Stinkerpants

Our Rockin’ Rehearsal Dinner

August 18, 2008 in Wedding (also on Weddingbee) • Pre-Wedding Parties

This post was originally featured on Weddingbee.  To see all of the comments, you'll have to check them out over there!

I haven’t been to many rehearsal dinners before, but I doubt many of them were like ours.  Complete with atrocious singing voices and my mom & Mr. Stinkerpants’ dad running around with shriveled chicken heads on forks, our pre-wedding party was quite the spectacle.  It even started out a little wacky:

Most of our guests met us in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt, where we were staying.  We walked together through the famous Chinatown gate, and a couple of blocks to the restaurant.

Mr. Stinkerpants and I decided that the only way to truly get the karaoke off on the right foot was to start it ourselves.  Here we are singing a beautiful rendition of “Endless Love.”  I am not being modest when I say I have a terrible voice, so I really think our song made our guests feel more comfortable being silly.

Our guests really got into the singing as well.

Here is one of the many reasons why I love my mom (that’s my dad in the background):

One of our groomsmen, checking out the playlist:

FIL Stinkerpants and I talking with my mom about our next song:

While Mr. Stinkerpants and I were innocently eating our meal with our very well-behaved friends, trouble was brewing between my mom and Mr. Stinkerpants’ dad.  I was busy dissecting a spring roll to verify that it was vegetarian when a shriveled chicken head started cawing in my ear.  I looked up in surprise to see my mom laughing hysterically and Mr. Stinkerpants’ dad dancing a chicken head on a fork by my ear.  The two of them thought it would be funny to take their dinner and create a puppet show.  It was hilarious!

I have no idea what I’m doing in this picture:

FIL gets down and funky:

Singing with my mom and her girlfriends:

A few weeks before the wedding, my MIL and SIL called from Chinatown with some sad, sad news.  Golden Gate Bakery, maker of my favorite chinese dessert, was closed for vacation. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this earlier, as the store closes every year for a month, but we didn’t.  We were planning to order a bunch of don tot for dessert for the rehearsal dinner, and now we had nothing.  So what did we do?  We looked inside ourselves and chose the most obvious replacement.  You guessed it!  Cream Puffs (I’m Mrs. Cream Puff on Weddingbee):

Yes, that’s a wine stain on Mr. Stinkerpants’ lovely shirt.  The wine was free-flowing, and I guess SIL  wasn’t paying attention to her glass during a particularly raucous rendition of “Enter Sandman.”

Our rehearsal dinner was great fun.  If you live in San Francisco and are looking for a fun place to throw a kitchy party, the Far East Café fits the bill (it’s great even if you’re not looking for kitch, actually!).  The service was great and the karaoke couldn’t be beat.

If you can make your rehearsal interactive somehow (and karaoke is a perfect way to do that), I think it makes the rehearsal so much more fun for people!  Everyone seemed to have a great time, and it was a great way to de-stress before the wedding.

DIY Rehearsal Dinner Invites

July 22, 2008 in Wedding (also on Weddingbee) • DIY Projects • Pre-Wedding Parties

This post was originally featured on Weddingbee.  To see all of the comments, you'll have to check them out over there!

Let me tell you a little secret, my friends: it is a very good thing that I got most of my DIY projects finished early on!  There were a few things left to the end, and I have hated those things!  Exhibit A is my rehearsal dinner invite.  I really love the design for these, but they were a lot of work and I only ended up making half of them (half the guests, mostly bridal party, were invited by word-of-mouth).  I have to say, I do think they turned out pretty cute though (patting myself on the back) (haha).

Our rehearsal dinner is at an old-time touristy Chinatown restaurant with karaoke.  I really wanted the invitations to reflect the feel of the dinner.  Here’s what I came up with:

The paper lanterns were folded up and manipulated into an A6 envelope:

Lantern #1:

Lantern #2:

Lantern #3:

How did I do this?  I printed the gold ink using my gocco machine.  The supplies for this project, other than the gocco stuff, were simple:

1) Red scallop card from Paper Source:
note: for some reason they don’t have the red available online.  Here it is in strawberry.

2) Gold tassels from my local Paper Source.

