Rehearsal Dinner: Again, ours was a very informal event, and since our wedding was to be at 1:00 PM, we opted to have our rehearsal the same time the day before and hold a rehearsal lunch rather than a rehearsal dinner.

Across from Sqwire’s (and owned by the same people) is The Soda Fountain; a new take on the old time feel of a soda fountain, complete with several menu pages filled with ice cream sodas, shakes and sundaes. Nice, relaxed and laid back, it was a great afternoon. They accommodated our (semi-large) party easily in their main dining room (they also have a separate room available for meetings, showers, etc). Service wasn’t the best (several orders were wrong when they were brought out), but overall it was a nice experience.

I cannot say enough nice things about Sqwire’s Annex. The Annex is the “party room” of Sqwire’s Restaurant, but it goes way beyond “party room. First of all, it’s a beautiful space—it’s in a former wire factory (hence the “punny” name) with lots of exposed brick and metal. Their staff transformed a pretty-enough-room into an absolutely gorgeous wedding reception with very little direction from me (in fact, when I walked in on the day of our wedding, I teared up a bit, saying, “It looks like a wedding!”).

There were a lot of reasons we ended up going with Sqwire’s: They had a lot of parking; the Annex has its own entrance and its own bathroom; although there’s a loft area, there are no steps that MUST be used (both of our fathers are in their 70s so mobility was a concern); they provide all linens, silverware, glassware, etc; plus it was within walking distance of our ceremony location. Sqwire’s also thoughtfully let us use chairs for our ceremony for free(we simply had to carry them over to the park and back again), and offered us a “rain” contingency—they’d let us come in an hour early if it rained and we needed to hold the ceremony at the reception site. That alone took a world of worry off my mind.

The coordinator was remarkably easy to work with…easy going, but always making sure I hit my deadlines without any nagging. I was a bit apprehensive when our coordinator left the week before our wedding, leaving us with a brand new coordinator, but my worries were unfounded: The new coordinator did a fabulous job! Everything that I’d discussed previously went through flawlessly, and the new coordinator was on site day of our wedding and made sure everything went according to plan.

We had a buffet brunch, with a limited bar (bloody marys and mimosas). Price was reasonable and the food was tasty. I was wary of doing a buffet (I’ve been to so many bad ones), but this was remarkably well done: The hot stuff was hot, the cold stuff was cold, and all of it was remarkably flavorful. Several of my friends are self described food snobs, and all of them enjoyed the meal. The best surprise was that when we got our final bill there WAS no surprise—everything was exactly as we’d discussed with no hidden charges.

Sqwire’s Annex IS a smaller venue; I think my literature said it could comfortably hold 200 (although I think that might be a bit of a stretch); we had approximately 70 people there, and it was comfortably roomy without looking empty. But I would highly recommend it for ANYTHING: rehearsal dinner, shower, whatever.

My husband opted to buy a suit rather than rent a tux, and we were incredibly impressed with the sales staff at Men’s Wearhouse. Not only did the salesman manage to size my husband up on the first try visually, he also managed to nicely suggest certain things which we obviously had no clue about (like where he likes his pants to “break” for instance. Neither of us knew what that even meant!). He helped us through every aspect of the outfit—right down to socks! And while I realize that was just his job, it’s been a long time since I experienced customer service on that level—he was phenomenal.

For our bands, we went with tungsten bands from Rogers and Holland. Again, as a bigger store, they have a lot of room to wiggle their prices around, and we found the staff at the South County Mall (St. Louis, MO) to be routinely nice, fun and easy to deal with. They were also knowledgeable: Since tungsten is such a hard metal, it is virtually impossible to resize. Rogers and Holland staff mentioned that if we were worried about resizing, we might like to look at the ArtCarved rings, since they have a lifetime “Forever Fit” program whereby you can simply exchange your ring for a different size at any point in your lifetime. This proved to be very useful after my husband managed to lose quite a bit of weight recently.

At Zales I found an engagement ring that I thought was absolutely lovely. Because it IS a chain store, Zales often has GREAT sales, and we were able to take advantage of that. I think the best part of our purchase, though was the free diamond warranty and the free maintenance plan. In order to keep those both activated, I simply need to bring my ring in for an inspection twice a year. Easy enough! One thing I did not realize (again, not a big jewelry girl), is that my chosen metal (white gold) is really just layered over yellow gold, and that after awhile (depending on the body’s chemistry), that white layer can wear away. They remedy this by plating it with rhodium. My maintenance plan covers this re-plating as often as I want/need it, which is proving to be rewarding; so far, I’ve just had it re-plated every six months when I take it in for its inspection. It looks absolutely beautiful and new.

