Since nothing about the wedding was related to a hotel, I gave guests a list of local lodging and didn’t do welcome bags or anything.

My extremely conscientious maid of honor decided to make bathroom baskets for the women and the men.

The men's restroom basket

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Why…Heelllloooo there! I am Honeysuckle Bud and I am the newest edition to the garden! I am really excited to be a part of this great Wedding Planning community and I just can’t wait to start posting with all my ideas!

So a little about me? Well… I am a Mid-Twenties Quirky and Enthusiastic Midwestern Princess, addicted to Starbucks Caramel Macchiatos and Red Bull Energy Drinks. Hater of Turnips and Slow Drivers. I am a lister of lists and stresser-outer by nature. I love to laugh and go to the movies…I have seen 18 movies to date this year alone. (I don’t even want to think about how much money I spend on Movies every week.) I currently work at a local bank as a Personal Banker but always looking for bigger and better things. The last 5 years of my life were working 60 hours/wk in Sales and while planning my wedding, I wanted something as stress free as possible so I went to Banker’s Hours…literally!

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Elope.  The wonderfully simple and delightfully complex word. How I love thee.

The Cymbies are under the 75 day mark. One would think that I would be super excited. Sadly, I’m simply tired. I’m sick and tired of weddings and all things associated! Is that wrong? For this very reason is why I have been taking an extended siesta from the Garden. I’m sick of making decisions about things that never interested me and tired of writing checks and swiping my credit card.

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The day we got engaged the questions about wedding details started coming at us from everywhere. I’m sure any newly engaged woman has experienced this and sympathizes with the overwhelming feeling we had at the beginning of our engagement. Of course I loved, and still love, telling our proposal story and showing off my ring but I wasn’t expecting all of the wedding questions so soon after we got engaged.

Needless to say it got us thinking, so we started off 2011 in full wedding planning mode. Before we started visiting wedding venues I wanted to work out some of the details so Mr. Man and I started trying to answer some of the basic questions. We both want a small wedding so that decision was easily made. Then came the debate of getting married locally or having a destination wedding. Charleston is one of our favorite cities so I started doing some research on venues and of course I found beautiful plantations and so many wonderful unique venues. The problem came when we started to look at the travel costs for every wedding planning visit and for our guests. I just couldn’t imagine not being able to take care of something important right away in person, being that Charleston is about 5 hours from us. So Charleston was out of the question and we decided a local wedding would be the easiest for both us and our guests.

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When deciding whether or not to have a destination wedding, there were a few things that I was concerned I would miss out on. It is interesting, looking back, at how those thing have worked themselves out. Local flowers, planning myself (and with Fressia Mom), and our minister of choice.

I had found a local grower at a farmers’ market close to home that make beautiful wildflower bouquets. They were quite inexpensive and seemed absolutely perfect. As soon as a destination wedding became a possibility, I knew the local flowers would be out. While I give serious props to those who can find flowers local to their destination, I have not been that resourceful. However, I decided on orchids that are readily available around Florida so they won’t have to travel far…and Freesia Dude usually gets me orchids for my birthday.

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My sister got married two years, almost to the day, before Freesia Dude proposed. She and I are rather close in age and in friendship. I was her MOH and she is mine. The day she got engaged was the day that I started paying attention to all those details at weddings that one does not usually consider. From my point of view, she handled the whole process like a champ. She had every bit of it under control and turned out an amazing wedding that totally encompassed the personalities of her and her new husband. It took around a year to plan her fairly sizable wedding. During her planning, I decided that if when my day came I would do a destination wedding and if not, it would be small and simple and DEFINITELY not take longer than a few months to plan.

One of the first questions I was asked after becoming engaged was whether I would have a destination wedding. Immediately I said no, I would miss out on several things that I will only get to have one chance at. I had set in my mind that I would plan a wedding on the Texas beaches that Freesia Dude and I both grew up on.

I dreamed of a ceremony on the beach at sunset, in front of a beach house that would hold the reception. A small number, around 50 or so of our closest friends and family, would make a fabulous, yet not overwhelming, party. After all, socializing does make me tired! (My apologies, this is a small joke from my family that originated during my brother’s engagement to my now sister-in-law. After attending a couple of wedding preparation events, I returned home exhausted and explained that “socializing makes me tired”, it has stuck ever since.) So a quaint wedding on the beach had my name all over it….until I began to consider who those “50-ish guests” would be, and where there was a beach house on the Texas coast that did not have a septic system that would be massively overloaded by 50 people! (again, my apologies, this time for the unsettling example)

Freesia Dude and I began looking between Galveston and Surfside Beach. This land is not within city limits, allowing us to hold fireworks which would be nice as we were hoping to have a July 4th wedding (this will be our 5th “dating-anniversary”). Also, it is less crowded, but has fewer homes. While searching we found a couple houses that looked like they might work, so we took a Saturday drive to the beach to take a look. The first house we drove to was filled with quite a buzz and, judging by the white tulle draped on the railings, we suspected they were setting up a wedding!

