Whistle while you work

Or drink some wine, whatever works for you. :)

It was finally the week of our wedding! There was a lot to do and we went to straight to work getting things done! Mr. Castle and I got our marriage license,

I had a hair trial....

... and we started finishing up all our projects! My Matron of honor and I went to Party City and Target to get some goodies for the kids bags. Unfortunately I was a very bad blogger and didn't take any pictures! I do however remember what I put in the bags. Each small orange gift bag contained, a box of animal crackers, a lollipop, a wooly willy, an orange glow stick, a rubber frog, a small pin ball game, bubbles and this:

I love the idea of giving kids coloring books, but I was too nervous to give the kids crayons or markers. One of my young cousins would have ended up drawing on the walls. I found these at Party City and they work just like the title says, you scratch to draw! I did worry a bit about the pointy scratcher but we opened one up and wasn't sharp or dangerous. I got this picture from the little boy I babysit. He kept everything from his bag!

After we finished the kids bags my bridesmaids and I got to work putting labels on all the tic tacs. It takes a lot of concentration and skill to put the labels on straight. We kept laughing as my girls would say, "Oh who's so and so? They got a good one," or "Sorry who ever you are, yours is a little crooked." After we finished putting the labels on we arranged them by table.

You'll notice that our tic tacs are a neon orange color. We ordered them online and instead of the clear box with the orange tic tacs showing through, it was an orange box... it wasn't really what we had in mind, but what can you do? We got over it. 

Once they were arranged we put each tables tic tacs into a zip lock bag with the table number and seating chart.

Lots of work going on in here. In the right corner you can see the orange kids bags!

Finished and ready to go!

Next we went over to my Dad's to put the labels on the wine bottles. Of course we had to open a couple bottles and try our custom wine. :)

We had a pretty good system. Bridesmaids pre-peeled the labels and Mr. Castle and I put them on the bottles. Mr. Castle made a little jig out of orange construction paper so we could make sure the labels were straight.

Mr. Castle concentrating on getting the label straight

I may or may not have sampled a little to much wine...

We really could not have finished everything if wasn't for the help of my amazing bridesmaids and family. We had such a fun week and it was nice to spend so much time with them! 

I was feeling pretty good about how the projects were turning out and how fast we were getting things accomplished. I was starting to get excited! I even got an amazingly perfect fortune in my fortune cookie. 

Yes I will!

Did you have a busy wedding week finishing up projects? Was wine involved???

All Photos are personal

Crafty Castle-in-law

I am very lucky. I have an amazing Mother-in-law. She is one of the nicest people I have ever met. She was so excited about the wedding and was willing to help in any way possible. We took her up on that offer and gave her with a few projects to tackle. Of course everything we gave her was finished and waiting for us when we arrived in California!

 We were greeted by this adorable sign. MIL Castle knows my love for turtles and always includes one for me :)

Their whole house was decorated in "wedding inspired decor." It was so cute. Right away MIL Castle showed us our completed up mailbox. We had done our hand prints the last time we were in Cali and she finished it up by adding our names. 

MIL Castle made it look so much better than Mr. Castle and I ever could! 

(Excuse me looking beat in this photo... we had just arrived after a long stressful flight)

Next MIL Castle took me into her bedroom to show me the sash she was working on for my dress. Let me back up a little and explain. When I found my dress my consultant added a sash and I fell in love with the way it looked. 

 A reminder photo of finding my dress

Unfortunately that sash was $800... yeah it was pretty but not that pretty. MIL Castle came to the rescue and offered to make me a similar sash. I bought a flower for the sash from the etsy seller Silverpencils. It was meant to be a hair flower, but I just asked the seller to add a pin backing instead of a hair comb. MIL Castle had already made the sash and all we had to do was choose the spot for the flower.

I decided I liked the flower in a similar spot as it was on the $800 sash.

A close up. Looks good to me!

My MIL even surprised me with a hidden turtle on the under side of the sash!

My special turtle!

My MIL was so sweet to do these things for us and have them ready right when we arrived! She did an amazing job. I was so excited to wear something she had made on our wedding day. :)

Did your Mother in law help with any special wedding projects?

It's all about the details

Sorry I've been absent for a while. Those thank you notes took longer than I thought! ;) Before I start my official recaps I wanted tell you all about some things I didn't get to blog about before the wedding. I didn't have time to write about them because I was scrambling to finish them!

