Jennifer & Brandon's Wishes PJ-10/12/09 France/LSS/Italy- 11/2 even more pics!

[jspahn]

I love your dress! Good luck planning

Your inspiration photo made me so excited to see your big day. I love it!!!!! I like you ring also, it's very nice.

Thank you both!

I finally tried on my dress last night - and it actually zippped Now,I couldnt breathe or laugh, but hey it's a start

 

[jspahn]

Sorry for the delay in starting my planning session recap - I was out shopping with my maid of honor yesterday. I think we have the dresses mostly sorted out for all the girls now. I'll post pics of each one when I know for sure....


PLANNING TRIP -
Our planning session was scheduled for Friday April 3rd, so DF and I went down wednesday after work. It's only a 7hour drive for us, so that wasnt too bad. We stayed (gasp) off property this time
Financially there just werent any deals on property that worked out as well as staying off did. I will however say that i will never ever stay at the "marriott village" again! It was terrible! Beds and pillows were awful, the "marketplace" which is basically a food court was really awful and service couldnt have gotten much worse!

But on to the fun stuff...
We decided that Thursday would be our "fun day" - basically the only day we would have time for the parks. Friday was completely packed with planning, menu tasting, and an appointment at raglan road. Saturday we wanted to visit hotels, meet with photographers, tux fitting, and other errands and then we were headed home sunday.
Anyone who has ever been to Disney with me will tell you I am a schedule nazi. You are up at the crack of dawn, waiting at the gate when the park opens, and you dont stop till the parks close. Everything is planned in an excel spreadsheet and we try hard to stick to the schedule! This was DFs first time going to Disney with me - poor guy
Thankfully Brandon is a morning person (normally a quality that drives me nuts, but very handy for Disney!) So Thursday morning we were up at 6:30 so we could get dressed, grab breakfast and head to the TTC (we wanted to start at EPCOT and end the night at MK so we parked the car at TTC).
Since we were only going for one day, we just decided to buy the tickets at the window that day. We got a super nice woman (i so wish i had gotten her name!) - and with a rather pouty face I asked for 2 one day park hoppers. (one day????!!!!) And that was her reaction - "just one day?" - so I explained we were in town to do our planning session for our wedding and we only had one day to play. She was very excited for us and handed us 2 "Just Engaged" buttons! Despite being bright pink, DF and I pinned our buttons on and headed up to the monorail for EPCOT.

Well, we were REALLY early - so early that we were at the EPCOT turnstiles by 8:12, when the park didnt open till 9

Finally they let us in, and we quickly made our way up to the rope drop at the fountain. Since there was still a few minutes before rope drop, we started chatting with some cast members while we waited. Our bright pink buttons were pretty obvious, so the CMs ask about when the wedding was etc. When we told them it was going to be in EPCOT France in October they were excited for us (actually, pretty much everyone we talked to on our trip was excited for us!).
Well one walks away and comes back a minute later with another CM with a headset on. She chats with us for a minute and then says...

How would you like to be the family of the day and help us open the park?

 

[jspahn]

By far this was my coolest Disney Park experience ever!!!!!!!!!!!!

I could not believe we were chosen - I told Brandon they ALWAYS pick the all america family of 4, and in all my trips I have never seen a couple be chosen!

So they pull us under the rope, and get us in front of the fountain, and we meet the characters.

They gave us a second button (you can kind of see it in the pic) that says Guest of Honor. They take pics and then they bring out a test track car...
And we hop in and wave to the crowd before being whisked off to Test Track - to be the first ones on the ride that day!!!

 

[princess22]

Oh my gosh! That is so awesome!!!!! Congrats on being the family of the day. I didn't know they did that at Epcot. That is so neat! I'm very jealous!! But yay for you

 

[jspahn]

We get to ride Test Track twice!!! Which was awesome!

Then we are escorted over to Mission Space - and taken up to the HP VIP lounge! We hang out there a bit, take advantage of the free beverages and video postcard kiosk they have there (fun!). Dont know how we forgot to take pictures of that part!

Our guide then takes down behind the scenes to the control area (behind the glass if you are waiting on line)

And we get brought right up to the front of the line. DF and decide to give the "intense" side a try -
BAD IDEA!
OMG - i was so ill afterward.
Our original CM who chose us for the family had also given us a Fast Pass for Soarin, but I told DF I needed a break after mission space!!

