The Name Change Gray Area

I am a feminist--unabashedly, passionately so--and I had always planned on taking Mr. Octo's name when we got married. Here's why: I like the clear "family unit" connotation that having the same last name as your spouse offers, I like Mr. Octo's last name specifically, and I want to have the same last name as our future children. Additionally, our last names sound super dumb when hyphenated (they have the same final syllable, so they sound oddly similar and rhymey). Mr. Octo was not at all interested in taking a combined name or changing his own name, but repeatedly expressed that he didn't care what my choice was, and wanted me to do whatever felt right to me. So, I decided that I'd be changing my name.

Then we got married, and immediately, nearly everyone started referring to me as Mrs. HisName. Often, it was meant in a cute, pointed, "you're married now!" way, but sometimes it seemed to just be an assumed fact of life (ie, receiving cards or mail addressed to Mr. and Mrs. HisName, from people I am certain I never told whether or not I actually wanted to be addressed as such). And, surprisingly, although changing my name to HisName had always been my plan, I found that I did not like the way it felt. At all.

I guess what rubbed me the wrong way was that it felt very sudden, and it felt like I had very little agency in the matter. I explained it to Mom Octopus by saying that with all the other emotional changes a marriage brings, the quickness with which my name was replaced was making me uncomfortable. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, I thought a lot (and, sometimes, struggled a lot) about what my new roles and identity as "wife" and "married person" were going to mean, and how they were going to change me. The sense that I was now, literally, a different person because I was married didn't feel good. I was also uncomfortable with the assumptions people made about what I'd prefer to be called. I hadn't been especially forthcoming with my name-change plans one way or the other before the wedding, so it really surprised me when many, many, many people automatically started calling me by his last name, without asking me what I actually wanted. It quickly started to feel like my last name had been taken away from me, rather than something I purposefully and consciously chose to change.

I know I had sixteen months to get used to the idea that I'd have a new name after the wedding; it's not like my own plans were a surprise to me. Hey, what can I tell you? I felt how I felt. I thought that I'd be ready to go by a new name as soon as I got married, and then, it turned out that I wasn't. Mom Octopus advised me, "Do whatever you need to do. Take some time if you feel like it. There's no right answer. Just go with what feels right." Mr. Octo continued not to care about whether or not I kept or changed my name, and continued to encourage me to do whatever made me happy.

So, I decided to just sit on it for a while, and think, and do nothing. I took a few weeks to let my new marriage sink in (during which time I continued going by my maiden name), and planned to re-visit the issue when our day-to-day life had more or less gotten back to normal.

Now that the excitement and thrill of the wedding, as well as the stress and anxiety and general feeling of Something Huge Is About to Happen are all over, I've realized that I do still want to change my name. I still like the fact that sharing a last name is a social signifier for "married to each other." I still like his last name, and the way it sounds with my first name. I still like the idea of having a common name with our future children. I still don't like the way our names sound when hyphenated. I guess the issue was really that I wanted to feel more like I was in control of the process, and that my name would change when and how I decided it would.

So far, I'm taking the process slowly, and doing things when I feel ready to do them. I changed my name on Facebook (a big deal, haha!), and I've started using his last name in non-legally-binding situations (like making restaurant reservations or whatever). I will probably start introducing myself by my married name now, and signing non-legal correspondence with my married name. I will start the actual government-documentation process.......whenever. Soon-ish. I'm not in a rush, and I don't think it's a particularly big deal if I take some more transition time between socially becoming Mrs. HisName and making it legal. I'm also still deciding whether or not I want to scratch my current middle name and replace it with my maiden name.

I feel good about my name change now. I feel much more like it's happening on my terms and because of my personal choice, and not like it's something society at large assigned to me without my consent.

