have a smaller guest list, it would be awful to have to track done 100+ entree orders, I think 40 will be difficult enough. We still need to work out some kind of pre-reception menu.
She gave us a seating chart with the table layouts, which I was sooo happy about. I've already made some progress. It's a little awkward to make it work out perfectly because if we're centered at a sweetheart table (which I've requested), the room is divided perfectly in half. But our sides aren't equal. If even one more family RSVPs yes from DF's side (all my guests are settled except for one single) then they'll have to be stranded near my family. Hahaha! That's such a weird thing. Weddings bring families together but only while they're comfortably on their own sides.
We also requested a signature drink. But since we didn't have any favourite drinks, we just gave our planner a few options of things we like and she said they would get back to me on what they could come up with. DF said sake or soju and I said pink and watermelon. I've had a really great watermelon soju cocktail before, I will be so happy if they could make that happen! And we're doing BOC since we need to have the option, but most of our guests won't have more than one drink if any. We chose wines directly from the Monsieur Paul menu, and a pretty expensive champagne option too, we have a $5000 food & bev. minimum to fill after all and probably only 40 guests max. attending.
Next characters! We are having Mickey and Minnie. I requested Mickey in a black tux and Minnie in her white formal dress. We also made another character request, which our planner seems to think will be a-okay, but I'm waiting to hear back for sure first! I'm trying to keep the characters a surprise from our guests, but I've let Mickey and Minnie slip to my MOHs and our parents. Hopefully they don't spread the news around too much!
And then it was the moment I was waiting for... CAKE! (BREAKFAST CAKE!)
It was as glorious as I expected it to be. That red velvet cake is the best was so deliciously, gorgeously, fantastic.
Here's what we decided on:
Bottom tier: Chocolate cake with Dark chocolate mousse
Middle tier: White cake with raspberry mousse
Top tier Red velvet with peanut butter cup mousse.
One of my MOHs does not like peanut butter. (What?!) So our amazing red velvet and peanut butter cup will make the most glorious post-wedding breakfasts ever! And there will be more for us that way too.
I am sooo excited for this cake. So excited that I continued to randomly shout out "Cake!" throughout the rest of our trip and still even now every other day or so.
After cake our floral planner arrived to discuss decor. DF was excused so that I could talk about my dress, and we jumped straight into bouquets. I gave my dream bouquet wishlist. Apparently two of the kinds of flowers I want are premium and have to be ordered by the box rather than by the stem - garden roses and lily of the valley. So we'll what that really means once we get our proposal. Our planner offered right of the bat to do a proposal for the bouquet with garden roses and one with just regular roses. Nothing freaked me out during the whole PS more than that offer. My heart rate is already increasing just as I recall it. Anyway, I felt like she really understood what I had in mind so I'm more excited now about the flowers than I've ever been.
Afterwards we talked decor. I had mentioned a wish for altar arrangements. She actually convinced me it wasn't necessary, since we aren't have any kind of ceremony/tradition that actually requires an altar. Bonus!
For the ceremony I requested white folding chairs, flower petals on the aisle, and chiffon on the chairs along the inside of the aisle. And more flower petals for a petal toss.
For the reception we requested white linens and some kind of shaded lamp/candle holder centerpiece. The decor in Monsieur Paul is pretty much exactly our vision so we don't need to add too much. Yay!
And then finally for the dessert party she showed us a photo of a little round bowl with marbles and LEDs, and a rose floating on top. (If I go with the box of garden roses there will be enough leftover to use in these centerpieces.) It's so cute and I wish I'd taken a photo because I can't seem to find anything like it from another dessert party online. Oh and white linens to keep the same look going from the reception.
And that was it for the floral planning. She said that was one of the quickest she'd done because we knew pretty much exactly what we wanted! Yay!
Then our wedding planner came back to discuss the dessert party. She printed out the menus for us to peruse, but in the end we made the following requests (to be made in small, cute form!).
-Bread pudding (O'hana)
-Strawberry shortcake
-French macarons
-Cake pops
-Fruit plate or fruit salad
-Ice cream
And at that point it was pretty much time to wrap up our planning session! It was a solid two hours of planning but it really seemed to breeze by!
And one last parting shot of the wedding pavilion. Someone was having a vow renewal that morning, so I took a really quick photo and then we dashed off to Magic Kingdom!
And now back to the real world, which means time for a TR to draw out the Disney fun! 
DF was particularly eager for me to start writing this, to the point where he actually wrote a lot of this. 
I think we'll probably just punch a hole and use a ribbon. Maybe I'll put in an eyelet or grommet, I'll need to do a test.
rolleyes
It's probably my biggest vice. 
I've never seen Peter Pan out, so I dragged DF into line. He was surprised I'd been able to see him from so far away. Peter Pan was very disappointed that I was celebrating my birthday, because I shouldn't be growing up... He was a very good Pan!
(I practically leapt out of my bunk when I realized what was happening, and then they stopped and got all embarrassed.)
Josh's site lately points out that folks w/o rfid tickets have a longer holder up and just a couple turnstiles open while everyone else breezes through... But Disney's My Disney Experience TOS shows that if you switch to the rfid card/ticket, you can no longer use the normal Fastpass... It seems like a big mess to me, and I'm frustrated that we'll be going to WDW during this turnover between FP and FP+ and Magic+ or whatever. We're not dropping thousands of dollars to be some guinea pigs while they try out a new system... Sigh.
I was lucky to never have to share a dorm room with anyone. But perhaps I'm only now starting to realize just how lucky...
I absolutely love that "these rings rule them all"!!! 
at your DF, I love the picture of him with the mat. Priceless.