The weeks leading up to the wedding were crazy. We were constantly working on projects that needed to be finished before we traveled to California. It was a stressful time and some of our projects were not going as smooth as we would have hoped. I have to say our biggest stress was caused by our programs.

Designing them was actually the easy part. I found the template for our programs by googling "Wedding program template."On the results list is a link that says, "[doc] Free wedding program template." Clicking on it automatically downloads a template for Word which looks like this:

Personal Screenshot of template

We changed it around a bit to fit with our ceremony. We could have created our own program from scratch but it was sooo helpful having the template and just plugging in our information. After I filled it in Mr. Castle took over making it look pretty in photoshop. He used the same fonts that are featured on all our our details; the table numbers, escorts cards, favor labels, etc. He added a photo from our engagement pictures and created us a beautiful program!

Personal images 

When it came to printing we thought we'd save some money and print them ourselves at home. We printed them on some card stock that I had bought on sale from Michaels. We started printing them and ran into an annoying problem. For some reason our printer was using color ink even though the programs should have only required black ink. We tried to change the settings, we searched online for an answer and for the life of us we couldn't figure out why our printer was being so stupid! Also it was taking about three minutes to print one page... We used up two cartridges of colored ink and then decided to give up. At that point we had printed the inside of all the programs and had about 50 more of the cover to print. I took the unfinished ones to office depot, something we should have done in the first place, and they printed the rest in 10 minutes. Lesson learned, some things are best left to professionals. 

We did have some luck with our other DIY home printing projects. Before printing the programs and wasting all that ink, we printed out escort cards! Designed of course by Mr Castle. 

Keeping with our "theater" theme. Our Escort cards were our guests "ticket" to find their seat.

Next we printed our custom wine bottle favor labels. Mr. Castle designed a separate label for white and red with a cute quote to go along with each. We bought full sheet label paper and printed six labels per sheet. I cut them all to size with my fancy paper trimmer. We put a label on a tester bottle to see how they looked. 

It's hard to read, but it says, "A bottle of red for joining us as we wed!"

The white reads, "A bottle of white for joining us on our big night."

And finally one of my favorite details: Our place cards. Early on I had the idea to incorporate orange tic tacs into our wedding. Not only are they the best flavor, in my opinion, I also loved the pop of orange they would bring. We decided to make our own labels and use them as place cards. Once again Mr. Castle went to work creating a layout and then filing in each of our guests name. We make a good team. I come up with the idea and he executes the project! 

We made a test label with our cats name :) The label reads, "Orange you happy for Sharon & Jeff?"

The date on the top

A cute poem on the back reads, "Shake these mints for marital bliss & keep on shaking until they kiss!"

All of these projects took a lot of time, which is why I never wrote about them until now! We designed, printed and cut all the labels in New York and that was only the first faze of these projects. We still had to add the labels to the wine and tic tacs which were waiting for us in California. We packed up our labels, programs and other wedding projects and got ready to head to west!

A failed stowaway attempt. Our boys were not happy that they couldn't come to the wedding. 

Did you have to wait to finish a project until you were at your wedding location? Anyone else have any printing fiascos?
All Photos are personal

A Couple Notes on Thank-you's

Now that I've told you all about the Castle honeymoon, I guess it's time to get back to wedding related things. I have plenty to share about before getting into official recaps but there is something that seems to be keeping me from finishing any of those posts... You see, I'm still working on finishing our thank you notes.

The first step was ordering them. We used a wedding photo for the front and a couple pictures from our honeymoon on the inside. We ordered them from shutterfly and I think they turned out really nice!

Personal Photo/ Front

Personal Photo/Inside

Next it was time to start writing! I've learned I'm actually pretty good at writing thank you notes. That is, until my hand starts cramping up after I write about ten. I'm not just being a sissy, it really hurts! It's probably because I write too fast and I'm a little out of practice in this paperless age. If I was writing thank you notes on my iPhone they would all be done by now. But alas they're not and I've got to get them done before I can move on to anything else!

I've come up with a sort of outline that I find helpful when writing our thank you cards. It helps speed up the process a bit. Sometimes I have a hard time coming up with what to say and I know I can't spend ten minutes contemplating each and every thank you note. So I searched some threads here on the boards, got some ideas and came up with a general outline for our thank-yous. Here's the opener I came up with:

"Thank you so much for being a part of our special day. We were so happy to have you there to celebrate with us."

