Maui Wedding Planning Trip: The Town of Paia

After we had our cake tasting, we headed into Paia. First thing on our agenda was to mail out our welcome dinner invitations for the wedding. We stopped in at the post office, mailed them out and talked a bit with one of the locals who said we must go to Paia Fish Market and get a fish burger before we left town. Since we already had lunch plans doing a tasting with our wedding venue, we weren't able to get lunch at Paia Fish Market, but we did stop by and check it out and added it to our list of places to eat when we are back for our wedding.

Just mailed out the Welcome Dinner invitations at the Paia Post Office. 

Our other goal (yes, yes, I'm very goal orientated) for going into Paia was to gather information for our wedding guests on the town. We wanted to make sure we knew what the town had to offer, the feel for it and what it had that would make our guests the most happy. For example, they had a really cute shop, Alice in Hulaland that I know Amanda will love and I can now direct her to go to that store. 

Reveal: Ev'rybody Loves a Hukilau

We interrupt our previously scheduled Wedding Planning Trip blog programming to bring you this post: 


Oh, we're going to a hukilau
A huki, huki, huki, huki, hukilau
Ev'rybody loves a hukilau
Where the laulau is the kau kau at the big luau

1948 Jack Owens

 
Having a destination wedding that can be more costly for guests to attend we wanted to make sure to do as much as we could for our guests. You might remember from before when I talked about our wedding week activities. The first wedding activity we have planned is our Welcome Hukilau on the 4th of July!

While on Maui, we mailed out the invitations to our Welcome Hukilau. We loved the addded touch of the Hawaii postmark. Our guests already got their invitations so we can now share them with all of you! Feast your eye on these fabulous works of art and notice how the large graphic in the top right hand corner matches up with the graphic on the wedding week activities. Yeah, it's another one of those little details that we planned.

Maui Wedding Planning Trip: Let Us Eat Cake!

Mention cake and I turn into Homer Simpson. Ooohhhh, cake! Complete with a little drool running down my chin. It doesn't matter if it's cake cake, cupcakes or ice cream cake. I love it all. Well, except chocolate cake. Don't even get me started on my disgust for chocolate cake! Oops, too late!

Now you will notice that we did not even try any chocolate cake during our cake tasting. I hate it that much. I don't even want to try it. I don't want it touching my tongue. And I certainly don't want it ruining any of my wonderful tropical cake flavors!

We are having our cake made by Lezley at Mama's Fish House. Yes, that Mama's Fish House. The one every bride goes to on her honeymoon to Maui. The one with not only scrumptious food and delectable drinks, but also amazingly beautiful and delicious desserts. I mean, have you tried their lilikoi creme bruele or their Black Pearl? We are talking down right sinful!

When I first started talking to Lezley about our cake, I kept thinking how am I supposed to pick out cake flavors when I can't even taste them? It's not like it's only vanilla and chocolate (yuck). There were all of these other flavors to pick from. Flavors I'd never had before. Flavors if not done correctly, could be very very wrong! Truth be told, the whole idea of taking a wedding planning trip to Maui was all because we wanted to taste cake!

Maui Wedding Planning Trip: A night on the West Shore

Have you ever had such a long day that it felt like two days? That's how this day was for us. After we had our amazing whale experience and spent most of the day cruising around Lahaina, we headed back to our timeshare. When we arrived the night before it was already dark and when we left in the morning it was still dark, so this was the first time we were seeing it in the light. And it was beautiful. It was right on the beach with tons of tropical flowers.

Originally we were planning on having a little rest when we got back to the timeshare, but once we got there I wanted to get right in the water and pushed for us to get back out the door. Unfortunately, by the time we got down there the wind had come up and it felt to windy to go swimming. Plus, the water was pretty dark by that time, the area had a lot of coral and since we didn't know the beach at all, we figured better safe then sorry. I know, what a bunch of squares, we are!

The view of the beach from our timeshare.

Maui Wedding Planning Trip: Day in Lahaina

Once off the boat, we bounced over to Lahaina Coolers for some breakfast. I looked up breakfast places on-line that were supposed to be good in Lahaina and this was one of the places that came up. Be warned, the menu they have on-line is not the menu they have in the restaurant.

I had macadamia nut pancakes with coconut syrup and Drew had an omelet. Like always, we split our food with each other. We always eat "family style". What did we think of it? It was alright. Nothing special and not somewhere that we would want to eat, again. If this is one of the best places Lahaina has to offer, it's not saying much.

After breakfast we set off to get some wedding shopping done and see some of the sites around town. We were on a mission to find a few more items for the out of town bags for our guests, plumeira flower clips and lauhala baskets. Lahaina has both ABC store and Hilo Hattie so we made sure to hit both. Between those places we found everything we were looking for. It was great to get all of that checked off the wedding to do list.

