Who needs a video?

I find it very interesting that a lot of brides (myself definitely included!) are so willing today to spend a large portion of their budget on photography, yet waiver almost indefinitely on whether or not they want a video of their day.  In today's highly digital age, videos are as easily accessible as photos, thanks to Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo and all the other video sharing sites out there.  But still, a lot of brides will say that having a video of their day isn't worth it. I was one of those brides.  And until we had made our photographer decision, I didn't think video was that important.  "I'm going to watch it once, and that's it" or "I'll just have someone I know videotape the ceremony, and that's it - I don't need to see anything else." - Common excuses I've said as to why we didn't need a video.  I was once asked to videotape someone's ceremony, and I'll be honest, it freaked me out.  I had no idea what I was doing and I was worried how it would turn out and this friend would forever hate me for not getting good enough footage of her ceremony.  Needless to say, I passed the buck onto someone else that day, and just watched the ceremony as a guest - as I should have - as any invited guest should.

I was in this "video is not important to me" boat, until just after we booked Mike Landis as our photographer. We saved nearly $2000 on our photography package, so we had some money to play with in our budget.  I decided to see what $2000 could get us in videography.  I found out early on, depending on the videographer - $2000 didn't get you very far. After looking into some really pricey packages, I was about to rule out videography (hello, letterpress...), when I found the site of a videographer who seemed to have good style, everything I would want in a package, and well within our price-range.  I emailed him, and within a week of even deciding if we even wanted videography, we had a great meeting and a good feeling about hiring a videographer.

Ken of Kenneth Stillman Videography is warm and friendly, and we shared a great meal with him while he showed us his work. He and Mr. Ly chatted about their favorite shows and movies, and got along as friends would (which considering our reasoning behind choosing a photographer is really important to us).  What we really LOVED about his packages, was that every single one of them included a same-day edit.  So while I'm pining away for professional photos, or wanting to relive every moment of my wedding day - immediately after it happens - I can.  At the end of my wedding, I will have something along the lines of this to share:

Same Day Edit - Philadelphia Wedding Video at Tendenza by Kenneth Stillman 

Considering his price was well within our budget and we get this PLUS a full-length digital video, after the fact - I'm not sure why we wouldn't hire him as our videographer. I am so excited about this, and I really find it hard to believe that I once uttered the words "Wedding video? Who needs a wedding video?"  I do.  

This is just one more reason I am SO glad we save money with the photographer, had we gone with our other choice I would have never had the option for video. 

Who else switched camps in the videography category? 

The Big Bang

Hive, if you saw me on the street a few years ago, you might not recognize me now. My hairstyle circa 2006 until about last year has changed numerous times in length, but the one thing that remained the same:

BANGS!  / Personal Photo

From super short to long - I've had bangs for the past 5 years until I decided it was time to grow them out.  Why the big change you might ask?

Well I wanted to go from this:

Shaggy Dog Look / Personal Photo 

to something more elegant, like

Photo by: Elizabeth Messina on Snippet and Ink via Lover.ly

or this

Photo by: Erich McVey on Wedding Chicks via Lover.ly

Photo by: Shannon Stellmacher Photography on Inspired By This via Lover.ly

I decided to grow out my bangs for the wedding.  I actually decided to start growing them out before I had a wedding date set, so my hair has been growing and growing for about a year now. And now my hair looks like this most days,

Gratuitous picture of my gorgeous niece and I, consultng about the atrocity which is my hair / Personal Photo

or like this, if I'm lucky, 

I have no idea how I achieved this look, but my mom looks pretty surprised by it!  / Personal Photo 

The point I'm trying to get to here is my hair is messy, all the time, unless I really style it.  And I'm tired of it. It's long, and heavy, and I am longing for my days of short hair and bangs. I'm counting down the DAYS until I can chop my hair - even if there are ~200 days to go... 

This is one bee who will have a PWC (with bangs returning, possibly??) scheduled as soon as I can following the wedding. 

Anyone else sacrifice a style you came to love for the sake of hair for your wedding day?  Do you think I should get my bangs back after the wedding?

The Last One, First.

Mr. Ly and I have so many songs that we could say are "our" songs. There are songs that remind me of almost every aspect of our relationship.

Some are ridiculously silly songs:
Your Love is My Drug - Ke$ha

What you've got boy is hard to find

Think about it all about it all the time

I'm all strung up my heart is fried

I just cant get you off my mind

This mostly stemmed from the very last line where Ke$ha says "I like your beard." seriously. Mr. Ly tried growing a beard early on in our relationship, and well, it didn't quite fill in the way he would have liked. So, this line stuck for both of us.  An entire song for the very last line. And while the song is not really my general taste in music, it reminds me of the very beginning of our relationship, where we would both walk around with these huge grins on our faces all the time.  Who wouldn't want to remember that on their wedding day?

Some are sweet, romantic, songs:
Feels Like Home - Edwina Hayes (from My Sister's Keeper Soundtrack), lyrics originally by Randy Newton 

If you knew how much this moment means to me

And how long I've waited for your touch

And if you knew how happy you are making me

I never thought that I'd love anyone so much

This song is so unbelievably sweet, and has a lot of meaning for us, but 3 out of the 4 weddings we've been to this past year had this song as one of the first dances.  We love it, but we want our song to be original, too. 