Then I move onto something more personal and thank them for their gift.

"Thank you so much for the waffle maker! Mr. Castle has already made many waffle breakfasts for us. It's the perfect addition to our kitchen."

Then I come up with a closer. Depending on the relationship it's either really mushy or just very gracious.

"Thank you again so much!" or "Thanks again so much! We love you and miss you!"

Mr. Castle and I had a debate/argument on how to handle monetary gifts. We finally compromised and came up with this wording:

"Thank you so much for your generous gift. It will be a great help to us as we start our married life together."

Thank you cards can be stressful and cause stupid arguments... When it came to thanking people for honeyfund gifts there was no debate. They were the easiest to write! It was great to be able to tell them a little about our experience with the gift they gave us.

"Thank you so much for your contribution to our honeyfund. We had the most amazing dinner in Venice at our hotel's restaurant. We ate in the garden, which was beautiful, and the food was fantastic! Thank you so much for such a thoughtful gift!"

It makes it easier to have a little bit of a format in your head. Of course some thank you notes will be different depending on the relationship. I haven't even started on my bridesmaids because I know writing those will involve tears... and with certain guests I added something more specific like, "I loved dancing with you," or "I will always remember you saying, 'When did your wedding turn into a rave?' That made me laugh so hard!" (And yes someone did say that to me!) Thank you notes can be daunting but it's best to just bite the bullet, finish them and move on. In fact I better go finish some now!

But before I go finish, I do have one question for the hive: Do you think you should to send a thank you to people who didn't bring a gift? I know there have been many threads on this subject but I wanted a fresh opinion. Some people think the wedding favor, in our case a bottle of wine, was thank you enough. Others say etiquette requires you to send a thank you to everyone who attended. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. What do you think?

Poll: Should you send a thank you note to someone who did not give a gift?

option a) Yes, always!

option b) No, the favor was enough.

The Castles abroad: Disneyland Paris!

Yes I had to dedicate a whole post to Disneyland Paris. What can I say? The Castles love Disney! Mr. Castle and I hope to visit all the Disney parks in our lifetime so we were happy to cross one off the list on our honeymoon! First off let me tell you about where we stayed!

Staying in one of the Disneyland Paris hotels was not an option for us. The prices per night are quite pricey, even by Castle honeymoon standards. Mr. Castle found us a close hotel that offered a free shuttle to the park. This hotel was sooo nice, probably the best hotel we stayed in on our honeymoon. The Hotel L'Elysee is right across the street from a Metro RER stop. It was very easy to get from central Paris. We couldn't have been happier with the area around the hotel, tons of restaurants and cafes. I had the best cappuccino of the whole trip right across the street from our hotel!

Our first picture in the park. I apologize now for all my iPhone pictures. We didn't want to carry around our nice camera...

I will start by saying that Disneyland Paris is just as magical and enjoyable as Disneyland/World. There are some striking cultural differences though between Disneyland Paris and its domestic counterparts. One thing that we took note of right away when visiting the park was that we were joined mostly by families with children. It's not like in the states where Disneyland and World are visited by "children of all ages." This park definitely catered to young children. There are lots of rides and walk throughs for children to experience. There were also multiple play grounds in the park, something that I have never seen at an amusement park. After around 4pm not only did the park clear out, because all the kids were going home, but all the restaurants closed! There was not one place to get dinner inside the park, Frontierland became a true ghost town! We had to leave the park and go over to the Disney Village, their equivalent to Downtown Disney, to have dinner. The advantage to the park being geared towards kids and everyone clearing out around 4pm, is that we basically walked onto every ride. The big "E ticket" rides like Pirates of the Caribbean, Space Mountain and Phantom Manor (AKA Haunted Mansion) were not very popular with the children so we never waited more than five minutes.

We really enjoyed our visit to the Park. We found ourselves at times just walking around taking everything in. Mr. Castle told me before we visited that it is considered the most beautiful of the Disney Parks and I can see why. It seemed everywhere we turned was a picturesque scene. You really could just walk around and enjoy the beauty of everything around you.

A beautiful view of Big Thunder Mountain. I have to say Disneyland Paris wins for the best Big Thunder Mountain. It's much more thrilling than it's American Cousins.