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The one and only thing we knew for sure going into our planning was that we wanted our wedding to be a laid back beach vacation and heck of a good time for our guests.  A time for everyone to cut loose,  relax and forget about the worries back at home.  We knew the only way to accomplish this with our family and friends was to give everyone a high stepping, fist pumping, booty shaking dance party where everyone could release some tension with not a care in the world… WOW, was that a success!

I spent countless hours listening to music, reading every wedding song list and even sent out song requests to friends.  I wanted to make sure we had a perfect mix to get everyone in a good mood.  I came up with roughly 15 songs that I thought embodied our style and passed it on to our DJ, Daniel at Event My Way, and told him to work his magic! Of course there was a separate list of songs we didn’t want played… your typical wedding party songs, but our biggest request was that there would be NO slow songs except our first dance and Daddy/Daughter dance.  Since we were doing a destination wedding, I was never able to meet Daniel in person, just have a couple of phone conversations with him.  We spoke for a total of about an hour, and I have never been so impressed with someone who can read you like a book in that short period of time.  He knew exactly what we wanted based on my short list and our phone conversations and we ended up with a killer mix of 80s, dance hits and classic rock that kept everyone on the dance floor all night long! There were even times when I disappeared to talk to someone, only to show back up on the dance floor and be shunned to the carpet because there wasn’t room on the floor! It was absolutely amazing and more than we ever hoped for! I am still getting comments to this day about how much fun people had dancing the night away!  And in case you don’t believe me regarding the fun, here are some pictures to prove it!

Dogwood Dude and friends... there was a lot of terrible singing going on!

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I love looking at photos of other’s weddings as I really enjoying searching for the small details, the little things that we may sometimes overlook.  As you all know, I had run the wedding gauntlet in the years leading up to my moment, and for so many of those weddings, I never paid attention to the little things; like bouquets, accessories, table numbers, guest books and even cakes and centerpieces… all the things that you can use to show your personality. Of course once I started planning my own wedding, these things became much more pronounced and I started pulling inspiration from every wedding I attended!

Here are a few shots of some of our small details, that I absolutely loved!

My bouquet... I never would have thought these things would be so heavy!

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One thing I have absolutely loved about BridalBuds is the feedback I have gotten from everyone! I had so many questions along the way, and my wedding colors were probably one of the biggest dilemmas I faced.  After much thought, I ended up going with Coral and Turquoise/Tiffany Blue.  I was pretty excited about our colors given the room we were working with, and the amazing natural light that filled the room especially during the sunset. Of course with all the candles we had, it was just as beautiful at night.

Here are a few pics of our decor, with a special thanks to Charlene Lopez at the Key Largo Hilton, Blooming Design and Events and Edda’s Cake Designs for making our wedding an absolute dream.  The creativity that went into designing this amazing scene was well beyond our wildest dreams.

Our wedding cake… I couldn’t stop starring at it, I was just so obsessed with it!

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Pretty much as soon as Hydrangea dude and I got engaged, the first order of business in regards to wedding planning was…choosing the venue.  As I am sure most brides-to-be can agree, choosing the venue is one of the first (and most likely) the hardest decision to make.  With wedding venues booking up more than a year in advance, I knew my fiancé and I had to get on the bandwagon and fast and choose where we wanted to hold our dream wedding.

The first step was choosing the actual city we wanted to get married in.  Since most of my extended family is in Illinois, I grew up in North Carolina, my parents live in Orlando and I currently live in Atlanta, it was no easy task choosing a location that was convenient for everyone.  We ended up deciding on a semi-destination wedding in Fort Lauderdale, FL, where Hydrangea dude is from.  Since most of my family and friends would be traveling in for the wedding, not matter what, we decided on Ft. Lauderdale, since it was one of our favorite places to go.  Not only is Fort Lauderdale beautiful in April (when we are getting hitched), but it also is close to beaches, the airport and a location that most of our guests would likely want to visit.

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