I never even planned on writing a name-change post, because I honestly felt like it was simply a matter of personal choice and personal business, so why would we discuss it? I'll do me, you do you, no need to analyze each other's choices. However, I decided to write this post because I realized that there's another aspect beyond, "which option did you pick for yourself?" In my own name-change process, I realized that the decision is often offered up as a black-or-white situation. You're EITHER on Team Change-Your-Name OR you're on Team Keep-Your-Name. But now I know that it doesn't have to be like that. You can also wait and see how it feels. You can also realize that you don't have to be ready to change your name at the exact same moment you get married. You can also change it whenever the eff you feel like it and not a moment before. You could also think you want to change your name, and then get married, and then realize that you don't want to change it after all, or vice versa. You could also change it in five years, or ten years, or when you have children, or whatever. I've always believed that changing your name is a choice, but now I also know that there are more choices than two.

What do you all think?

The Best $230 We Spent For Our Wedding

Mr. Octo's wedding day outfit was very nearly a disaster. We asked the men in our wedding party to wear black suits of their own choosing, with no other specifications. Easy, right? Well, not necessarily. We bought Mr. Octo's black suit months and months and months ago, in late January or early February. He actually needed a black suit for a different occasion, and we bought it off the rack at Macy's, on a big sale, at the very last minute (like, the day beforehand). At the time, I thought, "Great. Black suit, purchased. His wedding day outfit is taken care of!" Then, I proceeded not to think about it again until about four days before the wedding.

At the very last minute, I had a thought. We had bought that black suit in a huge hurry, he wore it once for a few hours, and then it hung in the closet for months. "Babe?" I said. "Why don't you try your wedding suit on? Just to make sure it looks good?"

He obliged, and as he stepped into the living room to show me, I felt incredibly dismayed. The suit was way, way too big. Given how rushed the initial purchase was, I guess we just weren't too discriminating beyond, "Suit? Black? Great, here's the credit card!" and neither of us paid much attention to how poorly it fit him. The seam of the shoulders hung way past where his natural shoulder actually was. The waist of the coat barely even touched his actual waist; it looked ridiculously boxy. He was practically swimming in the pants. Fabric ballooned out around his legs, and was saggy because of all the excess, too. It wasn't the MOST disastrous suit ever, but it was totally, totally unflattering. To use a favorite word of my BFF, Oprah, it was a schlumpadinka suit. That was four days before we needed to leave for Pittsburgh.

(Also, I realize I sound like a complete failure of a bride for totally forgetting to make sure my groom had a nice outfit for our wedding day. I think my brain was just loaded to the brim, and once I checked off "purchase Mr. O's black suit" from my mental list, it was GONE. Permanently.)

I had no idea what the best solution was. I hated the idea that Mr. Octo would be looking shlubby and ill-fitted on our wedding day (and forever in our pictures!), but it was Saturday night, and we left for the airport Wednesday afternoon. We could go shopping for a new suit, but at that point, anything we could afford to buy would probably not be a whole lot better. In desperation, I Googled "[Octo neighborhood] tailor," and stumbled across Jack. His tailoring service maintained a 4.5 star Yelp rating after 97 reviews, and most of the reviews noted that Jack's particular specialty was custom-fitting men's suits that had been purchased off-rack. Even though we would need the suit turned around with basically superheroic speed, I figured it was worth a shot. On Monday morning, Mr. Octo and I rolled into his nondescript little shop.

We explained our situation to Jack (whose normal turn-around time is two weeks), and he agreed to fit Mr. Octo's suit within 48 hours. He didn't even charge us a rush fee, saying, "it's for your wedding, and this is my job. I just like to make people happy." Jack doesn't play around, and informed us that while he always recommends that off-the-rack department store suits be brought in for a fitting (because large mass-produced garments just can't possibly fit every man's body type nicely), Mr. Octo's suit fit so poorly that if we had more time, he would have encouraged us to write that suit off as a lost cause and find an off-rack suit that fit better to begin with. Again: TOTAL bride-fail in the groom-outfitting department. So embarrassing.

