So we’re under three weeks now: there’s the rest of this week, all of next week. Then, the Monday following, people start arriving from out of town and the almost-weeklong party gets underway.

So far, so good on cold-feet moments. After eight months of being engaged and over six months of living together, we both pretty much feel married already – we just want to get this started, dress up, have the party, enjoy the company of friends and family and start wearing jewelry full time. Know what I mean?

We do still have our “holy crap” – what Kristi used to call her “thin air” – moments. Just those points in time that make us stop and look at what we’re doing and think, wow, we’re like getting married and stuff. For reals. With rings and dresses and legal paperwork and everything. And then there are the ooh-ahh moments.

The ooh-ahh moments happen when the details start coming together and just take your breath away.

Today we were down at the venue, going over close-to-final details with the coordinator: table layouts, itinerary, cake positioning, figuring out when everyone shows up and where everyone gets dressed and who gets to put what away afterwards for the drive home. A million odds and ends, and in the final picture we’re getting close to everything we wanted. Best of all, the budget seems to be coming together. There are so many, many little ways to drive cost overruns with a wedding, and as we get the program nailed down, are costs seem to be firmly under control. And thank God for that.

So we drove back home after the meeting, had a quick lunch of grilled salmon and potatoes, and then Kristi took off to her hair stylist for an afternoon appointment. Today was her trial run for the wedding with hair and makeup, so she went off to get prettified while I stayed home, updated the firmware on the PS3 and played some Grand Theft Auto 4. She came home about an hour later, walked in the door, turned so that I could see her.

Wow.

I was just speechless. I mean, don’t get me wrong – Kristi’s a lovely woman, beautiful to me made up or not. But wow. Makeup but especially her new hairstyle, oh my God. I just couldn’t put the words together. With wedding dress, tiara, veil and everything, Kristi’s going to be absolutely stunning at our wedding.

Finally she decided I’d spent enough time staring and needed to go do something productive. Like pick up the ring.

The plan for her wedding ring went through several evolutions before we finally settled on a strategy. The engagement ring I bought in October was a 2 carat diamond set in a white gold princess cut band (yes, it’s paid for); we’d considered a second band to fit over the engagement. Finally we decided to get two half-carat anniversary bands, soldering one above and one below the engagement band – all in all, 3 carats. We’d build her ring.

We got the final product back today and it’s freakin’ PERFECT. They did an absolutely gorgeous job and we both love it. For a long while this afternoon we both kept staring at the thing, shiny and bright and everything we hoped it’d be.

So yeah, we’re collecting breathtaking moments now. Stay tuned – I’m no longer taking client work until after July 21, we have another wedding to attend this weekend, and so as soon as Monday rolls around it’s all wedding-wedding-wedding until we walk down the aisle on July 5. We’ll keep everything here updated as often we can.

Quick note..

We’ve been asked several times lately if we plan to keep R&K going after the wedding.

The answer is yes; we always planned to keep it going. After the wedding, we’ll run a couple weeks without new posts as we go and enjoy our honeymoon, and then we plan to remodel R&K as our regular blog. So stick around – no doubt we’ve only begun to tap the well of material for future blog posts. 🙂