Blogging from the Big Apple!

After an extended break from wedding planning...I'm back! And all moved into my new New York City apartment!

Well, my Queens apartment. It still counts, right?

The place is a bit of a sty right now, so no nice pictures of how we're settling in yet. Instead, have a couple of shots from move in day:


The view from the kitchen


Just inside our living space


Yaaaaaaaaaaaay! Everything's in the apartment!!! Oh, crap, now we have to unpack it all!

A week and a couple of days later and I'd say 90% of our stuff is unpacked. We're still living out of suitcases, but that's because Billy refuses to hang up any of his clothes. Apparently he needs a dresser to survive (he used that argument on me in our last apartment so we ended up with two dressers...and yet, his clothes only ended up IN the dresser when I did his laundry!). So we're trying to figure out how to work that.

We're also waiting on a book shelf to unpack our DVDs and books. I'm hoping that one bookshelf will be enough to hold it all!

So far I think we're adjusting well to New York. There's a bit of a learning curve, but we're managing.

And now that we're (mostly) settled in, I have two tasks: 1) FIND A JOB (I've been applying like crazy for anything and everything I can find. I'm desperate) 2) Get back into wedding planning! Yesterday I spoke with my future sister-in-law Carling and my Ypsi-based usher (and unexpected bachelorette party organizer!) Marisa so they can coordinate working on my bridal shower (Carling and my future mother-in-law are doing most of the planning, with MOH Brittany helping out in some way, but Marisa, being the one actually based in Ypsilanti right now, is going to help figure out logistics like WHERE to have the bridal shower). The night before that I chatted with Brittany via AIM and she let me ramble aimlessly while I figured out what my next wedding planning steps were.

1) Figure out whether I should make my own pocketfolds for the invitations or buy them
2) Start figuring out what the invitations should say
3) Make Billy figure out what he and the groomsmen are wearing

I've also spent most of today finalizing the wedding registry so it will be all ready to be viewed by the bridal shower crowd!

More posts soon!

Family Drama

It seems like one of the most common bridal horror stories has to do with family. Maybe it's Dad not wanting to contribute his share, or a future mother-in-law going crazy with her guest list demands. Possibly everyone who has ever gotten married has a story like that (my mom has a hilarious one regarding my dad's parents), but I don't know if I've ever heard anyone else with my particular conundrum before...

As I mentioned in my last post, for me my family consists of my mom, my dad, and my younger brother, Dan. Totally average American family, right? Except for one little hitch: Dan is autistic.

Autism is an incredibly complex disorder, so invariably when I share with friends that I have an autistic brother I'm hit with a barrage of questions. Thankfully, most people have figured out that Dennis Hoffman's portrayal is less-than-accurate, but there are still lots of questions.

Dan is what we describe as "moderately autistic." He can speak and hold limited conversations with people, but he's also very regimented with his schedule and hates change of any sort. Also, heartbreakingly, he functions just high enough to recognize that he's different from other people, but he can't define it or understand why.

He is also ridiculously good at video games. Like, we don't buy video games for him any more because he beats them in an afternoon. It's kind of crazy.

Because of Dan's special needs, we didn't have the sibling relationship that most other people had. We didn't roughhouse (because when we did I usually ended up falling down a flight of stairs!), nor did we have a lot of sibling rivalry. Instead, I spent half of my childhood as a third parent. Not because my parents forced me to, I just picked it up on my own. When we were little I acted as his translator because his speech was often too garbled for the adults to understand (or he was talking about cartoons or toys our parents hadn't caught on to yet, so he really might as well have been speaking a foreign language to them), and I constantly defended him against anyone who would dare make fun of him or people like him.

But there never seemed to be much of a mutual relationship between us. I loved him, took care of him, helped him with school work and video games (before they got too complex for me), and he...didn't care, it seemed. Once I moved away for college my parents said he'd occasionally mention that he missed me, or hoped I would be home for Christmas or whatever, but I didn't really come up very much.

Billy, however, seemed to become his best friend the first time they met. Because Billy knew video games! Billy was a guy! Billy was cool!

So imagine my complete surprise when I told my family that Billy and I were engaged...and Dan freaked out. He was angry and sullen and told everyone that Billy was taking away the person that was most important to him and ripping out his heart.

Ouch.

He also must have heard my dad refer to Billy as "son" at one point, because he also got it into his head at one point that Billy was going to replace him.