Anyway, Jack shortened the sleeves of Mr. Octo's coat, detached and reattached the shoulders to fit his natural shoulder line, brought in the waist, shortened the pants' hemline, and trimmed the fit in the thighs. It was a major tailoring job. The total came to $210 (the Yelp reviews warned us that Jack's craftsmanship was not inexpensive, so we were prepared to spend that much), and Jack tried to offer us a first-time customer discount. We insisted on paying full price, and also tried to tip him $40, which he wouldn't accept. After some cajoling from us, he did take a $20 tip, but told us to use the other $20 for something wedding-related.

Overall, it was an unusually pleasant customer service experience, with great end results.


I wish I took a 'before' picture so you could see just how much better the suit fits now (Corey Ann Photography).

So, ladies: Get his suit fitted. Get. His. Suit. Fitted. GET HIS SUUUIIITTT FITTEDDDD. I can't emphasize it enough. Even if you buy a suit that fits pretty well to begin with, a custom fitting will make it look like a million bucks. GET HIS SUIT FITTED!

Did you narrowly avoid any big problems before your wedding?

A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words: What Our Wedding Felt Like

Guess whaaaat? The flash drive of Octopus pro pics is in! (Our photographer blew my mind, she was so fast!) I'm not quite ready to do full-blown recaps yet, because phew, the Bees before me were not kidding, they're a kind of intimidating and enormous task. I've also got a few other posts I'd like to put out there before I segue into recaps, since they'll be my final posts (sob!).

However, since Corey Ann did such a great job of capturing the love, joy, excitement, and all the other emotions of our wedding day, I thought it might be fun to pick out some of the photos that I think convey those feelings most strongly, and show them in sequence. So, without further ado, what our wedding day felt like: a story in pictures!













































































All photos are credited to Corey Ann Photography.

Do ya feel it? :) What are your hopes for what your wedding day feels like?

Some Thoughts on Wedding Weight Loss

So, disclaimer: I'm going to write about how I lost some weight before the wedding in this post. I totally do not want to reinforce that wedding industry pressure that all brides need to lose weight for their weddings. My diet & exercise efforts were kinda necessary for me (as you'll see below), but it's certainly not necessary for everybody! Okay, that's it. I just wanted to add a little prologue so this post doesn't come off like one of those incredibly annoying Facebook ads that stop just short of "Stop Eating, You Giant Fat Bride."

***

I've never been the type to worry excessively about my weight. This tendency is certainly helped by the fact that I'm naturally a fairly thin person, and I don't usually struggle to keep my weight stable. My mental attitude about my weight held true throughout most of our engagement. I had some vague thoughts and plans about wanting to look my best, but I felt pretty casual about it all. My general health philosophy is to make an overall habit of eating nutritious, non-processed food, to make a reasonable effort to exercise, and not to worry about it much beyond that.

You may recall that, for most of this year, I was in graduate school. I bought my wedding dress the summer before my master's degree program began, and then, over the course of that master's degree program, gained maybe......six pounds? Seven? Not just a teeny blip on the scale, but nothing really significant, either. It was mostly due to the fact that I was so busy with school that I barely exercised, and that I probably was a bit too enthusiastic about patronizing local businesses. Anyway, I noticed the weight gain, but was not particularly worried about it.

Then, in July, I made a trip to Pittsburgh, and I tried on my wedding dress for the first time since I'd bought it. And--yikes--it barely fit. It was so tight that my mom couldn't get the panel in the corset back to close securely; she had to do the laces first, and yank them tight, before the back would button closed. After the laces were done and the panel attached, I couldn't breathe comfortably, and that was when I was standing up. At one point, I sat down, and my stomach and ribs felt so constricted that I remember thinking, "I don't know how I will possibly be able to wear this dress all day."


July: I managed a smile between gasps for air.

After that, I knew that if I didn't focus a bit more closely on my diet & exercise regimen, I'd be almost unbearably uncomfortable on my wedding day.

