Nailed It,

I've mentioned on here before that my nails were something that ruined the idea of engagement photos and that I wanted to try and get them sorted before the wedding, and I was really happy to have been able to do it. It was something I started about three months before the wedding, getting my nails done with BIAB to make them stronger and less easy to bite, and now I have to come to a decision on what to do next. Do I soak the BIAB off and probably end up going back to biting my nails within minutes of them coming off, or paint them at home and hope that I can keep them in half way decent condition, or is this my life right now? Do I just have to accept that I'm going to be going to get my nails done every few weeks for the foreseeable?

It's not that I don't love the girl that does my nails, because I do. She's brilliant, she does brilliant work and I enjoy going spending time in the salon, so much so that I even managed to convince myself to get my hair cut there before the wedding and then was super thrilled to have the hair dresser come to help me get ready the morning of my wedding, but it's not exactly cheap to get them done and with the fact that I'm still on maternity leave it's not the most important thing in the budget.

I would also say it's not like they're perfect. It's not that my nail artist does anything wrong, but BIABs are a gel which uses UV to set it, and I've read a few things about how prolonged UV exposure, even little and often over time, can cause skin aging and potentially skin cancers, which is obviously more than a little concerning. I've also had a few episodes of catching my nails in things, because they're a lot longer than I've ever been used to, or catching them when trying to do things like closing the door, catching them on the handle and feeling like I'm peeling them straight off of the nail bed, which honestly made me feel pretty sick. I know I could trim them down and this would be less of a problem, and now that the wedding is over I feel like I don't need them to be elegant and pretty, just neat, but other than those incidents, and the fact that typing is different on either my phone or my laptop, I've actually really enjoyed my nails being longer.

The only problem I have with my nails at the moment is how quickly I need to get them replaced, though I think that that is at least in part because of the number of nappy changes and bottles I am doing, because it means I'm constantly washing my hands, and that doesn't help nails, even gels, to last as long as they can do.

Honestly. I think I'm going to message my nail artist tomorrow, because the last thing I want is to end up back at the stage where I'm biting my nails until my finger hurt, but I think I will get them done shorter so that I can let my nail beds have a bit of a rest from the peeling sensation and also get back to typing like normal. A bit driver in that though is because I don't think I could paint my nails well by myself, even if they were as strong without the BIAB gel on them, but it does mean it will soon be time to say goodbye to my wedding nails, which is kind of sad.

It Doesn't Have To Be Perfect,

Let me start this off with saying I'm not a girl who has imagined my wedding from being a small child. I've seen wedding dresses I've loved and trends I have hated, but I've never been the girl who has known what colours she would choose, what flowers she wanted, the dress, the shoes, the food and everything. I had an idea of the dress and I bought something pretty close to it, but then it didn't fit.

As we've been going along in this planning process though there have been thingsw I've loved and things I've wanted and things where I've thought, screw it, it'll do. (I know, I know, that's really not the attitude.) 

Some of the things which I chose to make - partly because I left it too late to order them - have been somewhat the bane of my life these last couple of weeks and that has been partly because I want them to be perfect, and accepting that they don't have to be and most likely won't be is really hard. But I'm not a painter. I'm not an artist in any way really and I think reminding myself that some of the things I'm making are going to look a bit rustic and wonky is fine, partly because they are homemade, handmade, made with a love of love and effort even if not too much skill and actually that's the thing that makes them lovely.

Yes, I could have paid a lot of money for someone else to do things for me - and this is no disrespect to those who do - but these are things I chose to give a go, spend my time and energy on and that means even though they are imperfect, they are pretty special, too. It might just be something I'm telling myself to feel better, but I guess that's what I have to do at the moment, because even if I wanted to throw the whole idea out of the window or choose to go back and find someone to make them "properly" there's not the time or the budget to do it now, so it's make do or do without...

Why Custom Rings Are A Total Racket,

Or at least I think so...

This isn't meant as any shade towards anyone with a custom ring, by the way.

There are some times when they make sense. A former partner of mine bought, or was gifted, I can't really remember the story, a large, partially finished amethyst when he was visiting India, and the plan was always to get it finished and set into a ring as an engagement ring, and that would have made a lot of sense to me. I also get when people get stones from heirloom rings either reshaped or refinished or just reset into something more modern or more to the taste of the intended wearer. What I don't quite get is saying, I couldn't find anything I like, so I got something custom... Oh kay... 

