Things you are not told when you get engaged:

Planning a wedding is an unpaid part time job
Focusing on all the details will make you lose sight of the bigger picture (y’know, love)
You should (you have to) celebrate the small stuff throughout your entire engagement

OK, sweet, I know these things now halfway through. So John and I really do try to celebrate and enjoy the mundane tasks of contacting vendors, constantly reviewing our budget, hand stamping favors, fretting over letterpress vs. lithography invitations, etc. but sometimes it’s tough. I guess it can’t all be cake tasting and dress twirling.

One thing that seemed like just another duty (at first) was getting our engagement pictures taken. We knew we weren’t going to put them in the paper and generally looked down on portraits of us that couldn’t possibly express who we are or our personalities. Since it was included in our wedding photo package we started to try to brainstorm better alternatives to jumping on the beach! or a shadow of us holding hands!. Blech.

We’re total foodies so I contacted the Boston Center for Adult Education to see if we could rent out their kitchens. Long story short – we could! (And for free might I add! All we have to do is send them our pics and provide a testimonial to them. Awesome, right?! I’ve always had dreams of being the new face of the BCAE…)

We planned a day with our amazing, amazing photographer, Kristin Korpos. We made a huge feast (RJ’s avocado and corn salsa, chicken, pineapple, and pepper jack quesadillas, and ice cream sundaes). The whole time we laughed and chatted and joked. It was awesome. Just when I thought I was getting too caught up in the wedding machine and all its forced tradition and consumer stupidity, I get to have this super fun photo shoot! It made all the other stuff totally worth it.

This week Kristin posted the photoshoot to her blog. I LOVE IT! It came out 100% perfect. I could not be happier and can’t wait for Kristin to shoot our wedding.

And then yesterday I came home to this:

YES! I love mail!

It was the disc of our pics!

So this morning I’ve been printing out our favorites to hang around the house.

My advice to any married-to-be is to totally enjoy these fun moments. They aren’t all like this but the ones that are make the rest all a little easier to attack.