shoot! i'm engaged!

after booking my wonderfully talented photographer ryan brenizer, we're now brainstorming WHERE to shoot our engagement session and WHEN might be good too...considering we'll be having a time crunch on our wedding day the engagement photos location needs to be extra special/memorable i think so we can do all the photos we want to but can't for the wedding...

Here are a few possibilities...

A. Northport Yacht Club

(source: northportyachtclub.com)

chris and i have spent many a summers here sailing and such and it'll also give us an opportunity to take some sexy beach pictures ala mrs hibiscus of weddingbee, but chris isn't so thrilled with this prospect...but he hasn't throw the idea out yet

B. Brooklyn Height Promenade

(source: inetours.com)

since we both live in brooklyn and he works in lower manhattan, i thought this would also make for some awesome new yorky engagement photos, it'll be trendy and stylish etc etc...but it doesn't really serve any particular meaning to our relationship so chris again is hesitant about giving me the green light about this one

C. Adirondaks High Peaks Region - Mount Jo
This place would be perfect i guess, but logistically getting up here with our photographer is a huge task to undertake and i'm not likely to want to venture into this sort of territory...

D. Old Westbury Gardens

(source: oldwestburygardens.org)

i think this place is GORGEOUS! you have the gardens, the mansion everything...most people take their wedding photos here on Long Island but yea, it's an old standby favorite, but chris isn't too thrilled with this one either... the man is hard to please ladies and gents.


so there is my dilemma, where to have these photos taken? i'm leaving towards A and B obviously..but where would you/have you take your engagement photos?

Practice for the big day

so the day arrived! it's my engagement party!
firstly, NOTHING ever happens without a hitch, and the person who tells you its possible is lying, tell em i said so...

the event was supposed to start at 5, but because of a horrid accident that blocked off ALL lanes on the highway that goes to the restaurant, majority of guests arrived late, and we were not able to start until an hour later...but afterwards, everything went rather smoothly...

i'll let the photos speak for themselves :)

thats us!

future in laws

with mom
dim sum appetizer (1st course) - buns, spring rolls and crystal shrimp dumplings

black pepper steak (2nd course).. yea not much of it left when this was taken haha
my favorite! jumbo prawns in mayonnaise sauce (course 3)


the seafood fish maw soup (4th course)

there were 6 more courses after this, the fish, chicken, lobster, snow pea leaves, fried rice and lo mein, and finished with assorted cookies, fruit and sweet soup

that my friends, is the chinese banquet ;)

(we actually had to modify a couple of the dishes to make it more friendly for non ambitious eaters, like subsituting the "jelly fish" for dim sum and the fish maw instead of shark fin

thats my future mother in law playing with the crispy chicken head

the amazing dress my very talented mommy made

The big ole chinese banquet

or in my case my big fat chinese engagement party. ok so one of the first things that i needed to tackle after i became engaged was the engagement party. i kid you not, i was engaged on friday night, wasn't able to tell anyone until saturday afternoon (due to no cell phone reception unless you were on top of some mountain) and by sunday dinner (mid autumn festival) i was confronted with the prospects of having an engagement party.

i quickly had to decide what kind of affair it would be. there is the totally economical, have a party at our home, which i had to ix nay due to the sheer number of guests that will be invited. the alternative was to find a restaurant that can accomodate the 80-90 guests and still wont break the bank and or cost the same as if we were to have a wedding 2 months from the date. chris and i both come from big families and there is no way that my modest southern brooklyn block would be able to park that many cars, its a virtual impossibilty. so upon discussion with mom, it was decided that we would have a 10 course chinese dinner at one of the new chinese restaurants that opened up in my area. the decision was pretty easy. i had considered if i wanted a chinese banquet for my future wedding and decided that i didn't want a gaudy chinese wedding with trumpet and lion dances accompanied by a 10 course cantonese family style dinner. so a good compromise to show my future husbands family what my culture is all about, we settled on having a chinese engagement banquet.