When my partner and I were looking at rings (he wasn't my fiancé at the point  because he hadn't asked and I hadn't said yes, because he wanted to do it properly and have the ring ready) there was so much choice it was a bit overwhelming, and even though you're thinking about the question of spending the rest of your lives together - or at least you hope that's the intention! - I personally think the question of budgets is an awkward one, but I'm not a big fan of talking about money generally.

I know some people can be really specific about engagement rings (whether their own or someone else's) and it has to be a diamond (traditionally it's the protect the woman's virginity (not sure that's such a big deal these days) and it should be x proportion of a wage (I think the tradition was something like a week or a months pay cheque or something) and a ring from Pandora is definitely not an engagement ring (genuinely read a story about that on Facebook and the comments made me die a little on the inside). There's other things like pre-owned rings are bad luck but heirloom rings are good... What's the difference? Well, a pre-owned one is one someone bought and used for a proposal where the answer was no, and an heirloom is one from a marriage. Clearly, it was all down to the ring...

I've had a costume ring I was in love with for years and I was specifically looking for something in the same style, but I would have loved whatever ring he picked, or we picked, I think, though maybe there are a couple of caveats to that. I'm not the biggest fan of pear or oval or marquise shaped stones not for any other reason than I'm just not, and I wasn't particularly enamoured with the idea of a solitaire ring or something pave (I can't find the accent on an Apple keyboard...) but there were still millions to choose from be it diamonds or other stones, different bands, different cuts or whatever. If literally nothing from jewellers would have done I know a few different vintage stores that carry gorgeous rings and I might have been able to find something I loved in the right size or something near enough I could have had it resized, but as it turned out, I found the perfect ring and said something like that one... and my partner said, okay, that one...

Now the only problem with "that one" was a wedding band wasn't going to fit under it, and it wasn't going to sit nicely next to it, so I was trying to look for something that would go around it. Why does this feel like we're going on a bear hunt?

Now, I thought it was highly logical to just go back to the same jewellers because surely if something is sold as an engagement ring they would stock a wedding ring to go with it, even if it's not sold in a wedding or bridal set? Well, apparently not. They suggested a ring with a bump in it, but the bump wasn't the right size or shape or angle or whatever to sit around my ring. They suggested a flat ring, but it didn't sit under my ring, or under the detail (it also wasn't anything like anything I wanted) and they suggested what I can only describe as either an incomplete or horse shoe ring. It didn't suit my engagement ring at all, and I'm kind of glad because again, it was nothing close to anything I wanted or liked, so the jeweller suggested their design service for a custom ring. We paid a fee, sent my ring off to be cast so that the new ring would fit with it perfectly and gave them a brief of what we wanted. All it had to be was a plain wedding band that looked like a wedding band, the same thickness as the band on my engagement ring, no diamonds, no inclusions, no nothing. It was something simple and understated and when they came back with a price that was well over a thousand pounds (from memory it was actually closer to fifteen hundred...) my jaw and my butt were in a race to the floor because honestly, I couldn't believe it. We went to collect my engagement ring from the store and I was feeling sad because I thought I wouldn't find something and I should have factored that in during the engagement ring search, but on the way I found something different, which still wasn't right, but it made them think hey, what about a wishbone shape? And it was perfect. And it was more elaborate. And it was less than half of what we were quoted for the custom ring. For the same shape. I was honestly livid.

My wedding ring is sat in a box with my future husband's future ring, and I can't wait to wear it, not just because it will mean we're married, and that the wedding is over, but also because I genuinely love it, and I think it looks stunning next to my engagement ring. I think back about the money we nearly spent on a ring to fit my engagement ring and it makes me feel sick. I don't know if it's just that the jewellers were pushing that service, or if they really hadn't thought of that ring or in a moment of temporary insanity had forgotten it existed, or if they thought we had the sort of money to drop that kind of cash on my wedding ring, but it upset me for a long while and for a few different reasons. In all of the wedding planning process, that was one of the genuinely really difficult bits, not because I'm being a bit soft, but because it genuinely felt so complicated, so expensive and so bloody stupid.

But we muddled through it and we found our way in the end, and I'm glad that we did. It took us a while to find the right wedding ring, but then it took us a long while to find each other, so maybe it fits. And at the risk of sounding very twee, I couldn't imagine any other ring being right just like I couldn't imagine any other person being right. You may now vomit into the nearest available waste paper basket. (Kidding).