So, we headed over to Journey into Imagination, and then did the Land boat - after wich I felt up to Soarin'.

DF and I then headed out to the countries and took loads of pics since the flower and garden festival was going on.
(if you are interested, all the pics are in photobucket: http://s229.photobucket.com/albums/ee242/jspahn/Disney PS Trip Pics/ )

We were also offered prime viewing seat for illuminations that night, but since we were hopping over to MK we didnt take advantage of that.

 

[jspahn]

So by 4pm we had finished Epcot and hopped on the monorail to MK.

MK seemed awfully crowded compared to EPCOT. There were no fastpasses left for space mountain when we got there, and the line was 80min - so we skipped it.
We did get to do most of the other important rides in the time we had. Unfortunately we were on Thunder Mountain when Wishes started so we kind of missed that!

Exhausted, we head out of the park - grab a bite to eat on the way back to the hotel - and fall in bed completely exhausted at 12:30am!!!!

Up Next: Planning Session at Franck's at 9am!

 

[beach bride 2010]

We started working on favors already. We wanted to stay with the whole under the sea/beach theme if we could. There are actually way more favors out there for that than I thought once I started looking!!! I have spent hours trolling favor websites (as I am sure most brides have!)

DF and I finally decided on a few things...
we are going to do custom M&Ms as we get closer, in our colors, with our names and wedding date. I love the new Disney ones they have, but not the colors they come in unfortunately! We are still looking for a container for these. We like something like this:

QUOTE]

I am planning on using m&m's as our favors too at a Little Mermaid/Under the Sea themed wedding. I found these http://www.joann.com/joann/catalog.jsp?CATID=cat1840&PRODID=xprd986551 and am thinking I will use them as the containers to put the m&m's in. I like that they are storybooks and would like to put a Little Mermaid picture on them but I know DF probably won't agree withthat idea so I will probably put our date or a picture of us.

 

[jspahn]

Our planning session was at 9am at Francks on Friday April 3rd. It was POURING out - I mean cats and dogs!
The directions to Fracks say follow the "green line" on the road after the toll booth... which we thought we were. Until we ended up in the handicap parking for MK!!! In the pouring rain we had apparently followed the Blue line, and not the green line!
Mind you, I was already agitated because we were running late through no fault of our own (see previous comment that the marriott village was terrible). So now we are even later - which I really hate.
But, we arrive at Francks at 9:15, and as it turned out, our planner was also a few minutes behind so it wasnt a big deal.

We have Ken Weaver as our planner, and it was wonderful to meet him in person! As it turns our he is originally from Long Island as well so we had something in common - and he understands when the NYer in me comes out.

We talked briefly about our overall plans, and then launched right into cake tasting.
We had these cake flavors: Yellow, chocolate, almond, and lemon
and we had these fillings: dark chocolate mousse, white chocolate mousse, amaretto, tropical mousse, raspberry, blackberry, peanutbutter, and bavarian cream and fresh raspberries.

We were so disappointed by the taste of the raspberry, tropical and blackberry mousses! They all tasted fake and not very fruit-like to us.
I personally dont like chocolate, so that tasting was left to Brandon. He thought the cake was great, but the dark chocolate mousse was very bitter. Our planner said most people like the milk chocolate mousse better.

In the end, we chose almond cake with ammaretto for top and bottom layers, and lemon cake with white chocolate mousse for the middle layer.
Yum Yum Yum!

 

[jspahn]

We talked a little about the design for our cake as well.

We liked this one, one display at Francks

We also liked the standard "coral and shells" cake so we asked for kind of a hybrid of the two. And less blue, more jade.

We gave the bakery general guidelines, but left some room for creativity on thier part as well.

We already have our cake topper too:

 

[tiggersam00]

Hey there! Just found your PJ, wow you have so much done already! You guys make a great couple, love all the pics. Your wedding is coming up so soon, you must be super excited

And you TR, wow you guys did so much in such a short amount of time. We were in WDW at the same time btw, and I think we were at Epcot when you were Family of the Day (4/2 if my math is right lol)! Too bad we didn't run into each other That sounds like an awesome experience for sure! My Df and I wore our buttons all week too and we weren't Family of the Day but we did get to be Grand Marshals of the MK parade earlier that week, isn't it crazy what 2 little button can do lol! It was a good week for the DisBrides for sure lol!

