pre-cana
January 5, 2008
I’m always wondering what people do in pre-cana session. And time goes by so fast that suddenly, it’s time for me to participate in the pre-canna session. So, we had our pre-cana session, the faith preparation before our marriage, today from 9AM to 3PM at Church of the Resurrection, New Albany.
Some of the topics covered are communication, finance, intimacy, faith and marriage. It was an interactive sessions where there were presentations, couple activities, and personal discussion moments although I admit that there were times we felt really bored. Overall, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience and we felt grateful that we had the chance to experience it. It prepared us for our marriage life spiritually and deepen our understanding of each other, encouraged us to think about subjects we never even thought of or discussed before yet important. Thinking back, I’ve got a lot of new and exciting experiences while preparing for this wedding and the wedding is still months to go! I’m just glad that I decided to create this blog so that I can always look back through my wedding journey here.
the ‘dress’
December 4, 2007
I found it!
I’ve started searching for my dress a few months ago and still couldn’t find the right one. I really want to get my dress bought before the end of this year to spread out the wedding prep workload. Once I found it, I can put it at the back of my head and focus on other things. So, my dress searching journey begins. I started out by visiting local bridal salon close to my home, tried a lot of pretty dresses but none of them tempt me enough. Then, I visited 3 or 4 other places in town and seems like there is nothing that really interest me. I envisioned having a lace strapless gown with a lot of sparkles but it seems there is nothing close to what I expect. Since I have a lot of time anyway, I’d plan to take it slowly.
One fine day, I and my MOH visited this BIG bridal salon (well, the place is small but the collection is big -.-) in Cincinnati. We browsed through the rack, pulled couple gowns and my MOH pulled out a gown with a black belt. When she showed it to me, I rejected it in just one glance. My mom & FMIL will freak out if I wear anything black on my wedding outfit. Then, we continue searching and she brought the subject of that gown again! “OK, I’ll try it” I said. There’s no harm in trying it anyway, right. Then, the magical thing happens. After I tried it, I felt something clicked and I came to love the gown. The longer I had it on, the longer I’m falling in love with it. To make the long story short, after some period of time of thinking and searching, I still couldn’t find another one, so I decided that it must be the one. Finally, I ordered it along with its accessories today! Yay, one more wedding prep task done! The funny thing is the dress I bought is totally different from the vision I had at first. So, lesson learnt here, unless it is a custom-made dress, what you envision can yield a totally different one.
wedding place story
November 2, 2007
One of the first task we feel need to be done on this wedding preparation is to find the wedding ceremony and reception place. For the ceremony, we’ve determined that we’ll have it at our parish here, St. Peter Church. So easy! However, it’s a different story with the wedding reception place.
The place for our wedding reception is set now. It’s going to be held at the brand-new Hilton Polaris.
We felt like we’ve accomplished a tremendous task here. We’ve been searching for the right place for a while and we kept arguing if we should have the reception at golf club, ballroom, museum, or park. Well, Edy has told me that he prefers to have the wedding at a ballroom somewhere but I’d like to broaden my search farther than ballroom (even though we end up with the ballroom). So the journey begins…
I’ve visited countless place here in-town that I think would be nice to have our wedding at. Some of the places I considered are the Art museum downtown, the Franklin Park, the Northbank Park, Renaissance downtown, Double Tree at Worthington, Tartan East golf club. Each of the place has its own reason that makes us rejected the place right away. We considered Tartan East very seriously since we like its newly renovated ballroom so much. However, they just had new management and it delayed our communication considerably. While we were waiting for their response, we found this Hilton at Polaris which is closer to town and nice as well. So, we switched our attention to Hilton now.
The hotel is not done yet, it’s still in construction but we trust the Hilton brand that it must be a beautiful place and have a professional management (see how powerful a brand is). So, Edy contacted them around early September and after thousands of emails (OK, I’m exaggerating here, but we did ask them A LOT OF questions), we finalized our decision on early November 07 that “yes, we’ll have our reception there”. Praise the Lord!
Being a brand-new hotel, we didn’t know anything about their reputation & review so we did ask them a lot of questions. Even the sales manager didn’t know the answers to most of my questions since she’s new herself. However, she did her best to ask her boss about my questions and updated me courteously and in a timely manner. That’s what I called a good customer service. I wrote earlier that we trusted the Hilton brand. However, realistically, we are anxious and concerned about it. Technically, we made a blind purchase. We didn’t even see how the ballroom looks like, no previous wedding for example, don’t know how the food tastes, etc. We just hope that they do a great job and make us super satisfied.
focus Test
September 29, 2007
Last week we had the initial meeting with Fr. Reis to talk about our spiritual preparation in getting married next year. Our wedding is still a long way to go but we’d like to contact the church now just because we want to make sure that the date we want is open. With our parents have to travel here and the football schedule, we can’t miss the October, 18th date we chose and we really want to get married at St. Peter. Not only St. Peter is our parish church, but also the church is beautiful.
On our initial meeting, we talked about basic topics such as why we decided to get married, how our view of children is, how we will bring the Christ in our marriage. Then, he asked us to fill in the Focus Test questionnaires. It is a comprehensive questionnaires (there were more than 100 questions!) to find out if we are truly compatible with each other/ if there is something that we need to work on before our marriage. I think it is a good test. The questions cover various topics such as financial decisions, household chores management, family matters, etc. Then, he’d grade it >.< and asked us to come back a week after to discuss about the result.
We met again with the father this afternoon and fortunately, we were pretty compatible with each other! We discussed everything today and did not need to come back next week. There were only a few topics in which we were in different view. Edy and I talked about it under Fr. Reis’ guidance. At the end, we reached an agreement over these matters. It’s good to know these differences in our views about life and life after marriage now so that we can smooth things out now before it’s getting too late. Overall, this focus test is a good experience and I’m glad that we did it. After we ‘passed’ the test, then we talked about the wedding date and the date now is set in stone. It’s going to be at 10.30AM in the morning of October, 18th 2008. We didn’t have much choice since we can only choose either AM ceremony or PM ceremony and we’d like to have a time gap between our ceremony and reception for VARIOUS reasons (Believe me! We’ve considered every aspect over having an AM ceremony vs. PM ceremony. In the end, AM ceremony wins). One more wedding prep task done. 