a vow is a vow is a vow

by now, anyone who's been reading this blog is definitely tired of hearing me talk about gary and the wedding. well lucky you, i'm not done yet!

we're already halfway through the wedding preparations. all the suppliers have been booked, and most have been paid half their fees too. all the trinkets have been purchased, and this week, i'm having my trial make up done.

with all these details going through my head, i almost put on the back burner a very important thing: my wedding vows. good thing, it turns out, gary has been thinking about his the whole time. and since i need to have both our vows approved by the parish priest prior to the ceremony, i get to know what he has to say too. haha well he's not done with his vows yet but from what he shared to me, i am officially warning each and every person attending my wedding that it's gonna be a cry fest. :)

so. my wedding vows. i'm really excited about writing it. but see i have this attitude when it comes to important things i have to write. i tend to get intimidated by them. the more important something is, the harder it is for me to start writing. because i want it to be perfect. because i want it to be something worth remembering. because i want to be able to say everything i want to say. because i only get one shot at this. ok, now i'm even more overwhelmed!

the first thing i'll do with gary when he gets here...

besides that, is to watch dear john, a romantic drama based on the nicholas sparks novel about a soldier who falls in love with a college girl while he's on leave. the movie features channing tatum and amanda seyfried. it started showing last week here in the philippines...hope we can still catch it when gary comes home. happy valentine's day! :D

kinarir ko na 'to!

i'm a geek bride. i actually went to a bridal fair! LOL i dutifully traversed the aisles of sm mega trade hall with assistant bride (read:my mom) in tow. LOL

yes, see, this whole wedding thing is serious business i tell you. there's a great deal of difference between unity candles and secondary candles. an embossed monogram on the cover of an invitation and a flat print. a wooden photo album and a magnetic storybook. fondant and royal icing.

ok, so i'm a dweeb, but hey, i finished all i needed to do in one day! i (finally!) found me an invitation maker. nothing drop-your-mouth-open-it's-so-fierce, but i like the look and feel of it nonetheless. simple but elegant. so cliché but i mean it :)

i also bought a guestbook since the photo/video won't make me one. as we all know, gary's coming here only a few days before the wedding and with all the pre-cana requirements, we can't have a pre-nuptial shoot, which means nice print has no material to use for a guestbook. the guestbook i got is too generic. i'm thinking i'll vamp it up if i still got time.

we also got this pair of humongous secondary candles. and another pair of party poppers. we have a bunch for the reception already but ritchelle says we need two more for when we get out of church after the ceremony. i was gonna buy my wedding shoes but there is nothing magical at nine west or celine or vnc. maybe another mall some other time.

there weren't too many people at the fair. well actually i don't know. maybe i was expecting a noel bazaar kind of crowd, but hey, it's a bridal fair. how many brides can you gather at one place right? my brother jay met up with us for lunch. we told him to find us inside the bridal fair. he was sticking out there like a sore thumb. LOL he left right after eating, while my mom and i stayed on to check out every corner of sm megamall.

bad!

i'm bad.

with only nearly a month away from THE DAY, i still didn't have final suppliers for my photo and video, my invitations and my giveaways. ritchelle, my new best friend a.k.a. the wedding coordinator, said we should step on it and try to finalize these three by this week and i totally agree. so yes, i've been on the edge.

the husband's been really patient; i hate myself for being such a pain. we were online chatting and i've been throwing him super tantrums. blame it on the wait. i mean i hate, hate waiting and not knowing if i'm getting something done or not. i bet he was biting his lip trying to be nice to me when i was complaining like a three-year-old.

in case he reads this, as he sometimes does, this is a shoutout to you baby: i'm sorryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy for the S, and i'm trying to pull it together. there's no excuse for behaving that way. :(

anyway, bridezilla was able to deposit the 50% for nice print photography today, so that basically seals the deal, except for the formal contract signing. see nice print's blog on my blogroll, it's pretty cool :)

my brand-spanking new passport

my passport finally arrived in the mail today. i went through teleserv, the online service of dfa for renewing my passport. :D i paid extra for this service, but it was well worth it. no lines, and i didn't worry about the requirements much. gone is the green worn-out passport i had for years. the maroon passport i got carries the name ina magat :)

the old and the new

awww...all those travelling

i start writing a blog entry title first, usually knowing what i wanna say and the stories i wanna tell. but as i type this, soooo many things are going through my mind i can't even come up with a title. i'll just put down anything and everything.
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i hate it when brides say they're busy and stressed out. i really do. it gives me the perception of self-importance, complaining about seemingly frivolous matters that they should be keeping to themselves. but now that i'm in their place, i can't stop myself from declaring how busy and utterly stressed out i am. can't sleep, can't eat (okay, that's a lie. LOL) can't sleep, can't sleep. the funny thing is, the hubby's going through the same thing. :D

me: why do you sound so tired?
him: i didn't sleep enough.
me: how can you not sleep enough, we ended talking at 2am, you only woke up now, it's lunchtime.
him: well it's like i didn't sleep at all. i'm in bed, my eyes are shut, but my mind's awake, thinking about the wedding and going home.

