Nah-na-na Bamboo

Tyler and I (well, mostly I) sat down with the guest list the other night to update it. When I brought the inital list home last month, my parents informed me — as I knew they would — of some people I had left out. Now the list is at 199. Ouch. It's great to have so many friends and family who we want to share the day with, but we also need to be considerate of our budget and of ours and our parent's sanity. Serving dinner to 200 guests with no catering help seems like a nightmare.

Then today, I got word of a deal on bamboo plates. We decided to go ahead and order 150 plates, but we're going to take a look at the guest list again and see if it makes sense to invite our closest friends and family to the ceremony and dinner, and open up the reception to everyone else. The reception is the most important part anyway, right?!

So here are our plates, which many of you will be eating off of. I'm very excited, because they were cheaper than renting glass plates, and they satisfy my desire to not use paper plates that we'd throw away. We can wash and reuse the bamboo plates, or sell them to another couple down the road. The best part is that they are 100 percent organic bamboo. They'll biodegrade in four-to-six months. And, there are no harmful bleaches or dyes.

Another shameless plug

Planning a wedding is giving me lots of ideas for stories to write at work. Like this one about the surge in homebrewing and winemaking.

Tyler's Dad Harvey is doing us a huge favor by brewing the beer for our wedding. He's also brewing the beer for Tyler's brother Jason and Amy's wedding. Yep, there will be two Aimee/Amy Tjaders! We'll probably get a keg, too, but we'll be so proud to serve dad's homebrew to our guests. It's a personal touch and as you'll find out in the article, it's cost-effective, too.

Tyler and I will head into unchartered territory this summer as we attempt to make our own wine for the wedding. I'm not yet sure if we'll buy a kit and the necessary equipment, or if we'll go to Vine Park Brewing in St. Paul. I love love love wine and so do most of my girlfriends, so I can see myself making my own wine more than once, so I'm leaning toward investing in the equipment. We can make our own personalized bottle labels, too!

More fun than ya can shake a stick at!

Current mood: relieved

I just did a search and am happy to report there are no registered sex offenders living in our neighborhood.

If you live in Minnesota, you can do your own search here.