3) 1/8″ hole punch

4) Paper cutter

All I did was cut off the tops and bottoms of the circular cards to shape them like lanterns. Then I punched a hole in the top and a hole on either side or both sides (depending whether it was the left, right or middle lantern).

Bachelorette Shenanigans!

June 27, 2008 in Wedding (also on Weddingbee) • Pre-Wedding Parties

 This post was originally featured on Weddingbee.  To see all of the comments, you'll have to check them out over there!

After my delicious shower, hosted by my friends Amanda and Marianne, I went directly to my bachelorette party, hosted by my supremely creative future sister-in-law, Katie. Katie rented out a hotel room in San Francisco for us and had all kinds of fun things planned.

First on the agenda? Changing my outfit. Katie gave me a bag full of stuff. The first thing I pulled out was a shirt with a picture of Mr. Stinkerpants on it. It’s probably the world’s weirdest photo of him. He’s wearing a cowboy hat with a dead rattlesnake on it–some weird guy in a dim sum restaurant let him try it on, and he made a really weird face and made me take a picture. But alas, I digress.

Also included was a pink “bachelorette” tiara and a veil, which Sarah is helping me put on, and a pink flashy ring.

I felt very pretty (haha!). And it turned out that I was wearing all white! How bridal! ;)

Kathy and I, drinking a delicious drink. I am not much of a drinker, so the idea of going out and touring a bunch of bars didn’t really appeal to me. Luckily, Katie knows me pretty well and didn’t plan something like that. And there were no strippers, which also aren’t my cup of tea. Instead, she had a bunch of really fun & creative games for us.

The first game Katie planned involved underwear. She had everyone at the party bring a pair of panties, and I had to guess who brought which pair:

It was actually pretty difficult! In the end, I think I got, like, TWO right (haha).

After the panty game, it was time for more food. Everyone knows how much I love sweet things! There was chocolate, and cookies!

Last week we suffered from a crazy heat wave here in California. Unfortunately the heat seriously affects children, the elderly, and…penis cupcakes:

Some of them looked as beautiful as they did right after being frosted and hair-ified, and some of them did not. They all TASTED delicious, though. FSIL Puff is obviously a very talented baker!

After the penis cupcakes, Katie announced that we were going out on the town for a bachelorette photo scavenger hunt. We had a list of a bunch of things we had to take pictures of, and we split into two teams. Below are some of my team’s successes:

At one point, we went into a bar to get a “big group picture,” when a guy in the bar made me sit at the piano, which was surrounded by a bunch of people. The guy playing the piano had a microphone, and he started asking me all kinds of questions. We left after one of the (nasty) guys aske

When we got back, there were still more fun activities to be had! Katie put me in the bathroom with a blindfold on. She led me out to the main room and sat me in a chair. When my blindfold was removed, I was the audience for an amazing and shocking fashion show: Tacky bridesmaids.

Some of the world’s most INSANE dresses, I kid you not. Left to right, some of the best: Katie, Sarah, Julie and Kathy.

Me with all mah hot ladies (except for Marianne, who I am beginning to notice is in hardly any pictures because she’s always behind the camera!). Julie, June, Sarah, Katherine, Katie, Marion, Kathy and Amanda. And me. I’m the one in the tiara.

It was a REALLY fun night. Afterward, we had a slumber party in the hotel room. Thanks, Katie! I couldn’t imagine a more fun bachelorette party.

My Sweet Shower!

June 26, 2008 in Wedding (also on Weddingbee) • Pre-Wedding Parties

 This post was originally featured on Weddingbee.  To see all of the comments, you'll have to check them out over there!

I have been MIA for days! I suck!! I’ve been waiting to post about my shower and bachelorette parties until I collected pictures from my friends. Luckily they are all super awesome and on top of it, and I got them less than a week later! Let’s start with my shower, which was hosted by my friends Amanda and Marianne, with help from Momma Puff.

First off, the decorations. Holy cute! All my favorite bright colors in one place, punctuated by lots and lots of candy!!

Did you see that? That bowl is full of chocolate covered gummy bears! My favorite!

And there was a sundae bar!

Clockwise: enjoying my sundae, Momma Puff and bridesmaid Julie making sundaes, Marianne and Marion, and Kathy creating a sundae masterpiece. And then there’s me, never one to turn down more sugar:

Thanks, Cousin Carol!

