Update: Dresses, Flowers, Cake, Diet.

Dresses

The original plan was to get dresses made from scratch -- my white gown and evening dress. However, I'm thinking it might be just as possible to buy dresses for cheap and take them to a really good tailor. That way I don't have to go through the fuss of finding material, like we had to do for my high school first dance and prom dresses. Those dresses didn't turn out great at all.

So now I need to figure out just when I want to start dress shopping, and start looking for a good tailor. And if I do choose to buy dresses that I'll be trying on, that means Yubo can't come with me like I originally wanted. So I need to coordinate with Eric and Alex, since they're the only ones from my wedding party that are up here, and see when we can do this whole dress thing. Then I'll take pictures and send them to Akemi and Archie.

Flowers

Dropped the plum blossoms but sticking to cherry blossoms (sakura), especially since sakura is Yubo's family flower.

I found pictures of bouquets that use Stephanotis, I thought they were really pretty. So I sent them off to my sister to show my mom so my mom's best friend could use them as a template.

So I think the bridesmaids bouquets may turn out looking something like this, using Stephanotis and sakura. I just like how simple and clean it looks. The sakura will add a nice pink color so that it's not all one boring color. And I think it's small enough to not take away from whatever dresses they'll be wearing, but big enough that it won't be entirely pointless to carry them.

To bulk up my bouquet, my sister asked what flower I might want to add to the sakura. Since I tend to like smaller flowers (like sakura, plum blossoms, hydrangea) I had to find something bigger that would create a more prominent bouquet. Since I still want to stick to flowers that have significance in our cultures, I decided to go with peonies. Peonies were once the national flower in China back in the... Qing dynasty (thank you, Wikipedia). Also, apparently in Japan, they are considered the "King of Flowers."

Flowers for the church and reception have yet to be determined. I have some people I need to talk to about those.

Cake

Still a struggle over the cake, but I have my mom and sister working on my dad to see if he'll give in and let me have my cupcakes. My sister found this picture that's pretty much exactly what I wanted, with some modification to the actual decorations.

Diet

Haven't been doing too good. Didn't do Nutrisystem at all the whole trip of Hawaii, and when I got home we went to the Bite of Seattle (yum! alligator!). Then it was still a lot of cheating throughout the week. When I weighed myself after the trip, I gained about 2lbs. So I'm 152 instead of the 150 that I left with. Yubo thinks that's just muscle that I gained from the ridiculous amounts of walking that we did. Hmm... I'm not sure. But we'll see if I continue to get any smaller. I should start taking my measurements along with my weight each week. After another week of Nutrisystem since getting back, and I'm still 152.

I'm really interested in getting leg and arm weights (yes, kinda like Rock Lee from Naruto). Well, we'll see if that ever happens. =P