What Can You Have Left To Do?,

Baring in mind that we booked the wedding back in January, a few people have been asking me if everything is ready and everything is done and I would love to be the sort of super organised person that could say, yes, all that's left to do is pack, but sadly that is not the case.

First off, my future husband still needs a new shirt and a new pair of shoes to match his suit. I'm trying not to sweat the small stuff, but this doesn't really feel too small! 

I'm still working on getting a few toys sorted for the playpen for little man, partly so he has somewhere to chill out and somewhere to stop himself from getting bored.

As if that was not enough I'm still working on a couple of little art projects for the wedding day and trying to find the time to do them is a little testing, but hopefully there is just enough time to get those done, and then it will be packing everything into the cars and getting everything from our house to the venue which feels like it might be a bit of a trauma.

It doesn't help that I keep feeling like I have hit a wall of exhaustion and still have a little boy to look after, and the little scamp is getting far more adventurous and mobile.

So as we head into the weekend and the number of weeks until the wedding ticks down by another one, I'm going to keep trying to find the time to get everything sorted and finished whilst also juggling little man and keeping him smiling!

That Which We Call A Hen Do...,

 Right, I've seen these called Hen Dos for years and I've seen American's call them bachelorette parties for years, too, but I saw it referred to as Stags and Does the other day and I don't know where that's from but it just doesn't sit right with me, to be quite honest. I don't know what it is, but I heard it and my only thought was, ew, no thanks. 

My image of a hen party has always been the 'classic' thing of Blackpool, getting drunk, wearing plaid skirts with plastic bottoms glued on (because I saw them in Blackpool once) and again it was one of those things that was like, yeah... no thanks, it's not for me. My future husband and I did consider just renting an Airbnb somewhere, having a few drinks with close friends and a bit of a games night but when we wrote out a list of people we would like to invite it started to get a little bit crazy and then get away from the idea of it being just a holiday of friends and more into typical stag or hen parties which are banned from some big houses because of the damage that previous drunken parties have done. The bigger it got, the more it felt like a mini wedding party before the wedding or we worried that there would be people we were inviting out of obligation rather than a desire for them to be there and so that went out of the window. I had thought before a spa day with just my mum or something might be nice, but even that didn't feel quite right, so it was back to the drawing board again. 

In the end I thought I would do the same thing as we have done for the wedding and take an approach of it's my party and I'm going to do what I want. 

One thing I did realise with it was that my ability to organise is shocking, and my ability to understand dates has got worse since having my son because I don't need to know what day or date it is most of the time, so there were a few people that I realised last minute that had I sat down and thought about it properly, I would have invited, but inviting people on the day of felt like an afterthought, which it wasn't but I think I've found the reason that the hen do is organised by your maid of honour or bridesmaids and it's because splitting focus between the wedding and the hen means you kind of do everything wrong.

I had desperately wanted to go to a certain Italian restaurant in Manchester, but when I came to book it, getting a table before 9pm wasn't possible, and we were meeting up earlier than that so I wasn't really up for going out for drinks and then going there because it was a group of neurodivergent friends and I, and we can get loud without realising it when we're sober, and I didn't want to interrupt other people's dinners, especially not there and especially not when the place was having a busy night, so instead I chose an Indian place which I love and got to introduce my super foodie friend to it. That never happens! There's also something very apt about it being a hen night and chaat bombs, because giving people warnings that they will go everywhere if you bite them. How is it that EVERY TIME someone does not heed the warning? So the night started with yoghurt everywhere and went from there. 

It wasn't a traditional thing in any way shape or form, because it was me and my male friends, I hated the white dress I had been planning on wearing so grabbed something black instead (and my green Doc Martens, so got to feel so like myself that it was incredible), and instead of doing the somewhat popular activity, food, drowning your liver in your tipple of choice we started with drinking at dinner and it all escalated from there. The lads hadn't known each other at the start of the night, but one of the great things is that they will now know each other at the wedding and that makes me feel a lot calmer, because people coming on their own who don't know anyone else there makes me worry. I don't want anyone to feel left out during the wedding, so it's good that they've got someone they vaguely know and once got drunk with.

It's also not lost on me that the people who were able to make it are those who don't have children, and those who couldn't make it have, because I know that had it been someone else's night and my son was ill, or he'd been a live wire for the day and I was exhausted, I wouldn't have made it either, and even though I do bring him up in conversation quite a bit, it was nice that the hen do wasn't completely about being his mum.