The thing I was most worried about regarding my shower was that I’d have to open gifts in front of everyone. Well, my friends, I am here to tell you that a) I survived, and b) it really wasn’t that bad! I am really thankful for all the gifts, too. I love them.

Marion and FMIL Puff made the lovely shower bouquet:

One of my favorite things about this shower was the Video 20 Questions we played. Amanda and Marianne conspired with Mr. Stinkerpants to get him to answer 20 Questions on video. Then Amanda’s fiancé, Jason, edited the whole thing with funny music and we watched Mr. Stinkerpants answer the questions.

The questions were things like:

1. When Mr. Stinkerpants and his sister, Katie, were little, Mr. Stinkerpants helped her look pretty by putting what in her hair? (answer: vaseline)

4. What is Mr. Stinkerpants’ favorite board game? (answer: Scrabble). I totally did not know the answer to this question. When I saw the answer was Scrabble, I said, “he hasn’t played that game ONCE in the three years we’ve been together!” The group of us then watched Mr. Stinkerpants show the box to the camera as a visual aid and blow three years of dust off the top of it!

10. What did Mr. Stinkerpants do on your first date when you introduced him to your pet rat? (answer: he dropped her!)

18. Mr. Stinkerpants once lost a baby tooth while eating and he thought it was a bone. What was he eating?
a) Chicken
b) Sea Cucumber
c) A marshmallow
d) An eggroll
The answer to this one, believe it or not, is c–a MARSHMALLOW. Yes, I got this wrong.

Overall, I did pretty well (sort of). I got thirteen right, and Mr. Stinkerpants said he would have given me extra credit for getting so many details on the other ones. :-D

Obviously, my shower was amazing. I loved it! Thank you Amanda and Marianne, and to all my friends and family who came!

The Rehearsal Dinner

June 6, 2008 in Wedding (also on Weddingbee) • Pre-Wedding Parties

 This post was originally featured on Weddingbee.  To see all of the comments, you'll have to check them out over there!

The main thing we’re going for with this wedding is FUN. And also multicultural. We really want the wedding festivities to be a reflection of who we are, and we want to show people a good time…so when it came to planning the rehearsal dinner and day-after brunch, the first thing I thought of was a Chinese Dinner and Bagels n’ Lox Breakfast. Sadly, finding a location for a bagel brunch in San Francisco is kind of hard…so we’re just going to have a regular brunch. However, we still really liked the idea of having chinese food for dinner.

Planning the rehearsal dinner has been kind of funny. Seeing as how Mr. Cream Puff’s parents are Chinese, they know all the great authentic Chinese places in the bay area. However, we also have to consider the fact that the majority of the out-of-town guests are from my family, so feeding a bunch of Jews shark fin soup and sea cucumbers might not go over well. Plus, most of their favorite restaurants are in Oakland Chinatown, and we couldn’t ask people to come all the way from the city to Oakland for dinner.

Then we came across this place, which is right smack in San Francisco’s Chinatown:

The second we walked in the door, I fell madly in love. It has old touristy San Francisco Chinatown feel–totally kitchy and fun.

And…it has KARAOKE! I am thrilled. Beyond thrilled. We get an entire room all to ourselves:

Okay, so the food is not authentic Chinese. It’s totally white-people-tourist-food. But that ought to please my family just fine (because although they say they are adventurous, I’m not really sure that they are). The other benefit of eating here is that it is a mere block from Golden Gate Bakery, maker of the world’s best Don Tot, my most favorite Chinese dessert (it’s like a custard with a delicious DELICIOUS buttery, flakey crust), which we will be bringing in for dessert.

In addition, it’s right in the heart of Chinatown, and within walking distance from the hotel we blocked rooms at…which means we can walk there from the hotel, through the famous Chinatown gate. I’m super excited to share San Francisco with our guests. This is going to be so fun!!

(this picture from here)

After dinner, we can walk around Chinatown!

Now that most of the plans are set, I am starting to get really, really excited. Last week while I was in Oregon visiting my parents, my mom and I went shopping and got our rehearsal dinner outfits. Here’s my dress (not me, haha–photo from Nordstrom):

So excited!!