It's a little disappointing that Drew isn't wearing an Aloha shirt in this picture.

While shopping we stopped at the Honolulu Cookie Company to try some of their cookies to maybe get some for the wedding. Their cookies are a Hawaiian shortbread and are oh, so tasty.  They had all the cookies out to sample and we tried some of every singe one. Our favorites were the original macadamia nut, pineapple, Kona coffee and chocolate dipped macadamia nut. Make sure to stop by one of their locations when in Hawaii. We didn't pick up any then for the wedding (doesn't mean we won't later), but we did get some to bring home to a couple people back on the mainland.

Maui Wedding Planning Trip: People Watching Whales Watching People

Huh? What? People watching whales watching people? I know, it sounds a little confusing. But bare with me and I promise it will make perfect sense.

Our first full day on Maui we got up bright and early to go whale watching at sunrise. It wasn't officially whale season, but it was just about two weeks before and there are always plenty of whales already there at that time. Why did we choose to go so early in the morning you ask? Well, for a few reasons. 

First of all the light is said to be amazing at that time. Second, some say there are more whales at that time. Third, we were still on west Coast time. And last, but not least, there are way less people on the early morning boat trips. Not many ppl want to have to be at the dock at 5:45 am. And you know what? All of this was true. 

It was still dark when we arrived at the dock in Lahaina. Which made for the Banyan Tree on Front Street looking really spooky and amazing, at the same time. Good thing was that free parking was really easy to find at this time of day. Not always an easy task later in the day in Lahaina. Or any of the towns on Maui, for that matter. 

The Banyan Tree.

Maui Wedding Planning Trip: Arriving on Maui

I've got to give you a little back story about the craziness of us getting to Maui. The night before we left, it started snowing. I'm not talking about a little snow either. It was coming down fast and a lot of it. Of course thoughts crossed our minds if we were going to be able to get out of the airport or not the next day.

Snow coming down at Knotty Cakes Ranch.

When we woke up the snow had already started melting, but not all was well. We went to turn on the lights and no power. We had to get ready for our trip in the dark! There was no making myself pretty since I could barely see. It's not easy getting ready with a flashlight in one hand. Luckily, we got out of there, to the airport on time and by the time we boarded, the snow was almost gone. Needless to say, we were more than ready to be on Maui by the time we landed!

Just a very little bit of snow left. Nothing  was stopping us from getting to Maui!

Maui Wedding Planning Trip: Oahu Layover

We are back from our trip and so happy we went! Actually we wish we were still there. Anyone want to get us a place to live on Maui for a wedding gift? Oh, come on! It's not asking for that much. :)

I wrote the blog below real quick in Honolulu, once on the plane and took the pictures with my iPhone while literally running through the airport to catch our flight to Maui. Unfortunately, I never had enough time to post it. I didn't even get back on my computer again until Sunday night. I still wanted to post it even though we've come and gone from Maui to hold you all over until we are able to post about everything we got done on our planning trip and everything else we got to enjoy. Seriously, there's a lot to share and we are so excited to share it with all of you.

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Aloha! We are on Hawaii! I can't believe it! Seriously, it's freaken unbelievable! I haven't been here since I lived here as a keiki (child) over 30 years ago. One short island hopper flight from Oahu and we will be on Maui!

This is one of my favorite vintage Hawaiian maps. Loved seeing a huge version of it at the airport.

Fly Us to Maui!

We are all packed and ready to go to Maui! We've worked-out at the gym, built a base tan, waxed and had manis and pedis. Ok, I'm the only one who waxed and had a mani and pedi. But, Drew did shave.

Do you think we will be able to sleep tonight? I've been so excited, I haven't really been able to sleep that well all week. Instead I bounce around the house saying over and over, again, "We are going to Maui! We are going to Maui! We are going to Maui!" Go ahead and laugh, I do.

We leave early tomorrow morning and will be there for 6 glorious days and 5 relaxing nights.  Yeah, we don't party it up at night like we use to. Now it's all about the relaxation! And of course, meeting with wedding vendors.

Don't even think about trying to come to Knotty Cakes Ranch while we are gone! ChiChi the Wonder Dog will be keeping a tight watch on this place! She's got tiny little teeth and she's not afraid to use them. She will open her mouth right up and lick you all over!

Oh, ChiChi! We will miss waking up to that little face every morning!
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Were you overly excited over meeting with your wedding vendors?

Making a List

Checking it twice. No, I'm not singing Christmas carols. I have a strict rule against any Christmas music before Thanksgiving and after Christmas. What I'm talking about it making a list for all that we need to get done while on Maui for our planning trip. Sure, there will be a little fun squeezed in under the sun, but mostly this trip is strictly wedding business.