Luckily, my family does have some community resources that help people like Dan and we were able to get him in to talk to a social worker and a counselor. They've assured us that we didn't do anything to set Dan off; most likely any sort of major change, like Dad retiring in a couple of years, could have made this happen. It's also revealed that most likely there's some other disorder like depression simmering under the surface, as often happens to people in Dan's situation, so he can get help for that as well.

So while I'm glad Dan is getting lots of help and support, it's also making planning the wedding rather difficult. I can't talk about it on the phone with Mom if Dan is in the house, and even when I go home to visit Mom and I usually do most of our planning out at lunch or holed up in her craft room. Also, if Billy comes home with me, we have to rent a hotel room, since his presence at the house can often send Dan into a fit. Since we've been saving money for both the wedding and moving to New York, this has meant very few trips back to my place together.

But possibly the hardest part of this? At this point, my little brother is not going to be attending the wedding. Occasionally I'll get depressed and feel like I'm probably the only sister in the world who has ever had to exclude her brother from any part of the wedding festivities. He's not standing up in the wedding party, he's not maintaining the guest book...he probably won't even attend the ceremony or reception. Because no one wants a meltdown in the middle of the wedding day. It sucks, it hurts, but unless there's a major breakthrough in the next six months, this is just the way it's going to have to be for everyone's well being.

What sort of family problems have been thrown your way? How are you working around them?

Location: Do you WANT our money?

When we had met Amanda at the Doubletree Hotel, I explained up front that we were going to be planning our wedding long distance, first from Ypsilanti and then from New York. She assured me this wasn't going to be a problem between phone calls and e-mails.

I feel rather gullible now, having believed that.

Shortly after we checked out locations I got a job (yaaaaaaaaaaaay) that had me working from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm (boooooooooooo), which meant talking to Amanda on the phone during the week was out, since she kept very similar office hours. After three attempts at e-mailing her, and leaving an after-hours phone message, I finally sent my maid of honor (who was living in Holland at the time) to go check in on Amanda in person and make sure she hadn't disappeared off of the face of the earth.

She hadn't. Turns out she was having "e-mail problems" and she had totally sent me an e-mail! But she would send me another one later that day.

If she did, it never arrived.

Finally giving up on e-mail, Amanda left me a voice mail message during the day that said, if I was available, she would call me around noon on Saturday since she had to do some things in the office then and we would talk and get all of my questions answered.

When Saturday rolled around there was no call at noon. Or at one. At two I finally decided I should make myself some lunch, since she clearly wasn't going to call.

As soon as I pulled my pasta off of the stove my phone rang. Because that's just how my life works!

Once I could finally talk to her, she was very forthcoming and helpful and was helping me figure out what the different pre-made wedding packages could be customized to include, and what we should definitely swap out because really it wasn't a good deal and so on and so forth. While I had been frustrated as all get out trying to get hold of her, I now felt much better and was sure that this was the place we needed to book for our wedding.

So I began e-mailing. And calling. Trying to get some sort of confirmation that yes, our date was still open and we could book the rooms and we could have a contract and how much would the deposit be...it was very frustrating. I took to saving each and every e-mail I sent to her, and her response, as well as documenting any phone calls just in case I needed to take this to someone higher up in the hotel. There were several times I felt like giving up, but every time my laziness and basic faith in people won out. If we chose a different location, that would probably mean going back to Holland to see if there were any other places we could find (we had already booked a photographer and were in the process of booking a DJ for the February 21st date so I didn't feel like bargaining with them to move back to February 28th to go with DeVos). Also, I like to believe that people are basically good and want to help each other, ESPECIALLY when it involves earning large sums of money for your business in the off-season (when we checked out the hotel in January there were maybe five cars in the parking lot. When I went back to visit with my mom to check out the hotel's restaurant in March there were only a few more. West Michigan doesn't get many visitors before Tulip Time in May and then the place, or at least the hotels, is swamped through Labor Day).

So far, while the process has been agonizingly slow and frustrating, everything is working out. In May I finally got a correct contract (I had been sent one in April that wasn't even close to correct. We were being charged for 50 more people than could even fit into our reception space, and the food price was way too much as well) and we sent in our deposit, and then in June I made a trip back to Holland in part so I could meet with Amanda in person and make sure everything had arrived correctly and just figure out all of the details. Like when would our tasting be scheduled. I also took the time to show my mom the ceremony space, since when we had visited in March those rooms had been closed.

So my review so far of Doubletree: it's a great space with lots of options for your ceremony or reception. While Amanda is extremely flaky and hard to get hold of, once you can talk to her she is extremely nice and accommodating. I also found out in June that they had recently hired an assistant for her, so it's possible that some of the communication issues will work themselves out.