cute no? :D
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my little chokchok is sick. he has mild fever and a really bad cough. since i came home, i've been so attached to my 8 month-old nephew. he's super fat...10.8 kilos at 8 months, and really funny-smart. he copies what he sees, and he makes these weird sounds. :D it breaks my heart to see him sad and quiet and sick :(



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important times like these when i miss my dad. the wedding coordinator asked me what song i want for the father-daughter dance...i simply had to say there won't be one.

i must admit i should remember my dad more than i do. i'm a daddy's girl and after his sudden death, i always thought it's impossible to live without him. the heart really does have a way of moving on. i think i'll go visit his grave this weekend.

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the entourage and the guestlist are getting out of hand...and i'm entirely to blame for it. gary's side's presence in this wedding is like not even 5% but the husband is just charming about it. he gives me a freehand on this and that makes everything a bit easier.

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i have a good team for the wedding. i know i did all the work at the start but i can see that the remaining weeks will be easier for me thanks to my coordinator, and the people at crown royale are just so cooperative and accomodating i'm really feeling good about my choice.

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this wedding will be so surreal. it'll be like a montage of my life. gradeschool friends. high school friends. college buddies. team kiko. friends from various points of my existence. gary's relatives. my relatives. all in one place at the same time. how weird is that???

bride wars

today i went to bataan's capital balanga city with my mom to check out crown royale, the only respectable hotel in town. i have envisioned a wedding in corregidor not long ago, but now that i'm here in the philippines, it just seems too taxing to stage a celebration there. besides, with our situation (gary arriving only 4 days before the ceremony) we have no choice really but to stick to my hometown, where i could (and was able to) use my life-long connections to make the wedding happen in such short notice. also, it just feels right to be married in a church where i spent almost all of my sundays hearing mass.

now that i've finished all the arrangements for the church requirements, the next target is to find the venue for our wedding. these days, my mom and i have been having our annabelle-ruffa moments more than usual. she insists i should have the reception in subic, which she says is a mere 10, 15 minutes away from hermosa via sctex. i'm more inclined to have it here in bataan, in balanga specifically, because...well, i just want to.

i've already given up the idea of a garden wedding because there's just too many risk factors that come with it: rain, too much sunshine, sound system quality, humidity, AVP equipment readiness, etc.

so yeah. today, we went to crown royale. it was surprisingly okay for a provincial hotel. it's new, it's clean and it's well-lit. the rates are okay, and we are sure to get the best suite if we book there. when the manager toured us around, i was a little disappointed with the first function room because while it was spacious, the really low ceiling gave me the feeling of suffocation.

then we saw the blue horizon area, which was really, really nice. it was a ballroom. like a ballroom. i wanted it right away, while my mom was exercising her haggling techniques. she was pretending it was ok--not good, not bad, and she was saying, yeah, well, we'll think about it.

minutes later when we went back to the management office, we were informed that another bride just confirmed her reservation for the blue horizon for the same day, at the same time (lunch). i was heart-broken. i had the gall to name-drop (one of the owners of the hotel was a contemporary in UP)and that got the manager pacifying me with a silly promise that we'll be notified should the other bride change her mind. actually, i'm the fifth bride to book one of their ballrooms for the same schedule. imagine that: five weddings at the same time in the same hotel!

now i have a lot of thinking to do, as if i'm not doing enough. how will i get the church to let me get married in the afternoon, so we can have the blue horizon area for dinner? the priest's rule is to not have weddings on saturday afternoons because they interfere with the anticipated mass at 5pm. do i just go for subic? do i plot against the person who stole my venue?!

my mom gave me a piece of advice: you can't get everything you want. i simply said, "watch me". i told you, bridezilla is in the house! :P

birth of the bridezilla

here we go!

the husband gave the ultimate good news: he has an idea when he'll be here! his troop had some sort of a meeting where they calendared their leave applications, and he finally got the schedule that gets him to kuwait in march 14 for a few days of safety briefing before flying to the philippines via germany. we're thinking he'll be here on the 20th, at the latest.

first and foremost, i need to sweet-talk the parish priest and those who give the pre-cana seminar to let us finish all the wedding requirements within the first three or four days that gary is here in the country. this is of course really ambitious because the normal process takes months to happen. we gotta pull some serious strings i tell you.

then if i'm able to do that, the real stress of booking a venue, finding the perfect gown, sending out the invites, etc. begins.