The night ended with my very soon to be husband picking up three of us and driving us home whilst I was insufferably drunk, and putting up with me as he does so well, and only partly because I've promised to do the same for him after his stag do.

I don't know whether it's that the hen do has happened or by sheer proximity, but everything for the wedding is feeling a lot more real now and whilst I love that, it is making me very nervous about things arriving on time or getting everything packed and to the venue, getting last things like hair cuts and nails done (why am I suddenly a person who cares about getting my nails done!) and I have genuinely considered starting to pack suitcases of bits we need but I keep telling myself that that is a bit neurotic, but I probably won't be able to hold off that long because it's getting very close now. 

I'm sure that a few people who have read this blog for a while will be glad when the wedding stuff goes off, but when it's so close and it's such a big thing in your life, it's obviously something you're going to talk about a lot of the time, and even when I don't, people ask.

How Big Is Your Small Wedding,

And we're back onto weddings...

I may have said this before, but if I don't remember then what's the likelihood anyone else does? Actually, it's probable that someone else would remember better than me because my memory is terrible at the moment.

The smallest wedding that you can legally have in the UK (and probably anywhere, but I'm just writing what I know) is the two partners, two witnesses and then your celebrant(s), registrars or religious leader(s) which works out to five people at the very bare minimum, and the very easiest that you can do that is at a registry office, but even then you have to give notice and wait for twenty nine days (the day you give notice and twenty eight days afterwards) before you are actually able to get married. I will admit that I would have appreciated a wedding like that, partly because it's not having to talk in front of a bunch of people or having to have too many people involved or too many people's opinions and inevitably it's one of the cheapest ways to get married. I don't think it was ever something that we entertained though, because my partner wants his family with them and I do, too, and there are some people it would just be more hassle to not have there than it is to have them.

Thinking a little bit bigger would have been just including both sets of our parents, which for us would have meant the two of us, four parents and assuming that two of them could be witnesses (it's actually not a given) and then the registrars which would make for a room of eight people, or if we could have done something we did consider, at least for a minute, seven people by being married on a cruise ship and having the ceremony done by the captain. The problem with that being that my partners parents are raising one of their grandchildren, so we would have needed to include them, and then both sets of parents would likely have wanted us to include our siblings, which would have been another three, plus one sibling's partner, so four. Once you're including that number of people there are other family that we would need to include which then started to tick the numbers up even further, and as we went through it our small wedding seemed to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

This is one of the reasons, and there are a few on a list, but this is one of the bigger reasons why we weren't allowing plus ones for the wedding. To me, plus ones are just adding random people you need to pay for and accommodate and also tolerate to your wedding day, but they are likely people you don't know, have never met and will never see again, so unless necessary - like they are the spouse of someone who knows no one else at the event - they were something we definitely wanted to avoid. When other people have wanted to invite people to our wedding, it's been hard to say no, but for the majority of times it has been a no, because we didn't want some sort of massive event (and only partly because we didn't want a massive bill for it). 

By the end of it, we could have added probably another fifty people onto the evening do if we had really wanted to, but the most important thing to us was that it would be an event of people we are close to, who are close to us and it be something we can both enjoy and that our son can enjoy without being surrounded by hundreds of people we or he don't know, or have to spend the entire wedding introducing each other to half of the room. How big is our small wedding? Maybe a little bigger than we quite wanted it to be, but still small enough for comfort, I think.

That Photo,

Let me start this by saying I am a habitual nail biter and have been for a decent chunk of my life. I have used the "trick" of painting my nails clear or nude or with a transparent glitter in order to not bite them for a small period, but my nails are pathetic and not just because of how long I have bitten them for; my mum's nails kind of suck as well (sorry Mum). I was never really bothered by it. And then I got engaged...

When we got engaged, I didn't want a photo of the ring on my hand where my nails were visible, because I just hated that they looked so awful and having a beautiful engagement ring (I think she's gorgeous anyway) only made me feel like they looked worse, but I just didn't take the 'traditional' photo or photos like the photo of just my hand and the ring or one with my hand on him with the ring visible, and I never really thought it bothered me too much that I didn't have it. And then I thought about our wedding photos... 