One of my favorite things at Disneyland Paris was the Castle. Surprise, surprise, Mrs. Castle likes Castles. Mr. Castle informed me that since there are actual medieval castles in Europe they decided to make this Disneyland Castle more "fairy tale" like.

Sleeping Beauty's Castle 

We were so excited to be there! 

The best part about the Disneyland Paris Castle? There is a dragon underneath it!

Shout out to Miss Dragon! Let's face it, dragons are pretty cool and this animatronic Dragon was amazing. I took a video on my iPhone so I could share with everyone the awesomeness of this dragon.

Hope you like Mr. Castles cameo at the end there.

If you are a huge fan of Disneyland in California or the Magic Kingdom at Disney World, you might be interested to know some of the major differences at Disneyland Paris. For one, the area that we know as Tomorrowland is called Discoveryland.

Mr. Castle thinking about a Discovery yet to be made

What we know as "The Haunted Mansion," is called "Phantom Manor." It's very different.

The story of this ride is centered around a bride. :)

Space Mountain is completely different in Paris. From the outside decor to the roller coaster itself. The roller coaster features a loop and it is much more intense than the others.

Something you would NEVER see in California or Orlando. Five minute wait for Space Mountain!!! 

Walking right onto Pirates of the Caribbean. Mr. Castle thinks he might enjoy the Paris version over the original at Disneyland. It's a close call, but for me I vote for the original.

My only complaint about our visit would have to be the weather. It was freezing! Our first day it rained. Our second was day was dry but just as cold.

Freezing and trying to keep as warm as possible. I had to buy extra socks for my poor frozen toes.

Even with the cold we had a great time. We got to be kids on our honeymoon and experience one of our favorite places in a different country!  

Would you make a special trip to an amusement park on your honeymoon? Any other Disney nerds? Tokyo Disney is next on our list!

Just in case you didn't catch it the first time!

The Castles Abroad: Italy!

The Castles Abroad: Paris! 

All Photos (and video) are personal!

The Castles Abroad: Paris!

We decided to fly from Venice to Paris. It was surprisingly cheaper than taking the train. Italy really wore us out so we decided to take it a little easier in Paris. We did a lot of the touristy things, we went to the top of the Eiffel tower, visited the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Opera Garnier and the Arc du Triomphe. We also took a tour of the Palace of Versailles.

 A beautiful day in Paris

 I wore special socks

 The Castles in front of the Eiffel Tower

 The Palace of Versailles

 We made sure to go when all the fountains were on in the gardens at Versailles. 

 Visiting the Opera Garnier. Mr. Castles rule was no singing anything from Phantom of the Opera. 

One highlight during our time in Paris was meeting up with friends! A friend of ours was visiting Paris with her best friend and they offered to take Mr. Castle and I to their favorite tea house, Mariage Freres. It was quite an experience. The tea, the food, and the company were all fabulous but the most memorable part was the dessert. It was a chocolate mouse wrapped in, wait for it... edible gold! Yeah, we ate gold on our honeymoon.

Enjoying our tea and ready to dig into our dessert! 

Best dessert ever

Later that same evening we met up with our friends once again to have a picnic on the river Seine. We had some wine and watched the sun go down with Paris as our backdrop. We saw a lot of people enjoying wine outdoors in parks all around Paris and we were happy to partake! We had so much fun. There was definitely some tipsy, OK more than tipsy, tap dancing in the streets of Paris. It was a night to be remembered!

Our picnic spot in Paris. The tip of the Île de la Cité (The Island where Notre Dame is located)

Later that evening... Mr. Castle eager to carry his bride

My final Paris highlight took place on the last evening of our honeymoon. As a wedding gift we were given a dinner cruise with Bateaux Parisiens. We had to "dress smart" for this dinner so we carted Mr. Castle's suit around during our whole trip just for this one night! But it was worth it, he looked very handsome.

My handsome husband, waiting for the Metro

This dinner cruise was amazing. The food, the view, the wine, everything was incredible. It was the best possible way to end our honeymoon.

Our food was to die for!

The Castles "dressing smart" 

The view of the Eiffel tower during desert!

Well I took you through to the last night of our honeymoon, but I still have one more location to recap! In the middle of our stay in Paris we left the city for two days to visit Disneyland Paris! Coming up next!

If you missed the first half of the Castles Abroad check it out!
The Castles Abroad: Italy!