We have some fun dancey songs too,
Home - Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros 

I'll follow you into the park, 

through the jungle, through the dark

Girl, I've never loved one like you

Ahh, Home

Let me come Home

Home is wherever I'm with you

It's too upbeat for our first dance, but we love this song.  It was a contender for the last dance, but -again - too upbeat to end the night on as well. We want something a bit more sway-inducing, and sing-along-ish. However, it will find it's home (ha!), somewhere in our wedding.

The Avett Brothers, Mumford & Sons, Ingrid Michaelson, and many more bands/artists have been at the forefront of our relationship.  Which has made finding a first dance song kind of tortuous. We know we don't want something traditional, but we don't want something that is so obscure that people won't like it. All of these songs/artists will make an appearance at our wedding, in some way or another. But we are still searching for that perfect first dance song. (I have made many a suggestion - but this is the one area that Mr. Ly is super opinionated and has rejected everything I have said thus far)

Our last dance kind of just fell into our laps. In the same lines as Mrs. Unicycle, we want to be surrounded by loved ones as we soak in the final moments of our wedding. We want something fun, and special, and something a lot of our guests can sing along to.

We were recently at a Keane concert, and the sheer volume of people singing along to "Somewhere Only We Know" struck me, and I turned to Mr. Ly, mid song, and said "this is our last dance song." He agreed, (I was shocked!) and just like that, we have ONE musical decision made for the wedding.  It's not much, I know, but it's a good start to a long process of narrowing down what is important to us musically.

Somewhere Only We Know - Keane

And if you have a minute, why don't we go

Talk about it somewhere only we know?

This could be the end of everything

So why don't we go somewhere only we know?

Somewhere only we know

What were your first dance choices? Who else had a tough time convincing their FI to pick one? Any suggestions you think could sway Mr. Ly? 

Why Winter.

When people hear that we are planning our wedding for January, in a mid-atlantic climate, the most common question people follow with is WHY??  As if getting married in the winter is completely unheard of.  My go-to response is "Why not?"   And people say, aren't you worried it's going to snow??  No more than I'm worried about rain, or hail, or tornadoes, or the apocalypse, or monkeys falling from the sky on my wedding day.  I try to avoid worrying about the weather, because if there is one element that is completely beyond my control, it's this.

I've always wanted a winter wedding.  As a teacher, I know it makes the most sense to get married in the summer.  Time off to finalize plans right before the wedding, a long extended vacation right after, it makes perfect sense to me.  I get why the summer is so popular, but I have zero interest in getting married during these months.  While I love vacation, the weather from June through August is a different story.  Excessive heat and humidity, sweating, mosquitoes (I am a mosquito MAGNET) - no thank you.  I also have super sensitive skin, and after no less than 10 minutes in the sun, I get a terrible sun rash that itches me all day.  With all this, my wedding fragrance would have to be a combination of SPF 100 and bug spray. Not my idea of a romantic scent.  I will risk the chance that it might snow on my wedding day to avoid everything I don't like about summer weather.

But, as a librarian (and forever seeker of knowledge!), curiousity got the better of me, and I wanted to research what the history of our wedding date was like in Philadelphia.

So, being January and all, I'm most concerned with snowfall:

Philadelphia Snowfall Totals for the past 30 years / Image via The National Weather Service

I am not a liar, but I am MISS LYRE.

Hello hive!

When I got my email from Pengy, accepting me to be a blogger, I thought this was too good to be true.  I must have re-read that email 20 times to make sure it didn't get sent to me by accident!  But here I am, and I can't even describe how happy I am to be here.

We are the Lyres, even though we really and truly are terrible liars.

Who are the Lyres? 

Our most recent photo, May 2012, at a Weird Al concert.  We are such geeks. 

A Nectar-Moon

Nectar comes before honey, so Mr. Ly has gotten into the habit of calling our mini-moon our nectar-moon, which I think is perfect because our mini moon, really isn't going to be very "mini" after all.

When asked where we will be going on our honeymoon,  Mr. Ly and I don't really have an answer yet.  We do have a plan, albeit a rough one, and is really up in the air.  My standard answer is something along the lines of "We're taking a mini-moon right after the wedding, but since it's in the middle of the school year, we want to wait until summer to take a full honeymoon." This satisfies most people, but some people do inevitably follow up with the same question that I didn't answer the first time "WHERE are you going?" There is a long and short answer.

The short: We don't know.

The long:

For our mini (nectar) moon - we are relying solely on the Groupon/LivingSocial gods for this. We are looking for somewhere warm/tropical, all-inclusive, and a not too long plane ride from Philly (3-4 hours max!) that we can jet set off to Monday following our wedding.  We'll return Friday or Saturday (depending on the deal we can find), and back to work on Monday.  There have been A LOT of amazing deals lately to all-inclusive, tropical spots for super cheap. The problem is that most of them have a travel-by date that is a about a month before our wedding.  A few have extended into January, but apparently we are a bit too early for flash sales on travel for January 2013.

Here are some of our top favorites we've seen lately:

All-Inclusive 4 night stay in an ocean view suite for 2 in Cozumel - $849
3 hour flight from Philadelphia

Image via Groupon / Aura Cozumel Grand Resort

Image via Groupon / Aura Cozumel Grand Resort