a 15 minute walk or a 5 minute drive from my humble abode, we chose spring garden chinese restaurant. we met with the restaurant manager over dim sum and discussed menu. i have to admit this was pretty painless. most chinese restaurants have prefixe chinese banquet menus, but considering we're going to be having a lot of non chinese guests, we couldn't really use any of the prefixed menus that were available to us, so we had to get a little creative with the dish selections so that we can accomodate less adventurous palates. an auntie probably never heard of abalone and will most likely be weirded out by its slimy appearance. or our tree hugger cousin may think that shark fin soup is animal cruelty and sic peta on us or something. so we changed some of the more exotic dishes and replaced them with something that will be more audience friendly to people of all cultures. in the end i think we did pretty good. momma tse did a good job negotiating the menu down so no complaints from me.

THE proposal

A few years ago, chris and i went to the adirondaks high peaks region on memorial day weekend to escape the city life. he was already familiar with this region, having gone up many times throughout his childhood with his family and as a boy scout. for a lack of better words, he's an uber wilderness man at heart, and kinda sexy may i add. i on the other hand have never been up to the high peaks region, and the only wilderness-y thing i've ever done was basically hike up a tiny little mountain in westchester NY. wilderness girl i am not. but i was glad i went on this weekend getaway because i quickly fell in love with the region for all its natural beauty, not to mention the amazing view from atop a mountain. so we've always said we'd go back every year to hike a mountain and to just basically enjoy the adirondaks. for various reasons we haven't made it back up there until this fall.

to be quite honest, i was sorta expecting his proposal since i knew he had the ring already, albeit i never SAW the ring and have no idea what it looked like (i swear!). how you wonder, well usually he wouldn't mind if we had friends join us for any sort of trip or adventure, but this time he was quite adamant that it just be the two of us. so from that moment on i had a sneaking suspicion this would be the weekend of all weekends.

so we arrive at the adirondak loj at heart lake and check in and its around 4pm and rather rainy. i love going up mt jo, but i felt it was too rainy to go and was getting a little sad i may not make it up on this trip. we were due to leave on sunday and on saturday we were supposed to leave at the crack of dawn to hike up mt marcy and would take up a whole day (i also thought he would propose on top of mt marcy). but chris insisted that i loved mt jo and we should try to hike up jo despite the weather since the rain turned into a light drizzle anyway. so dressed in our ponchos we began to ascend mt jo, it's a pretty short hike about an hour up and an hour down but the view from the top is breathtaking.

i made it to the summit! and it even stopped raining at this point! (it was a good omen now that i think of it haha)

(this is heart lake, our loj was right next to it, and the foot of the mountain was basically in the loj's backyard)

After chris and i make it to the top of the mountain, he instructed me to remove my poncho so we can sit on them and appreciate the scenary, or so i thought! so i'm like busying myself with taking photos of the area (see above) and making chris take pictures of me to commemorate the fact that we once again made it to the top of jo (yes i'm a photo whore, well... to some extent) i was determined to document as much of this trip as i possibly could, chris starts to pace around the top of the mountain. now to be honest, i just thought he was just walking around to appreciate the scenary from different angles. i thought the proposal would come the next day so i was in no way suspicous of anything. finally i look at my watch and i mention it is getting late and dark and the sun will set and we dont want to be caught on the mountain when it is full dark and that we should start heading back. and with one last look out over the clouds, chris tells me he has one last thing left to do before we descend. ladies and gents you guessed it, the boy gets on his knee and my waterworks start and the rest is shall we all say history. i remember most of what he said to me (surprisingly) but i won't be recapping that in this journal as chris wanted to leave that precious moment private to just the two of us, so i suppose i will respect his wishes :)

we're engaged!!!! this was probably like 2 minutes later, please try to ignore my atrocious hair and check out the hardware on my left hand!!!!

basically all in all, chris managed to do the unthinkable (at least i thought was originally unthinkable) surprise proposal.

note: for those of you who are really curious, he actually didn't propose with the ring, but rather presented to me after i said "yes". which in hindsight was definitely the smarter thing to do, because i can bet you that if he proposed with the ring, i would not have remembered one thing he said to me, and instead wouldve just stared at the ring and not have the wonderful memories i now have.