And so we being...

In exactly 143 days I will finally be Mrs. Wenzel! 143 more days!!!!!

That leaves me precisely 143 more days to geek-out and (hopefully) not freak out over the details. I've been dreaming of this day - literally - for my entire life. I was probably 13 when I bought my first contraband wedding magazine and it all went downhill from there. Over the years my vision of what this day would look like has totally changed, and probably for the better. Thankfully I too have changed, my relationships have changed, and I've grown into Me. With a capital M.

Ever since the lovely day of November 19th, 2007, the "vision" of my (our!) wedding day has changed nearly on a daily basis. Until today my brain was still in relative normalcy and you could have considered me a functioning woman that just happened to be planning a wedding... I sit here now, at 1:36 a.m., with several pages of theknot.com and an obscene number of wedding blogs open on my desktop. It only took one phone call to flip the switch. Here's how it went down:

For the past 5 months I have spent a lot of time trying to convince myself that not everything in this whole wedding planning craziness matters... For example: invitations. I personally don't feel the need to spend a great deal of cash on something that will be living in a garbage can sooner than I would like to think. And ironically I am totally crazy for flowers... I am prepared to pay (a lot) for something that has been on it's journey to death since the moment it was cut from it's lifesource and stuck in floral foam.

Irrational? In the big picture, yes.

Also in the category of "don't spend a bundle/no one will care but you" was the wedding cake. Basically, all I really cared about (or convinced myself) was that it needed to look good and taste great. I have pretty simple taste and I'm not looking for something gilded in 24k gold. So during a conversation with the MOB about wedding cakes, we stumbled upon Wendy Kromer. I'm instantly hooked. Not only have I spent the majority of my day looking at totally hideous cakes with waterfalls, Precious Moments figurines, far too many plastic hearts and (lord help us) fiber-optic lights tacked on them, but now sitting on my computer screen are the most beautiful, perfect cakes I have ever seen. Like a dream. Baked by one of Martha's main women. In Ohio. Only one hour from the wedding site.

How could this be? She's basically a wedding cake superstar and she lives in stinking Sandusky, Ohio? Totally weird, but I'm very okay with her being in driving distance to my wedding.

I'm completely ruined. Nothing is going to compare to Wendy and the dream-cake she would have created. And sadly, I'm 99.9% positive she's gonna be way out of my wedding budget. Hello, she just co-wrote a book on wedding cakes with Ms. Stewart herself.


I suppose that my feelings of disgust towards the price of already dead flowers and over-the-top-tacky invitations has lead me down a path of "no one else will care"/"spend money elsewhere"... but now that Obsession Mode has kicked in, I've realized these things really do matter to me. I guess we'll have to see what happens in the next few weeks...

So I have to forget my quick and ill-fated love affair with Wendy. Our relationship, though brief, showed me just how much I do actually care about my (our) wedding cake. And now I'm moving on to bigger, better (less expensive) bakers to whip up their best buttercreme for my guests. Flour Girl, you better be up to the challenge.