Have I mentioned before how I love making lists? Well, I do. I have a whole USB drive dedicated to wedding lists.  I love referencing it and carry it in my purse with me everywhere I go. You never know when I'm going to need one of my lists.

At any one time I have more than one list going.  I have lists for what still needs to be done for our Maui wedding, what still needs to be done for our Portland celebration, who's RSVPed, what they've RSVPed for, who hasn't RSVPed, what our Maid of Honor needs to do, what DIY projects still need to be completed, what Drew needs to do, food menus and so many more.  But, right now the list that I am most focused on is the one with everything we need to do while on Maui to plan for our wedding.

I love me a good list!
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The One Where the Stress Sets In

It's amazing how when you hit 6 months until the wedding that a certain level of wedding stress hits you. It sure did for me. I was going along fine, working on wedding projects, checking my list of what still needed to be done and then the stress hit. I figured it was time to start taking an assessment of what was causing me stress and how I planned on managing it before I ended up like the bride below.

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Now we did a lot of things early on to prevent some of the usual wedding planning stress since we knew weddings are supposed to be one of the most stressful events in one's life. Right up there with death. Lovely. We wanted to enjoy our wedding, not be stressed out over it. To do this we figured out exactly what we wanted for our wedding and stuck to our vision. We communicated what we wanted to our family and maintained firm boundaries with them. I can't stress enough how important it is to communicate to others about your wedding vision and to set boundaries. Doing so saved us a great amount of stress in the long run. Even if it was a bit stressful at first communicating that to everyone.

DIY: Wrapping Up Our Wedding Invitations

Yesterday we showed you how we made our mini luggage tags and enclosure card bundles for our wedding invitations. Today we are going to finish showing you how we put them together and wrapped them up.

You will also be lucky enough to see some pictures of our super cute Maid of Honor.  I'm always the one taking the pictures, so usually all you get to see is my hand on these projects.  Don't worry, my hand does make an appearance.

One of the things that is great about everything I've been working on with our Maid of Honor is she is happy to do all of the things I hate.  I actually think she even likes doing them.  She folded all of the tissue paper for the insides of the invitation boxes and got them all ready for the invitations.

While she worked on that, I filled in the numbers on the RSVP cards.  That way guests would know exactly how many leis had been reserved in their honor. Just in case, they got confused by which names were on their invitation and thought they could invite others. In other words, Mom will not be able to bring her 50  boyfriends with her. Calm down, Mom. We know you don't have 50 boyfriends. You're an old maid now and only have 49. Sheesshhh.

It took a few tries to figure out exactly how to fold the tissue paper to make sure it fit inside the boxes correctly. 

DIY: Mini Luggage Tags and Enclosure Card Bundles

Whoops! It appears that we never finished posting about how we made our wedding invitations.  We showed you the invitations in our reveal. Then we showed you how we made the bands for the invitation boxes and the bands for the pocket folds. And then, well, nothing. There was just so much other great wedding stuff to share this got put off for a while is all. Really, we didn't forget.

We are going to start off with a few bits and pieces of smaller projects that we did for the invitations. And apparently a whole bunch of other DIY projects, too. I forget sometimes how much we've done until I start looking through all of the pictures I've taken of all of it. Let's just say you have a ton of DIY posts coming your way. You're really excited, right?! I knew it! And back to how we made our wedding invitations.

I made a bunch of mini luggage tags that were used on the enclosure card bundles.  To do this, I punched scalloped circles out of Tiffany blue paper stock and sea grass paper. After that I punched mini luggage tags also out of the blue paper and put eyelets in the luggage tags to be able to string twine through them.

You can get all of the tools I used at Michael's Art &Crafts. 

New Year's Eve at Trader Vic's Portland

How was your New Year's Eve?

Every year we go to our friends, Justin and Greg's house for New Year's Eve. They have a really big party and lots of our friends go. It's always a fun way to ring in the new year. This year we did a little something different. Oh, we still went to their party, but before it we went to a special New Year's Eve dinner at Trader Vic's Portland. 

We got dressed up all fancy. I wore the beautiful vintage dress I wore in some of our engagement photos with a vintage sweater over it. I just love the way the bright yellow looks with the soft lavender. Don't you? 

Drew wore his great vintage hula dancer tie I got him for his birthday a couple years ago. It's perfect for dinner at Trader Vic's. The manager, Sage, really loved Drew's tie.

DIY: Making Our Seastar Ornaments

Fun fact: Did you know that starfish are in fact not fish and are now called seastars? It can be hard to break old habits on what you call things, sometimes.

We first mentioned our seastar ornaments in the Hawaiian Christmas bags that we gave to our parents and wedding party. Not only did we give these with the gift bags, but also to friends who we knew are coming to the wedding. For a quick DIY, I thought I'd share with you how we made them. Seriously, this is a really easy one.