My fiancée and I wanted to go on a fancy honeymoon, but neither of us wanted to spend a lot of money, so we started looking at Mexico. Neither of us had ever been, but honestly, I was a bit hesitant to go to Cancun because of its “party” reputation. We like to drink, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted a wild honeymoon.

After doing a lot of research, I found what ended up working wonderfully for us: We stayed at the Sun Palace (www.palaceresorts.com), which is a lovely all-inclusive hotel. Palace Resorts have several hotels in the Cancun region; Sun Palace is one of the smaller ones, but it’s extremely elegant and the staff treats guests like they are kings and queens. The location turned out to be wonderful for us, close enough to downtown and “resort town” Cancun (about a 15 minute bus ride away), but far enough away that we didn’t have to deal with tons of drunken people (we also had a beach that seemed to be private—lots and lots of gorgeous open sand).

As I said, the Sun Palace is small compared to some of the other resorts in the area, this means that there are fewer overall amenities (for example, there were only 3 full restaurants and several snack bars; at other resorts we visited, there were a many as 15 restaurants on site!). But if you stay at the Sun Palace, you may also visit any of the other Palace Resorts in the area and use their pools, beaches, restaurants, etc free of charge…so you could certainly have the best of both worlds.

The service is impeccable; from the moment you walk in and are greeted with a cool towel, champagne cocktail and a flower for the ladies. All requests were met with “It is my pleasure.” The captains at the restaurants knew us by name in just a day or two; the housekeeping staff kept our rooms fresh and fun (they made animals out of our hotels); and room service is available 24 hours a day (and even if they don’t have something on the room service menu, they will do their best to locate it for you; several nights they brought me coconut ice cream which was absolutely delicious!).

As part of our package, we were given free tours of sites. We chose to tour Chichen Itza, Coba and Tulum, all ancient Mayan ruins. Each tour left in the morning, included transportation, lunch, and a guide, and returned in the mid afternoon. After looking at the prices for similar tours, we felt this was a very good bargain.

One note about the Palace Resorts: They are part of a timeshare operation. This means they act as a regular hotel/resort, but they also can solicit you for a presentation and ask you to buy into their vacation time share. We simply said “no thank you” when they asked us to attend the presentation/brunch, and they did not push the issue.

Because of this, though, there are lots of members who wish to sell additional weeks of their package to you (kind of like some season ticket holders will sell tickets to an individual game if they can’t attend). This can be a good way to purchase the week, if you buy from a reputable dealer. I did quite a bit of research and eventually bought from a seller on eBay. Because of this, the package we got included: 7 nights of hotel, all food and beverage (including alcohol and room service), unlimited tours of certain sites (mentioned above), two manicures, pedicures and massages at a price that was less than what I could find online for 4 nights of lodging/food with them otherwise. Paired with some cheap airline tickets, we managed a five star honeymoon on a three star budget!

(5+++ stars)! I started going to Yvette about 10 months before my wedding, on a whim. She’s a very warm, outgoing person who also happens to be fabulous with hair! I had a lot of gray streaks in my hair, but was reluctant to color because I didn’t want the work and expense of keeping up with the roots. Well, slowly but surely Yvette warmed me up to the idea and I finally let her put some blonde highlights in my otherwise mouse-brown hair. What a difference! I no longer looked old and washed out.

Yvette loves to do updos, and it really shows—she’s an artist. For my wedding itself, we did a trial run; I showed her a number of pictures of what I hoped to achieve, and she managed to put a whole new twist on what I was showing her. She worked with the clips and pins that I wanted to include, tried the style both with bangs and without to see which looked better and just took so much time listening to me. My hair was intricately styled yet it did not fall out of the style until I physically took the pins out at the end of the night (which is remarkable considering I can generally use an entire can of hairspray on my hair, only to have it wilt ten minutes later).

I should also mention that Yvette agreed to open her shop up so she could do my sister’s and my hair at 8:30 on a Sunday morning. I can’t recommend this woman enough.

Walter Knoll has several shops in the St. Louis area. Since we were having such a small wedding (one attendant each), we opted to order flowers wholesale and assemble them ourselves.