I also love the cakes you picked, I bet the jade color will look amazing with your under the sea theme! Question, did you pre-pick the flavors of cake and icing at your PS or did they just bring out an assortment for you to try?

Can't wait to follow along with your plans

 

[jspahn]

Hey there! Just found your PJ, wow you have so much done already! You guys make a great couple, love all the pics. Your wedding is coming up so soon, you must be super excited

And you TR, wow you guys did so much in such a short amount of time. We were in WDW at the same time btw, and I think we were at Epcot when you were Family of the Day (4/2 if my math is right lol)! Too bad we didn't run into each other That sounds like an awesome experience for sure! My Df and I wore our buttons all week too and we weren't Family of the Day but we did get to be Grand Marshals of the MK parade earlier that week, isn't it crazy what 2 little button can do lol! It was a good week for the DisBrides for sure lol!

I also love the cakes you picked, I bet the jade color will look amazing with your under the sea theme! Question, did you pre-pick the flavors of cake and icing at your PS or did they just bring out an assortment for you to try?

Can't wait to follow along with your plans

Hi Sam - I saw that you were Grand Marshals and was totally jealous
It definitely surprised me that our little buttons got us so much attention (especially when it seemed like half the people in the parks had buttons for something!)
Too bad we didnt know ahead of time you would be there - it would have been great to meet up with another DisBride in person!

For the cake tasting, we actually sent a list ahead of time because there were specific flavors we wanted to try that were not the standard ones. (ie. lemon cake instead of marble)
We had to send our list back to them a month ahead of time so the bakery could have them ready for our session. I am really glad we did because the lemon cake was sooooo good!

 

[mermaidbride1108]

Jenn - That is so cool that you were picked! What an awesome experience!!!

I ahven't been on in awhile, been dealing with some family drama... But I had to write and said we were picking the same two cakes!!!! I will tell you though the first cake (blue one in Franc's) is pretty pricey - with the handling fees and the minimum requirement it ends up being over $1200... So we switched to the light coral & shells one but we are making it blue instead of ivory

Oh and we have the same cake topper!!! But we aren't going to use it as the topper because I thought that it's huge!!! It's beautiful but I think we are going to use it on the cake table istead.

Can't wait to hear more!

 

[jspahn]

Jenn - That is so cool that you were picked! What an awesome experience!!!

I ahven't been on in awhile, been dealing with some family drama...

Jackie -I saw your posts about your future SIL - I hope it all works out I know it's hard, but try not to let her get to you - it's your happiness that matters and if she can't be happy for you and her brother, and wants to cause drama, then forget her.

But I had to write and said we were picking the same two cakes!!!! I will tell you though the first cake (blue one in Franc's) is pretty pricey - with the handling fees and the minimum requirement it ends up being over $1200... So we switched to the light coral & shells one but we are making it blue instead of ivory

Oh my! Well we havent gotten our BEO back yet (nearly 4 weeks later!!!) so I had no idea how pricey it was!

Oh and we have the same cake topper!!! But we aren't going to use it as the topper because I thought that it's huge!!! It's beautiful but I think we are going to use it on the cake table istead.

Can't wait to hear more!

We were afraid it might be too big but our planner assured us it would work just fine. We also have the one of them in the boat - which is gigantic! We are going to put that on the cake table too.

 

[jspahn]

So just as we were finishing our cake tasting, Elizabeth from Disney Floral came in.
We talked about linens, centerpieces, and flowers for ceremony.

For my boquet, I wanted a large round boquet with black magic roses and stephanotis - similar to this:

The men are just doing single black magic roses.

For my girls I decided to do rosewands - 3 black magic roses and antique white ribbon (matched my dress). The maid of honor will have some crystal mickey heads in hers, as will my bouquet.

For the moms right now we have wrist corsages with stephanotis - which ties in to my bouquet.

We also talked about centerpieces for the reception. Since our reception is in the Living Seas, I knew I wanted to keep that feel.
So i showed her these pics as ideas:

Elizabeth said that was very easy to do, and she came up with the idea of varying the centerpieces a little bit between tables - some round, some square, some with the tall pillar candle, some with floating candles. All with sand and shells at the bottom. It should fit right in to the room and look great with our theme!