Like I said, I usually strive to eat healthfully, especially with the foods Mr. Octo and I keep in the house. In the process of evaluating my diet, however, I realized that I have three particular issues:

I love eating huge breakfasts. I always wake up absolutely starving in the morning, and I adore breakfast food. It was not at all uncommon for me to kick off the day with two eggs, two pieces of toast, another side (bacon, fruit, or yogurt, usually), and a latte. I usually eat a really small lunch, but still. I am also a huge sucker for a bagel slathered with cream cheese, or a breakfast sandwich.

I eat a lot of dessert. For real, I have a Godzilla-esque sweet tooth. Up until the stuffed-into-my-dress situation, I was eating chocolate in some way, shape, or form every single day, no exaggeration. And, as I said above, I was indulging in some especially delicious neighborhood offerings much more frequently than is probably advisable.

I have no idea what an appropriate portion size is. When I started measuring, counting, and weighing my portions carefully (more on that below), I was straight-up stunned by how much I had been overeating.

So, here's what I did:

Kept careful track of what I ate. MOH/Sister Lauren has seen great results from counting Weight Watchers points, so I decided to try it too. I didn't officially register for the program, I just used an online points calculator, and kept a food journal so I could remember and count the points. I also weighed/measured/counted my portion sizes religiously, which was a crucial step. I was seriously shocked by how much I had been overeating, and how clueless I had been about what a proper portion was. Since, as I mentioned, we try to keep healthy food in the house, I never thought portions were a big deal. I mean, what's the problem with eating too much hummus, or almonds, or organic yogurt, or bananas, right? Yeah, no. Wrong. Once I started counting WW points, I tried to hit around 23 points per day, and quickly realized that beforehand, I must have been consuming 35 points a day, easily, if not more. 35+ points of mostly healthy food, but 35+ points all the same. Just those hearty breakfasts alone were EIGHTEEN POINTS. A snack of whole-grain Kashi cereal is still not good for you if you're eating twice as much as recommended, you know?

Drank tons and tons of water. I have heard that people often think they're hungry when they're actually thirsty, and that drinking water helps curb hungry feelings. I made sure to drink eight glasses of water per day, and it definitely worked for me.

Ate lots of vegetables. Probably another weakness of mine is vegetable avoidance. I do like a good salad, but generally, I'm a pretty big slacker in making sure I eat enough veggies. I did some easy substitutions and add-ons, like having baby carrots with my Laughing Cow cheese wedge instead of crackers, or adding a side of steamed broccoli to my dinner. I also tried to eat a salad at some point every day. The bonus is that veggies are very low in Weight Watchers points, so I could eat lots of them and feel full without racking up points. I noticed that on days when I skimped on vegetables, I ended up feeling a lot hungrier all day.

Exercised four times a week. I used BuyWithMe to purchase a pass to a really fancy local gym, and I used the heck out of it. I also did my best to really push myself during workouts, and took a lot of fitness classes. I am often guilty of bopping around on the elliptical for twenty minutes--just enough to work up a light glow and a slightly elevated heart rate--and then calling it quits, but I wanted to do better than that.

Quit desserts cold turkey. I wavered off and on during August, but once September rolled around, I completely stopped eating my beloved sweets. I think cutting anything completely out of your diet, even dessert, is not a sustainable long-term choice, but I always intended to just take a hiatus.

And what do you know? It worked! Between my mid-July dress fitting and my late September wedding, I lost ten pounds!


Wedding day, breathing much easier (Corey Ann Photography).

Here's the thing, though. Before the wedding, physically, I felt great. I was energized, limber, and just felt really, really healthy. It didn't hurt that the results I was getting made me feel really confident about how I looked. However, I was beginning to go friggin' crazy from my exclusively healthy diet. I was DYING, dyiiiiiiing, to go feral on some French fries, or a cupcake, or a big sloppy bacon and egg sandwich. A person can only eat so much lean protein, non-refined carbs, and salad, ya heard? At one point, I MAY have insisted that Bridesmaid/Cousin Katie split an entire wheel of Brie cheese with me after the wedding.

