Eight Months, Our First Christmas and New Year, Plus a Few Updates

Hello! It's been a while. We got bitten by the bug that hits almost all newlyweds after the wedding. Getting over the stress of wedding planning, basking in the exhilaration of the wedding, and then focusing on starting a new life together can certainly make couples ignore things like the wedding photos and blog. Our lives had a chance to settle down a bit over the past few months, so we figured it was finally time for some updates.

Eight Months!

First of all, we celebrated our eighth month as husband and wife last December! We only celebrate sporadically to keep things interesting, heh. (Actually we usually just forget. Having been together 13 years before we got married, we are not so good at monthsaries anymore. Those are a lot of months after all!)

L-O-V-E!

First Holidays

We also had our first Christmas and New Year! 2013 was a mix of highs and lows for us. The year started out amazing but it got tough near the end. The wonderful thing is we now know that we meant it when we said "for better or for worse" at the altar. 2014 is going to rock. 

A + J on New Year's Eve

What's up?

Now for updates. We completely forgot about That Happy Day for a while because real life got in the way. That will change. We'll be celebrating our first anniversary in a couple of months so we really have to complete our engagement and wedding stories here. 

I also got emails and messages from bride-to-bes or friends of soon-to-be-brides asking about wedding advice and supplier feedback. I answered and gave info as much as I could. It was really nice to be able to help other women out there who are planning their own happy days. Before the wedding, I was trying to balance the process of documenting things and providing info. I didn't want to give things away so that we could still have the element of surprise at our wedding. Now that it's over, I can finally blog about everything I left out. The emails and messages I got have also pushed me to really get this blog going again.

What happened to our wedding photos?

First up are the photos. Even though I have posted our same-day-edit video and photo slideshow in this blog, I have never posted the actual photos. To be honest, just going through wedding photos is almost as stressful as planning the entire wedding. We had to sift through a gazillion photos from our photographer and our family, friends, and suppliers. We also had to choose specific ones according to where they will come out -- the official wedding album, Facebook to tag guests, this blog, etc -- and we had around 4000 raw photos (official and unofficial pictures) to choose from. A and I found ourselves kind of wishing we lived in the days when there were only 36 shots in film cams and wedding albums only had a fraction of the number of photos we have now. 

Photo overload!!!

We only finished turning over the photos for our official wedding album and posting more photos in Facebook last November so we can probably expect our wedding album and video to arrive around our first anniversary, heh. We just couldn't narrow everything down to 120 photos when we had hundreds! We settled with our photographers at 135. I'm very obsessive-compulsive as well, so I usually have a hard time with these things. But hey, I have friends who only finished their album after 5 years, and friends who are on their 6th year but still haven't chosen pictures. A and I aren't so bad after all.

The good news is, I finally got my "nutshell" folder done today! It's a folder that has more than the number of photos in our wedding album, but has a lot less than our ultimate folder of wedding photos. (See? OC!) I'll be posting the photos after this post, yay!

The Start of Preparation and Supplier Kwento

I'll be starting my stories on our wedding details and suppliers soon. I'm excited to post about our DIYs and other fun stuff! My Wedding Fairies would be happy to hear that, I'm sure. 

I have to say though, that I won't be posting any supplier reviews. We had a wonderful wedding and we don't really have anything to say but good things about our suppliers. Instead of reviews, we will just be telling stories of our experiences with everyone. Our day wasn't perfect, but those imperfections were just very little things. Talking about them feels very nitpick-y for us. If we did have anything major we'd like to warn other soon-to-wed couples about we would write about them for sure, but we simply don't. We've heard a lot of annoying and even to the point of nightmarish stories out there. We truly feel very lucky not to have experienced any major mishaps and to have picked very trustworthy and capable suppliers. We actually still can't believe our day was as perfect as it could possibly get actually. 

The MyPhotato (aka WeCelebrate) guys, partying at our wedding

That's about it! Thank you for reading the blog and keeping up with us this entire time. We'll most likely finish everything by our first anniversary. It has been a blast!