Linens were a little hard for us. At this point, we still hadnt seen the living seas in person - so we had a hard time judging how colors would look. All the pics I had seen were kind of dark and made the carpet and room look purple - which is not the case. (I'll post pics when I get to the site visit part.)
We decided to do a purple underlay with pixie dust overlay, and jade napkins - the jade matched my fabric swatch of the girls dresses perfectly! The purple will be very close to the guys tuxes I think, though we didnt know that at the time since we hadnt gone to do tuxes yet!
Here is the linen against the paint chip I had of the purple color I liked:

We also discussed chairs with Elizabeth. We decided to change the chairs out for our ceremony. The standard ones at Epcot are black plastic - which we didnt like at all. So we went with white folding chairs.
Essentially it will look like this:

We also decided to have rose petals in little bags for everyone to throw as we exited - placed on the chairs ahead of time.

Elizabeth left and promised to send our quote in a few weeks - which she did and I will get to that later!

 

[camara381]

Wow! Love everything! The ceremony will be beautiful, it is so worth it to change the chairs. Are you going to have the same aisle decorations as in the picture? The cake will be beautiful, I love the almond amaretto combo so yummy!!!!!

 

[tiggersam00]

Ohh love it all so far! France looks like such a great venue, I am not sure if I have ever seen a ceremony there before. I think it looks amazing!

 

[jspahn]

Wow! Love everything! The ceremony will be beautiful, it is so worth it to change the chairs. Are you going to have the same aisle decorations as in the picture? The cake will be beautiful, I love the almond amaretto combo so yummy!!!!!

Actually I think we are going without decoration for the most part at the ceremony. If we have extra room in the budget (ha!) then maybe at the end we might add some in. To me, the location itself is so pretty it didnt need anything.

Ohh love it all so far! France looks like such a great venue, I am not sure if I have ever seen a ceremony there before. I think it looks amazing!

Thanks sam! We think so too - and since we never made it to paris in person, we thought this would be fun. Paris maybe for our one year anniversary

 

[jspahn]

After Elizabeth from floral left, we met again with Ken for a few minutes. We were supposed to have a break between 1pm and our tasting at 2:30 - so Shelly from Impressions met us at Francks to talk about invitations.

While Shelley is very sweet, she seemed kind of disorganized. She was late, and then didnt bring any samples with her (glad I had the ones she sent me previously!) She also seemed so focused on getting the wording of our invitation down, almost assuming we were going with her.
ANYWAY - she is very talented, and she did seem very excited to work with us. We wanted our invitations to have Ariel and Eric on them.

We liked her Mickey Pixie dust style:

Ours would be something like this:

but maybe with the graphic of Ariel and Eric in their wedding attire instead.
We liked the glitter ink - letterpress was just out of our budget!


We also asked her to price out the Mickey Head fan programs for us - I'd seen the pics below from other brides here and I thought it was such a cute idea. We were going to do this on our own, but they seem like a pain in the butt, so I asked for Shelley to price it out for us thinking it might be worth it to pay someone else.

Ken was waiting for us to finish up with Shelley so we could head over to EPCOT for our tasting and site visit.

 

[Ann117]

I love the invitation idea!! i also want to do the mickey programs so if you don't mind posting the quote once she gives it to you that would be great. I think I read some where else they are expensive so I may have to try to do it on my own and I am not good with computers

 

[jspahn]

I love the invitation idea!! i also want to do the mickey programs so if you don't mind posting the quote once she gives it to you that would be great. I think I read some where else they are expensive so I may have to try to do it on my own and I am not good with computers

She quoted us both assembled and non assembled - but the difference wasnt much between the two. Below is the assembled pricing.

White or Ivory Paper/ Assembled
2-sided Mickey fan, printed in one raised color

25 -$395.42
50 - $414.99
75 - $437.00
100 - $461.57
125 - $508.14
150 - $557.15
each add’l 25 - $49.82

Additional options:
Hand-tied bows (available on ASSEMBLED fans only) . . .. . $1.85ea
Custom typeset . . . .. . . . . . . . . . $27.50 each side
Custom created Wedding Logo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $45.00 one-time fee
Glitter added to any color ink . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . $50.00
Rhinestone Couture Buckle (available on ASSEMBLED fans only) . .. $3.99ea