I first went to my local WK shop to see if I could order the flowers. They were not very helpful. Eventually, I went to the wholesale site and found exactly what I wanted. We ordered several dozen mokara orchids for centerpieces (put into vases from Michael’s with river stones from the Dollar Store). I was a bit upset because the price went up significantly (and for no apparent reason) between the time I put down my deposit and the time they ordered them (this is when I was still attempting to work with the local shop. I eventually cut back on my order to save money), but they did at least inform me prior to ordering them at the inflated price. Flowers came in on time and we had no problems with picking them up. I understand they also have tables available for rent if you want to assemble your centerpieces at the location itself.

For our bouquets, boutonnieres and corsages, we bought seasonal single flowers; Walter Knoll sells cut flowers at ½ price every Saturday, so we got a real bargain!

Lafayette Square Park is a lovely Victorian style park about ten minutes from downtown St. Louis. It’s surrounded by huge Victorian mansions, most of which have been lovingly refurbished. The park is surrounded by black wrought iron gate, and the landscaping is absolutely lovely. We also liked that there were things to entertain children there—a pond with ducks to be fed and a small playground; we thought our friends with kids might enjoy having something for them to do before/after the ceremony.

For $300, we were able to reserve a gazebo in the park for four hours. The reservation is made through the City of St. Louis, so it was a little bureaucratic, but nothing too terribly taxing. The rules and regulations are a bit strict (in regards to hanging any decorations, lighting, sound, etc), but since we were married in the afternoon (and used weighted balloons as decorations), they really didn’t concern or bother us too much.

The gazebo is small, but looks out over a beautiful small pond with a large bridge over it. The grounds leading from the gazebo down to the pond are absolutely resplendent with color; the flowers the park plants are truly lovely, especially in the fall. It’s one of the reasons we didn’t feel the need to add much in the way of decorations; nature took care of that for us! We incorporated the bridge into our entrance and exit, and it made for some very beautiful pictures (I’ve since learned that this park is a popular site for wedding pictures, understandably so).

We only experienced two problems with the site: One was that they were doing some planting/weeding work the week before our wedding, which we found out kind of by happenstance (we came by for our rehearsal and found a giant mound of dirt next to the gazebo). Fortunately, the dirt was gone the day we arrived to set up for the wedding; workers had left a garden hose out, but we were able to stow it out of site.

The other incident was more a factor of being married in a public place than the park itself…as I was standing by the pond, waiting to begin our procession, two strangers came up to me with a friendly, “Hi! Are you having an event today?” (Uh, no, ladies, I generally hang out near the pond in a full length white gown….). Turns out they had rented the space for the following weekend and wanted to run a soundcheck. I told them, as politely as I could, that they would have to wait until our time was up before doing so (even though, yes, believe it or not, they promised to be quiet). HA!

(5+++ stars) Oh, how I love cake! Choosing the cake was probably one of my more difficult decisions, because I really, really wanted to like the cake I was serving to people. And I am a cake snob. There, I said it. But, unfortunately, I was also a bride on a budget, so I had to contain myself a little bit.

We tried several tastings at different bakeries, but really weren’t satisfied with anything—all seemed a little dry, and the frostings we tried seemed too sugary sweet. Luckily, we found out about the Cakery. The Cakery is a small bakery located in Dogtown in St. Louis, and they make the most wonderfully moist, delicious cakes with a buttercream frosting that will truly melt in your mouth (no gritty aftertaste here). Since they are a small shop, they do tend to book up quickly, but we were in luck. See, the other reason that picking a cake was going to be difficult for me is that I have some weird fear of cutting cakes (why yes, it IS really difficult to be in my head!). I really, really, REALLY did not want to do that, especially not with 100 of my nearest and dearest family/friends watching. So I decided to circumvent that whole fiasco and go with cupcakes instead. And boy, am I glad I did. We went with three flavors: strawberry cake with strawberry buttercream frosting (my ultimate favorite), lemon cake with raspberry buttercream frosting and chocolate cake with mint buttercream frosting.

The Cakery rented us a tiered cupcake stand, and we arranged to pick up the cupcakes the day before the wedding (we got married on a Sunday, so we picked up the Saturday before). This worked SO well for us—we didn’t have to pay for delivery and because they were neatly packed in large bakery boxes, I wasn’t worried about them sliding around or getting ruined. And here’s where the Cakery gets a gold star: As I said, we got married on a Sunday. The following day, we left at stupid o’clock to go on our honeymoon. The Cakery was not due to be open yet. I was completely flummoxed about how to return the cupcake tier (my family all lives out of town, so I really couldn’t delegate it to anyone). When I called to explain the problem, one of the girls said she’d come in so I could drop it off. And she showed up just as promised. Fabulous!