First I purchased a Heartsy daily deal and used it to get seastar ornaments from The Shabby Chic Cottage. They were simple and exactly what we wanted. Next I went to Michael's Crafts and purchased ribbon in our blue wedding color. Our Maid or Honor printed up the graphics and words needed for this project for me.  All other supplies, we already owned from previous wedding DIY projects.

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DIY: Hawaiian Christmas Gift Bags

I'm so excited that we finally get to share these with all of you! We had to wait until after we'd given out all of the bags. The last one we gave to our Maid of Honor and her daughter this weekend.

Taking the idea of our destination wedding welcome bags to a new level, we decided to do Maui Christmas gift bags as presents this year. That way people could start experiencing the islands now and we hoped that it would get them even more excited about visiting Maui in July. At the very least, they got some of our favorite Hawaiian goodies!

First we started off by having reusable canvas shopping bags printed up with our wedding logo at VistaPrint. They were a great price and they turned out really nice. An even better price considering we had another VistaPrint Groupon to use for them. We got one for ourselves, as well.

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Under 6 Months!

What? We are under 6 months until our wedding! How did this happen? Sometimes, (OK, most of the time) we can't believe how quickly the time is passing. Luckily, we are on track with getting everything done early and we're able to have a day of fun with our Maid of Honor yesterday and celebrated 6 months until the wedding with a bottle of bubbly. It was a super fun day.

In case you've missed any of our great wedding planning leading up to the 6 month lark here's a recap:

* We got engaged while at Tiki Ti in Hollywood California.

Hey, Mr. DJ!

Let's talk about wedding music. Or not. It's not like we ever really did. I mean we did, it just wasn't some big conversation.  It went a little something like this:

K: I'm thinking we should just use our iPod for the music for the wedding. What do you think?
D: Uh huh.
K: Are you listening to me?
D: Ummm, yeah?
K: What did I say?
D: I don't know. Tell me, again.
K: I knew you weren't listening. I said, I'm thinking we should just use our iPod for the music for the wedding. What do you think?
D: Sounds good.

Making the Cut

Yes. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Oh, hell no. Yes. Yes. Well, maybe.....

Does this sound familiar to you? One of the hardest parts of wedding planning for us has been the guest list. Deciding who makes the cut and who doesn't isn't as easy as it sounds. Sure, there are the absolute yeses that are no brainers, but there's a whole lot of gray area while writing up the wedding guest list, too.

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Since we are having a destination wedding and a celebration at home, it meant coming up with two guest lists.  The wedding guest list wasn't too hard.  We had a limit of 21 people, including us, due to our venue restrictions. (More on that later.) We decided to invite our parents, Drew's brother, my grandparents (Drew's grandparents are no longer with us.) and very close friends.

Becoming Real

While posting on The Knot this morning, I noticed my wedding counters. They read 2 weeks until our wedding planning trip to Maui, 6 months until our wedding and 8 months until our Portland wedding celebration. What? How did that happen? Where has the time gone? Then it hit me, this is really happening.  I'm really getting married this year. All of a sudden this overwhelming wave of excitement urged through me while also wanting to throw-up at the same time.

A little while later my Maid of Honor emailed me about some wedding projects we are working on and mentioned that she had almost everything worked out for the bridal shower she is throwing me. She'd be making an announcement to me about it as soon as it was all ironed out. What? That's happening, too?  Oh yeah. In less than three months.  Again, I felt super excited and like I was going to throw up at the same time.

Do It Yourself

*Disclaimer* WEDDING GUESTS, do not read below or you will spoil some of the surprises for the wedding.  Seriously, don't do it. 

I'm warning you, wedding guests, as I shake my fist at you, don't look any further!
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That picture has nothing to do with this post.  I just thought it was pretty and wanted something to use as a place holder to keep wedding guests from ready any further.  Wedding guests, if you just read that you are in BIG TROUBLE! This is your last chance to turn away and not ruin any surprises for you.

Welcome 2012!!!

Seriously, it's 2012! The year we get married! The year we go to Maui! Twice! The year we get to have a big party and celebrate like it's 1999 with all of our favorite people!  I loved yelling out after the stroke of midnight, "We are getting married this year!" I loved even more that our friends around us all cheered. After wedding planning for almost two years, we are beyond excited that this is our year!

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2011 was a great year.  So great in fact, I didn't feel like I needed to make any New Year's resolutions. Or vow that anything needed to be different in 2012.  I am beyond happy in where I am in my life right now.  The best thing about it though, is Drew feels the same way.  Drew even told me this whole thing yesterday about how we were meant for each other and no matter what we would have eventually found each other. It was so sweet.