Let’s get this party started: signature drinks.

When we started looking at venues almost a year ago (this long engagement thing is a pain, but kind of handy in Chicago) one of the big musts on our list was a place that would let us bring in our own alcohol. Cafe Brauer, as gorgeous as it is, charged over $11,000 for a bar menu that included the lovely “high end” brands like Jose Cuervo. Right.

We want our guests to have lots of fun, but because we’d like to invest heavily in other areas of the night (photography and food, anyone?) we love the idea of having beer, wine (what’s a wedding without champagne?) and a few cocktails. Pretty, right?

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It sounds so simple, but when we sit down to decide on which cocktails we’re having (usually, this comes up while we’re actually drinking a cocktail) we can never decide on how many to have, and how to include variability for multiple tastes while still having fun drinks. Just between the two of us, we love margaritas, martinis, mint juleps, Manhattans, Tom Collinses, and pretty much anything that involves champagne.

Of course, then there are the fun, newish cocktails that you see as signature drinks:

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Lavender martini? Yes, please. As an aside, what’s the maximum number of martinis you can have on your signature drink list before people think you’re ridiculous? Seriously, though, we’re trying to limit ourselves to about four crowd-pleasing drinks. So what would you like to see?

The wedding cupcake.

It’s a dreary Monday and I’d like to brighten up your day a bit with this post. Have I told you all much about our wedding details? No? Well, that’s probably because I’m not exactly on top of things. But we have been pretty darn excited about the whole dessert shebang at the wedding.

I really dislike traditional wedding cakes. Fondant drives me crazy, and unless you have awesome sleuthing skills or connections, it’s tough to find a genuinely finger-licking good cake with any sort of budget.

But finger-licking good cupcakes are right down the street from us. These cupcakes have a special place in my heart, because they were the first vegan dessert I ever had that was better than its non-vegan counterpart. I was one of those baking snobs who thought that without eggs and butter, it just wasn’t worth it. Boy was I wrong.

These cupcakes (from Molly’s Cupcakes) are the one sweet I will never be able to give up. In the warmer months, we love walking our dog to their outdoor patio some Sunday mornings and drinking our coffee with two cupcakes to go. So it seemed fairly obvious to us that some kind of cupcake table could be epic, and leave no one missing the so-called quintessential wedding cake. Since we’re getting married here in the city we’re looking forward to introducing all of our guests to Molly’s – we hope everyone else loves them as much as we do!

I haven’t found my perfect dessert-table set up yet (okay, I did a Google search during this post and it didn’t turn anything amazing up. I’m a wedding slacker) but this is my favorite so far – I love the thought of simple serving trays or cake stands with little calligraphy cards to tell you what flavor each cupcake is.

(via Trendsetting Wedding and Adrianne Bonafede)

For the newlyweds out there, what did your dessert table look like? Did you incorporate anything out of the ordinary?

What do they know? My giant “eff you” to the wedding world.

I’m really excited – giddy, actually – about our marriage. Some days, I’m even excited about the wedding. The day that we found our venue, for instance, or the first time I spun around in my wedding dress. I love when wonderful friends (Layla!) pass along bits of their wedding, because it makes me feel like ours will not be this one overly-hyped day, but a part of something bigger. It makes me happy when R gets excited about something wedding-related, like the day that he spent hours listening to local bands and contacting them to see if they’d play a wedding on our budget.

These are all things that came about fairly organically. I wasn’t really seeking them out, they just happened. They were done kind of stealthily, before everyone had an opinion on where we should get married, who should officiate, what I should wear, who should be in the bridal party, what food should be served, who should (or should not) be invited, what our favors should be, and a zillion other things that I am not listing but are really, definitely topics of conversation.

My reaction to all of this has been, essentially, not to plan for the wedding. I just keep telling people who are wedding troublemakers that we’re too far out to even think about it. If you’re not on that black list of crazy, then I may just be willing to talk about the wedding.

But when I think about our wedding day, I’m excited for things like seeing all of our friends and family, sharing our vows with everyone, having a blast on the dancefloor, and getting some truly kick-ass photos. Can everyone just stick to those details, please? Because the other ones, the ones where only certain veil lengths are proper, and getting married in our city is an incovenience, and *gasp* the lack of a wedding cake are making me want to pull my hair out and elope.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not something I dwell on often. We still talk about our life and our marriage much more (oh, and the honeymoon. What’s not perfect about Paris?) than we discuss the wedding.

So, as a remedy to all this wedding crazy, I want to share with you all a little about our relationship. We’ve been through quite the ups and downs, through the angsty high school years, the transition to college and adulthood, and the stress of finding careers. We’ve had those months where we didn’t know how we could possibly make ends meet financially, and the string of days where one of us was always working or in classes, and it felt like we were perpetually waving at each other on our way out. But we’ve been pretty good at keeping our standards directed at our relationship, and putting the other person first.

One of our old fights that we constantly rehashed was the good old lack of communication. I admit it, I was a hinter. I thought that somehow, he would know what I meant when I dropped a hint, and I got upset when he didn’t pick up on it. Then he would get mad that I was mad, and he’d storm out of the room or go silent. Which only infuriated me more, because I felt like he was giving up on the situation. There were some pretty stormy months like that, and it took sitting down and establishing how to fight fairly to actually eliminate most of our fights. Now they honestly don’t happen much unless one of us hasn’t  had enough coffee that morning. And really, who can be blamed for that?

The aspect of our relationship that has, without a doubt, kept us happy more than any other is how we spend our together and alone times. We don’t have the spending money to have an actual date night, but we love to plan dinners at home, take walks together, and sit at outdoor cafes for hours on summer mornings. That is our time, and when we’ve agreed upon it we don’t let life get in the way of it. Those days are so important to me, because they help me sort out my week and make sense of what’s going on in my life.

Almost equally important is the time we spend apart. There is something to be said for having independent relationships with friends apart from other couple friends, and I think I’d go insane without coffee dates, brunches, and girls’ nights.

On the surface, it seems like this is just regular relationship stuff. And it is, undoubtedly. I’m sure everyone works out their own system of what works. But this is the stuff of our marriage. Because at this point, marriage is just a public statement of our commitment, and an acknowledgement of that commitment from society. Marriage will not change what we already have, it will just solidify it. I love waking up in the morning to my best friend and the person I love right now just as I will through the years of our marriage – and that is why no amount of crazy wedding talk truly gets me down, even though it can be all sorts of annoying. Because really, it’s the marriage that matters to us.