Monday, February 21, 2011

Need Your Advice

Hi ladies (and guys if there are any of you reading this)! I wanted to interrupt the wedding recaps to ask for your advice on a wedding/etiquette related matter. Mr. Milk and I were recently talking about this issue, and although we don't have to make a decision immediately, I thought it would be interesting to get your input. So here goes...

We have been invited to a wedding of a first cousin of mine that will be taking place in June. While the couple and their families (i.e. my aunt and uncle) live abroad, they are having the wedding here, since the majority of the extended family lives here.

These family members were invited to our wedding. Between our invitation being sent out and the actual wedding date, my cousin got engaged. So I made sure that they knew that her new fiance (I had no idea she was in a relationship at all) was also invited to the wedding, even tough his name wasn't on the original invitation. I need to mention that we are not close. I haven't seen them in years and years, and we have always lived in different countries. Only my aunt came to our wedding. We heard nothing from either of my two cousins, even though we had phone and email contact written on our invitation. 

We have four weddings to go to between May and Sept of this year, all of close friends and family that attended our wedding also. My cousin is holding her wedding in a remote location where hotel accommodation is extremely expensive, and driving back home after a long night is not really ideal.

So here comes our dilemma. Should we attend this wedding? Yes it's family but to be honest, I personally feel no obligation to be there. When we take a step back and look at all the expenses of the four weddings we are already going to attend (one is in the UK), its a heck of a lot of money! And for people that made zero effort when it came to our wedding (I mean even just an email, forget paying to come out here for it) I'm leaning towards a no. The catch is that it is first line family, and our absence will be noticeable since mostly everyone else (I think) will be there.

What are your thoughts? What would you do?

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

A Party To Remember: The Details

So time for the nitty gritty! I love detail shots! As people say, love is in the details... If I've already posted some of these pictures, please forgive me. There are just too many to keep track!

Our wedding invitations, which Mr. Milk designed, along with our wedding bands

The bubbles, tossing flowers, and signs for Mr. Milk :)

My SHOES!

Details on the dress

I doooooo

My colorful bouquet

Aisle arrangements

Part of our food buffet

More food!

The executive chef at the InterContinental is a sweetheart! We have become friends with him! Even though we had such an extensive buffet at the wedding, he personally went to the kitchen and created this plate of fillet steak just for us!

Dessert and fruit buffet

The ballroom! I get giddy every time I see these pics! 

More ballroom!

On half of our tables we had candelabra's. They looked so pretty when the lights reflected off them.

On the other half we had these flower arrangements. 

Here's a shot with the lighting we had

These were on our head table

The place setting with the favors

Close-up of our favors. The contained a dense lava cake and a small bottle of wine.

Cake, champagne, and flutes

I love our champagne flutes!

And finally the pic of the head table.

All Photos courtesy of Petros Sordinas Photography

Up next: Greeting our guests.

Monday, February 7, 2011

A Party To Remember: Our Entrance and Cake Cutting

I was hoping to be able to show you guys a video of our entrance, but that requires Mr. Milk's help, and unfortunately the poor guy is so busy with work he hasn't even had the chance to do any of the editing he wanted to for the wedding footage. So as soon as he has the time, I will come back with some video footage. In the meantime, here are some of the pics of our entrance and cake cutting. 

So here we are :) Our entrance song was a remix of the Black Eyed Peas song I Gotta Feeling.

I love that the ballroom was pitch black other than that one spotlight on us

Cutting...

Still cutting...

Failed at cutting and so needed the help of the hotel experts! To our defense, the knife was crap :)

Our cake was nothing wow. In face, the 2 bottom layers are fake. Since our wedding favor was so rich, and we had a dessert buffet that was out of this world, we decided that the cake itself was more for the tradition and pics than anything else. The top tier was a chocolate/biscuit cake, which we fed each other and then had the waiters take away. A lot of people later asked about why the cake hadn't been served :) 

A little worried that I would get cake in the face. I didn't thankfully!

Toasting our guests

Drinking our champagne...

Downing our champagne :) After taking a sip and uncrossing our arms, Mr. Milk whispered to me "down it!" So I did :)

I love this picture! Sitting down after the cake cutting and getting ready for the dinner and party to start!

All Photos courtesy of Petros Sordinas Photography

Up next: Some detail shots