After the wedding? I will go ahead and tell you that I've totally been binging. Starting with our honeymoon, any old food item that struck my fancy went straight down the hatch. I was in Vermont and Montreal, you guys, and I was not ABOUT to skip out on the cheese and beer and poutine and pain au chocolat. Then, after the honeymoon, I just......didn't stop. More cheese! More beer! More dessert! More bacon! Every pumpkin-flavored thing I set my eyes upon!

You know what I did stop, though? Exercising. Yes, my Healthworks pass expired, but there are other places and ways to exercise than a gym, but I just totally quit. Haven't exercised since the Wednesday before my wedding.

And you know what? I feel like crap. There is a big, noticeable difference between the way I felt before the wedding and how I feel now. I feel sluggish and tired and heavy. My posture sucks and my shoulders hurt. It's almost hard to explain, but I just feel different, bad different. I have already gained back five of the ten pounds I lost (in the eighteen days since my wedding!!) and I am not exactly pleased about that.

So, I think I've learned a valuable lesson in moderation. I was starting to go crazy without enjoying ANY of the delicious-but-unhealthy food pleasures life has to offer, but I'm also finding that it doesn't feel good to enjoy too much of them, either. Going forward, I'm going to continue to pay more attention to portion size, to eat lots of vegetables and drink lots of water, and to exercise regularly, because I loved how I felt before the wedding, and I want to pursue that. On the other hand, I'm not going to skip the occasional fried, cheese-covered, or chocolate-laden item, because seriously, a life totally devoid of cupcakes and French fries is not a life I want to live.

Are you trying to meet any physical goals? Newlyweds (I know you're out there, still reading!), did you overindulge after your wedding too?

Octo-Tip for Stress Reduction

I mentioned before that our wedding day was, overall, easy and low-stress. A lot of the things that contributed to the day proceeding so well were entirely out of my control. The perfect, delicious, dreamy weather was a stroke of pure luck (ESPECIALLY in Pittsburgh). I researched our vendors very carefully, but I knew it was pretty much out of my hands if they ultimately executed things correctly or not. There were a lot of things that just kind of ended up going our way, you know?

However, Mr. Octo and I talked about one of the things that WAS within our grasp that made our wedding day so great, and here is what we both recommend: think really carefully about who you choose to be in your bridal party. If it's at all possible, don't choose people just because you feel obligated to, or for old time's sake, or because you got excited and asked before you really thought about it, or whatever. You spend a LOT of time with the bridal party during the wedding weekend, and if they're bringing drama, or stress, or negativity, or apathy to the table, I am pretty sure you'll feel it, and it will impact your experience.

But on the other hand, if your bridal party is so unbelievably supportive, responsible, helpful, and easy-going that you're totally blown away by their sheer awesomeness, you'll feel that too. During our wedding weekend, our friends were champs. They were so, so, so great to us. The people we surrounded ourselves with improved our entire wedding experience. I believe that very much.

Here's one of my very, very, very favorite photos from our wedding day, showing the moment when I finished putting my dress on with Mom Octopus & MOH/Sister Lauren and showed my bridesmaids the result:


(Photo by Corey Ann Photography.)

I loooooooove this picture because the way the girls are looking at me totally represents how they treated me all day, and reminds me of how thankful I felt. They were SO sweet, SO supportive, and SO happy. All day, I felt like they were all trying their very best to keep the mood positive, calm me down, take care of anything I might need, and head off any situations that might bother me. One of my favorite memories of the wedding is from right before the ceremony. We were all holed up in the tiny little dressing room of Heinz Chapel, and I had just finished freshening up my lip gloss and putting my veil on, and I was standing and looking at myself in the mirror, taking in the fact that the moment was here and I was a bride. My friends all stood around me, saying things like, "you look perfect!" and "this is going to be amazing!" and "you look like you just stepped off the cover of a magazine." I had been very nervous up until then, and all their positivity made me feel excited and confident and just supported.

