Don't let the intro fool you, it's not "Ice, Ice, Baby"

Brides are under pressure to make their wedding day as beautiful as possible...but what if all these potentially great ideas in their heads don't really work out all that well in the execution?!

I have felt a jolt of excess pressure recently. My photographer is a friend of mine who worked on our college newspaper and yearbook with me (I was a layout designer) and went on to become this amazing wedding/fashion photographer in New York. He usually charges significantly more to do weddings than I am paying him...like 90% more. It helps to have friends!!

He has done several weddings but he is still building his portfolio so he is coming in the day before and going over to our wedding cake baker's house (out of which her company is based) to shoot the cake and now I'm thinking "I really hope our cake is as fabulous as I think it will be because it's important to his career!!"

Also, he has an agreement with Brides magazine because they really like his previous pictures so I gave him permission to submit our wedding. What if they don't take his pictures because my fabulous (in my mind) wedding isn't so fabulous (in reality)?

I just want to give him as much opportunity as possible considering he is doing crazy things like shooting my rehearsal dinner and bending over backwards for basically free.

Yikes! Talk about pressure.

The beauty of simple things... like soda bottles?

My mad brainstorming post included my idea for a lemonade stand. We inquired about this with our resort but the price they quoted for making and refilling the lemonade for our stand was out of our range and I wasn't sure how we could manage it ourselves. I thought having a family member refill the lemonade dispensers would be a bit tacky. Well, maybe not tacky because I hate to use that term but just not the aesthetic we are going for.

So I started thinking we wanted something fun, whimsical and beautiful and I came up with... soda!!

Beautiful soda though, not what you're thinking right now ;-)

Soda like this:

Sources:

bawls.com

thefoodpaper.com

jonessoda.com

amazon.com

jonessoda.com

Pretty, no? We are going to set them up on a table in the garden for cocktail hour.

All the sodas are available online but we actually found a local soda shop that sells by the case, saving us a ton in shipping and is actually cheaper per bottle too. We are going soda shopping at the end of the month!

The great sparkler let-down...

I have always thought that since FI and I are staying at the hotel where we are having our reception, we wouldn't need a big send off after the reception. It will be dark and we just have to walk down some stairs and then down a path to our "cottage." But then I started thinking "hmmmm... what about sparklers?!"

I saw this picture and I was hooked!

Photo from Sparklersonline.com

Sparklersonline.com would probably be a fabulous place to buy sparklers for your wedding if they were not, in fact, illegal in your state!

Sparklers are not legal in Arizona. I thought maybe this was the case but then I saw a picture of a similar exit done at our wedding resort so I thought everything was okay. Apparently, those people defied the law in our great state. I considered ignoring the law for about half a second before I realized my retired firefighter father would never let this happen.

My sparkling sparkler dream was quickly doused by a huge bucket of cold A.R.S. 36-13-1.

How's that for a mixed metaphor?