ONE WEEK UNTIL OUR WEDDING.

I hope all my Canadian friends are having a great Canada Day long weekend! I am actually spending a few hours in the office today getting myself organized as tomorrow is my last day before going on holidays for two weeks and I know it’s going to be hectic so I wanted to spend some time organizing my email and wrapping up some projects before I go!

Anyways, Leigh always does these fun confession posts where she confesses one thing a week and I always mean to play along. This weekend I thought of the perfect confession…

I’ve actually had Eric saved in my phone as “HUSBAND” for several months now. I saved his contact as that when I was getting heavily into marathon training because I wanted people to know FOR SURE who they should immediately call if something were to ever happen to me! I’m also saved as “WIFE” in his phone and have been for a few months now!

We’re just practicing calling each other that early I suppose

What’s your confession today? 

I originally wrote about choosing our wedding venue here over a year ago!

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Nine times out of ten when we tell someone our wedding location the response is: “oh, did one of you grow up there?” Nope! I would consider our wedding a ‘destination wedding’ since the closest people coming are 2.5 hours away with the majority coming from approx. 600 – 1,500 km away and many flying in for the occasion. Our family and friends are spread out all over the continent so there really wasn’t a “central” place we could have had the wedding. Our hometown would have meant a lot of travel for all our friends, the city we currently live in would have meant a lot of travel for family and to be honest we didn’t feel particularly tied to either of those places anyways. We have guests coming from Fort St. John, Prince George, Kamloops, Kelowna, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Newfoundland, Minneapolis, Boston and Germany!

The other factor that played into our decision is I’ve always wanted to get married on the ocean. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve felt this pull towards it. I was obsessed with sea animals and decorated my room in the theme when I was 9, I have a dolphin tattooed on my ankle and I just love everything to do with the ocean! While getting married barefoot on a beach in Mexico, Jamaica or Italy sounded amazing, romantic and perfect, I knew it would mean forgoing the attendance of most of our dear family members and friends. So I decided to choose an oceanfront location that many could drive to. While it is still more costly for our guests than if we’re having a local wedding I’ve had several people tell me that they are treating it as their vacation for the year, which makes me all kinds of happy. I am 100% certain after visiting the Sunshine Coast and venue myself in March that they will not be disappointed about coming to the area for their vacation. It is so incredibly beautiful!

There has been the occasional disgruntled comment that’s floated back to me about why we chose a place that was so far away or so “inconvenient”. I guess what annoys me about some of those comments is that if we’d chosen a venue in, say, Mexico I doubt anyone would say anything about it because it is so common for people to do destination weddings now-a-days. But our not quite local, not quite destination wedding seems strange to some, I suppose.

I would be lying if I said I hadn’t gotten a few disappointing no RSVP’s due to the distance and/or cost of traveling to our wedding. Because I have. But I’ve rarely doubted our location choice. I just know our wedding is going to be beautiful, amazing and completely perfect for us. I can’t wait to celebrate with the 80ish family and friends who are making the trek for it! In the end, that’s all that really matters.

My lovely friend Katie got me the above hanger to hang my wedding dress on. I love it, and it’s so beautiful, but I have to admit seeing my soon-to-be last name like that still kind of freaks me out a bit.

I actually went back and forth on whether I was going to change my name or not. For awhile I thought I wouldn’t, and then I thought maybe I’d change it personally but keep my current last name professionally, and finally I decided “go big or go home” if I’m going to change my name I might as well just change it! Hyphenation isn’t for me and neither is juggling two different last names depending on whether I’m in personal-mode or professional-mode.

Also, over the past 14 months of being engaged, something has shifted in the way I think about relationships and specifically my relationship. To me, marriage is so much more than just saying “I do” and some vows in front of family and friends. It really signifies a partnership and a team. Something like changing my name that didn’t seem that important 14 months ago has suddenly became very important to me because I want to go through the rest of my life with the same last name as my husband and the same last name as my (eventual, one day, far-in-the-future) children. I feel like it’s just another sign of our partnership and unified front. This is just my opinion of course, I’m not saying if you chose not to change your name you don’t view your husband/wife as a partner

At the same time, my current name is not “just a name” to me. It’s something I’ve had my entire life. It’s mine. It was my name when I graduated high school, university, received my first byline and more. So while I am excited for this next step in my life with my new name I am also a little sad to be letting my old name go.

So that’s kind of where I am on the changing name thing. I’m doing it. I’m excited to share the same name as my soon-to-be husband but I’m also a little sad to let go of a piece of me and my past.

Questions of the day: For the ladies, did you change your name or will you when you get married? For the men, did your wife? Did you want her to or did you care?