I could regale you with stories of how fabbity fab the Octo-Maids were all day long, but I'm sure you're catching my snap by now. Anyway, that's my advice: be thoughtful about who you choose to be with you during your wedding. Pick people who will boost you up, not bring you down. It's worth it times a million.

Are you excited about spending time with the people you picked for your bridal party?

People Are Weird About Weddings

Hi everybody! We're back from our honeymoon and I'm ready to start blogging again! Our lightning-fast photographer already has ALL of our photos finished and up in the online gallery, and as soon as I get our disc, I can't wait to start writing the Octo-recaps. In the meantime, I have a bunch of posts on deck that I just never had the time to write before the wedding. I'd like to kick off this particular post with a quote.....

"I thought everyone I knew was normal and socially appropriate. And then I planned a wedding."--Bridesmaid Erica

Over the course of my engagement, I developed a little theory, one which was validated over and over and over, both in my experiences and those of other people. Here it is: some people, even ones who are normal and polite and sociable and predictable 99% of the time, say or do really weird stuff when it comes to weddings. A lot of my friends have gotten married in the past two years, and in an informal poll, I discovered that every single bride had at least one story about someone doing something really, really weird, awkward, or inappropriate regarding the wedding. Sometimes the weird wedding behavior is hilarious, sometimes it is decisively NOT hilarious, spanning all the way up to incredibly hurtful, surprising, and sometimes friendship-ending.

I definitely have a few People Are Weird About Weddings stories of my own, but given the not-very-anonymous nature of this blog, I don't really feel like I can give you all the dirty details. Suffice to say, we had a few guests to whom an RSVP was apparently a very loose and fluid thing, subject to change up until a matter of hours before the wedding began. You know, not like your meal had to be paid for or a seat found for you or anything. Ahem. Anyway.

However, I also have an anonymous PAWAW story to share from a friend (of the hilariously awkward variety). After her wedding ceremony, a friend of the bride's father approached the family. "Hey!" he said. "I just wanted to let you know, my wife has some errands to run and won't be able to make the dinner portion of the reception, so I'm bringing a work buddy of mine instead." True to his word, the man showed up at the reception with his uninvited buddy-date, who was a total stranger to the bride and her whole family. The buddy-date sat in the man's wife's seat and ate her dinner. About an hour later, the man's wife arrived, and the buddy-date moved over to a seat that was vacant due to a no-show guest (a whole other, very common variety of People Are Weird About Weddings). The buddy-date then stuck around and proceeded to spend the rest of the evening having cake and enjoying the open bar.

I mean, WTF? Who DOES that? From the wife's perspective, who peaces out of a wedding for an hour to run errands? From the husband's, who thinks it's appropriate to bring a stand-in stunt date who then doesn't leave when your actual invited date shows up? From the buddy-date's, who ON EARTH would think it's okay to attend a wedding under those circumstances?? So many WTFs it boggles the mind!

I have heard so many others (the bridesmaid who got belligerently drunk, ripped her bouquet to shreds, and screamed at the bride's mother!), and now I want to hear yours. What's your best People Are Weird About Weddings story (or, do you disagree with my theory)?

Oh, Hey. Sup?

Hey guys. How was your week? Mine was pretty good. The weather was hit or miss. I was very underwhelmed by the Britney episode of Glee, but I think Boardwalk Empire looks like it's going to be a new favorite. It's my favorite time of year (ie the time when everything is flavored like pumpkin), so I celebrated by eating a big slice of pumpkin bread.

Oh, also? I married Mr. Octopus.










(All photos by Corey Ann Photography.)

And guess what? Turns out it is 100% possible to have a wedding that is completely and totally stress-free, drama-free, and mishap-free, and even better, looks and feels exactly how you always dreamed it might. That was a really, REALLY great discovery to make.

I have a honeymoon to wrap up, but I'll see you all soon.

Love,
Mrs. Octopus!