witness the birth of the bridezilla. mwahahahaha

pre-cana long distance style

yes, my friends, some very fortunate progress at last!

i went to the church secretary to tell her that gary's coming to the philippines this march, that he'll be here more or less 14 days, and that yes, please, by all means, get the monsignor out here before i lose the chutzpah to demand a short pre-cana process.

the nice secretary honestly told me that as someone who's listed many a happy couple in her marriage registry, four days to get all the church requirements done is nearly impossible. i pushed for it anyway.

so now gary and i find ourselves on yahoo messenger answering agree-disagree questions about marriage. if you wanna get married as bad as we do, going through the pre-cana while you're worlds apart is a pretty fair deal. it was actually pretty fun too, discussing what he thinks and what i think about every aspect of getting married. we finished page 1 of the 6 pages we have as advance reading. we'll be doing this for the next 5 more days, then we'll go through the sacraments, the prayers, etc.

he'll get here on a tuesday and we'll head straight to the priest for our 1st interview. a relationship seminar the morning after. cathecesis lectures for wednesday and thursday. 2nd interview and confession on friday. wedding on saturday. im already getting exhausted just thinking about it. hay my gulay!:P

two weddings and an anniversary

this morning i went to the st. peter de verona parish secretary's office to register for the church wedding. we need to prepare some documents (baptismal and confirmation certificates, etc.) and we have to undergo a really time-consuming process (pre-cana seminar, cathecesis, interviews, confession)so i have, once again, turned on my panic button. this is aggravated by the fact that gary doesn't know when he will be here in the philippines. he applied for a two-week leave starting the 20th of april, but as the army goes, you don't know what's gonna happen until you get your oders. so how does one prepare the church schedule, the invitations, the venue, the flowers, the wardrobe, when there is no set date for the ceremony? you tell me.

gary insists it will happen. we both want this to be the wedding we have always planned and dreamed of, so even with the time constraint, we both promised to do everything in our power to have a wedding this april. it's now or never.

our first picture together

i've been meaning to blog about our civil wedding for a long time, but never got the chance, until now. today is our first wedding anniversary, and it's the perfect time to reminisce.

everything went wrong in our civil wedding. i mean everything. we were supposed to wait for my mom to get to the states before we tied the knot, but gary and i knew we had to get it done fast so he can put me into his records in the army, apply for housing inside the base, and be together in el paso. i was then staying at his parents' in santa clara, and it killed us to be finally in the same country but still be living apart.

so during his holiday break, he went home to santa clara and decided to finally get married. i was of course, feeling really really guilty for not having any of my family members with me. gary felt sorry for me too, but the longer we'd wait, the harder it was gonna get for us.

so we woke up one morning, and a few hours later, found ourselves driving with his family for 16 hours to nevada, where the marriage contract can be had the same day you get married. we needed this, because gary was scheduled to fly back to el paso in two days from san jose. this means we had to get the marriage contract and hurry back home for him to make it to his flight. we didn't even have time to prepare all the details, not even our wardrobe.

many hours into the trip, gary held my hand from the driver's seat and told me, "this isn't the wedding i have for you. we'll do this for practical reasons for now, but i'll give you the wedding we've always wanted. that's a promise."

we got there at dawn, and while we were all sleepless, nobody wanted to sleep anymore because we had to wait for the first chapel to open, have the ceremony, and go. at around 9am gary and i found this dainty little church that looks like it came straight out of the set of gilmore girls. i told gary, if we're gonna have this rushed wedding, at least have me married in this pretty little chapel. so we got scheduled for 10:30am. we then had to get the marriage license from the county clerk.

so picture this. we were both really tired from the really long trip. except for the drive-thru dinner we had, nobody's eaten anything yet. we couldn't get the damn GPS to work. so gary and i drove around and around looking for the city hall. i was getting really impatient, so i told him we should just stop and ask for directions. "baby, i'm a scout," he said. 30 minutes before our church schedule, and i was ready to walk out on him, the scout finally pulled over and asked for help.

it was a mad rush to the county clerk's office, and while i wasn't thinking anymore as i filled up the form, gary pulled me close and kissed me, when i asked why, he looked at the marriage certificate i was holding. he said it felt so good. i smiled back. it sure did.

so we got back to the room to get ready while everyone was out killing time before the wedding. gary and i got back to the van, and when we were about to pick up his family, he looked at me and said, "listen, let's do this on our own. it's only fair, you have no family with you, so i won't have my family with me. just you and me." and it was the most romantic thing he ever thought of.

the world stopped when we stood in the altar. it was just so romantic. the church was so pretty and everything was so quiet. it was only him, and me, and the reverend. we recited our vows nervously, and when the ceremony was over, we both felt so much closer to each other. like it was our very own little secret. what started out so wrong, in the end, was every bit right.