We've spent a fair amount of money on having a photographer for certain parts of the day, partly with the idea that at least one of those photos will be hanging in our house, and let's face it, both sets of parents are likely to want a photo from it in their homes, as are our grandparents, and I just kept thinking about how it would either be really hard to hide my hands, or they would just look awful, so when we were walking around the village a few weeks back getting errands done, I went into the nail salon and asked if there was anything that they could do to sort them out.

When I was going for the appointment, my partner asked how long I would be so he knew whether to try and keep the baby awake for me or to do bedtime solo, and I told him I had no idea. I even had to Google it on the way there as to what the type of nails I was getting done were since I had no idea. I had never had a manicure before so I had no clue about any of it. I didn't know how often I was going to need to get it done so they're alright for the wedding, or how much it was going to cost, but I knew it was going to be worth it so I didn't have to feel like they were ugly as hell and something I needed to hide on my wedding day, and I was right.

The finished nails are not something ridiculous or obvious, but they are a significant improvement, so much so that I  couldn't stop looking at them and kind of wanted to take the photos we had missed out on when we got engaged, but at the same time I don't want to feel like I'm trying to rewrite history just because I like something about myself now that I didn't like back then, but like this I can keep them looking lovely and have them looking nice on my wedding day for the photos with our rings and actually any of the photos that we have taken for the day. It seems like such a little thing but it's the sort of little thing that means a lot and I'm glad it's another item ticked off of the to do list. And given the number of things we are doing in the next few weeks, including a couple of My Chemical Romance gigs, I'm kind of proud that I didn't go for something crazy like black or red polish that would have been a lot more obvious!! 

The Path to Saying 'I Do' Part 5,

I fully appreciate that some people are distrustful of AI and some people just plain hate it and there are a lot of good reasons for that. I do, honestly, especially because I don't think there should be a debate about the fact that it's use should be able to get us to the point where we have more time for our passions, rather than less, or rather than the AI effectively doing our passion projects for us, like when it creates artwork, but...

When it comes to weddings there are a lot of people who have started wanting to do a lot of it themselves, whether because it works out cheaper or because it gives them a lot more creative control or just control generally. And I get it.

When we started planning our wedding, I was kind of aware of the fact that there were going to be all of these little bits of things which would crop up that we hadn't thought of or hadn't known about, but I also had a bit of a general idea of how much things might cost. My future husband, God love him, thought that the price we had from the venue was a package price and we'd have to get a suit and a dress (his dress is gorgeous... KIDDING) and rings, but that other than that it was sort of a plug and play thing where it was all done for us, and it has shook him how much there has been to do. (And I haven't even made him do most of it.) 

I think he was aware that wedding invites weren't in the scope of what the venue did but I think he was of the opinion that they couldn't really be that expensive, could they? And I was like, yeah, it says wedding on it. Whatever price you're thinking of, add a zero to the end and you're probably closer to the figure than you were with your first guess. It was like the conversation over the pram all over again. I looked into a few different options, but as some of them were going in the post and I didn't want two 'tiers' of invites, we wanted them to be flat and as few sheets of paper or card as possible. We were also still trying to sort out with the venue about the menu so just asked about allergies and not food choices at that stage, but a lot of places that I was looking at wanted to do an invite "bundle" with an RSVP card to physically send back, an "info sheet" and a menu options card... It was all getting a bit out of hand, so thankfully I used Canva to do our own and do them our own way.

Now, I've always been more autistic than artistic (it's fine, I am ND, I can make that joke, and I do, regularly) I was pretty impressed that I chose a design I liked that was completely the wrong colour scheme (although one I'm wishing had gone with our venue, because I looked at a burgundy suit over the weekend and liked it - not for me!) and changed it, then managed to change the design for the back of the invite to make it a bit more simplistic, but still on theme and cute, so we could pile a bit of info on there without it looking cramped or cluttered, but when it's come to other bits that I want to mirror the invites, I'm sad to say I just don't want to mess around with them the same way, and I just want to press the AI button and say do this next bit, whatever it is, like that, so it matches, and then it poofs and does it, but it's not working out that simple.

I'm not asking for rocket science, I just want a template for *one thing, or another thing, which I'm not going to put because I never quite know who reads this and they might be coming to the wedding...* but it keeps saying, nah, I don't want to do that, do it yourself. And then I want to scream. I mean, yes, I can do it myself, but I don't want to and I thought the whole point of AI being there and "making our lives easier" was that I didn't have to, but it seems that there is no such luck on this for the moment, so I'm just going to have to keep plodding on with it and hope it's done sooner rather than later...