Team Wedding (And Why Being a Millennial Won't Stop Me)

Ah, the joys of being a millennial.

You get to live life with people calling you lazy, entitled, oblivious and overall expecting you to be the worst.

Yeah, I love to binge watch Netflix and I'm horribly addicted to Facebook and Candy Crush, and yes, I genuinely don't know anything about fax machines or how to properly mail things. But I'm talking about something more important than your general opinion of my age group as a whole.

Age discrimination is a thing, and not just for older people. I can't tell you how many times I've been called "young lady" and "sweetheart", how often I have to set aside my real work to help my co-workers with their cellphones or printers or Microsoft Word because "You're young right? You know how to do this stuff", or how often my ideas and opinions have been completely discredited because my superiors have "t-shirts older than" me. I don't want to hear you talk to me in your "dad" voice because your children are my age.

It's not that I expect to be taken seriously without the work or experience. I realize that I haven't been working for thirty years. I know that I am still green. But that doesn't mean I don't have fresh ideas or worthy ideas. It doesn't mean that I'm allowed to be silenced or excluded simply because I'm in my twenties instead of my 40s or 50s,

I've worked hard. I've worked all the way up from cleaning cheddar bay biscuits out of high chairs to where I am now, all while taking care of my family and getting a degree (that no one asks about). Do I feel like I deserve something? You're damn right I do! It's called respect. I don't want anything handed to me, I just want to be treated like an adult. I pay my bills, I figured out Obamacare, I can almost not eat hot pockets for dinner for the majority of the week! Ok, so maybe I see your point with the last one. BUT STILL.

I love work. I always have. I'm motivated by having work to go to each day, something to do and create and be proud of. I'm a workaholic who can't sleep some nights just because of a project I get to work on the following day. I judge my value in life by what I do with my days, and with that being said, it's extremely depressing for me to work in an environment where I don't feel fulfilled, appreciated, or respected. I don't want to live a life where each day is a struggle to find happiness within my work because frankly, life is just too short to be miserable.

For the sake of my sanity and my happiness, I'm about to make a big change.

It's been a tough decision to do something this drastic, and potentially insane, but with Eric and my friends and family's endless support behind me, I've decided that I am venturing out to fulfill my life's dream of owning my own business.

This January I will be launching Team Wedding, a full service wedding planning business.

It's a terrifying thing to take a chance on something like this, but I know I have the support of all you wonderful people out there who have believed in me through all my journeys.


You can check out my website and learn a little more about it by clicking here. And if you hear of someone needing a wedding planner, you can send them my way!

One Fell Swoop

Guys, I know it's been a while since I've written.

And that's because I decided it would be a good idea to get (another) dog, a house, host Christmas, and plan a wedding all during the holiday season.






Yeah, yeah. I know!


Needless to say, I think I've survived it all and come out on the other side realizing in 18 days I'll be married.





Let me fill you in on what's developed in wedding plans since we last spoke.


The plan for paying for the wedding took an unexpected turn and we found out we'd be paying for the whole thing ourselves.




Which, while super terrifying and unexpected, just meant we had to change a few details.


NBD.

(Shout out to my fiance who decided to be an engineer instead of an artist.)




Anyway, in the midst of wedding chaos we found a new addition to our family.

Cue Butterball, the worlds most precious, scraggly pup next to our Jackson.

We adore her, and even though we were fifth in line to get her...we still managed and brought her home right before Thanksgiving. 

We quickly realized that our zoo was now too large to remaining in our cool-kid loft downtown and it was time to find somewhere with a yard and real people space. 

Look at them. LOOK AT THEM. 

 So we loaded up and the week before Christmas moved into our new home, a suburb in West Knox like the classy ass people we are. Or something like that...

The next day my brother showed up to spend Christmas with us, bringing along his beautiful lady and their ADORABLE PRECIOUS PRINCESS daughter. 

We're basically BFF's already. 

We saved the world from destruction. 

Christmas was insane and wore us all out, and this past Sunday was the first moment we had to breathe since before Thanksgiving. 

There was lots of napping. 

In the quiet of our new, empty house it started hitting us that in less than a month we'd be married. In a house. With our little family. 

It wasn't a panicked realization, it was more like a calm. Like it was all coming together and we'd be starting a new adventure that we (for once) were completely ready to embark on. 

We're so ready for the next year, and for the rest of our lives.


Let's do this!

It's All in the Details

I'm a fan of the little things.

Little things make me really happy, especially when a lot of thought goes into little details.

Like one wedding I did, they had this hilarious story about their first date. They were at a bar, starving, and the kitchen was closed. But the bartender served them tater tots and pigs in a blanket in beer pitchers.

So at their wedding they had us carry around beer pitchers full of tater tots and pigs in a blanket. All their guests probably just thought it was the best wedding food ever, but really it had this whole back story.

Or I had a bride who used raspberry filling in her cake because once she got a big raspberry stain on a fancy dress during on of their dates and it was mortifying, but later became a huge joke.

Those little things make my heart melt like buttah!


And I love those little details so much that I try to put them into everything I do, and this wedding is giving me the opportunity to go BIG with it. Our theme has given me the freedom to make it consistent from the decor to the party favors, and I'd love to share some of those little details with you!


First off, I'm delighted about our favors.

Kawaiiiiii!

They're cute little air mail packages that we'll be filling with a variety of different candies from around the world.

Most people end up leaving dozens of favors around after the wedding, but in this case I won't be upset if I end up taking some home!


There's also this stamp:

Which, this one of course doesn't have our address on it. But we had one made with our's for our invitations. 

They're pre-inked stamps, so you don't have to re-ink it every stamp which makes life a whole lot easier when you're stamping 200 envelopes. Plus, it has a gorgeous vintagey feel which is exactly what we wanted!

(If you'd like to purchase your own stamp in any style, you can find their Etsy store here. )

I also had the help of the lovely and talented, Lynn Justice (And my bridesmaid, Christine too!) to emboss my invitations.

That basically just means we make it shiny. We did the plane on the front and the stamp on the back, and it is literally the most time consuming thing you could ever do to something BUT SO PRETTY. 

If you'd like to see how to emboss, you can check out the pins on my blog board that have tips and videos on how to do it. 

Another super exciting find was these vintage luggage tags to use as place cards. Obviously we won't have that butterfly logo, but we'll put guest's names there instead. We're probably going to take off the tacky blue string, but these were the most realistically affordable luggage tags for our guest counts, and they matched our invitations. 

Last but not least, we found our send off car! This is a 1960 Chrysler New Yorker hardtop. It's beautiful and we are PUMPED that we get to ride off in this beauty. 

Not to mention the guy that owns it is a complete doll and has been a delight to work with. 

He has some amazing cars, and from what I've seen the best price on rentals in the area. 

If you're looking for classic cars for anything, you can see his stuff here. 

We have more exciting details to come, and I'm so thankful to be getting things knocked off the list.

If you'd like to see any of the stuff I mentioned, the jewelry I picked out for the wedding, and more good stuff check out my blog board and follow me on Pinterest! 

Follow Marvyl Cockrell's board To Be Triscritti on Pinterest.

The Biggest Lie

What's the biggest lie you've ever been told?


For me I don't know if it was my high school boyfriend telling me that he wasn't cheating on me... or my best friend telling me that she wasn't having an affair with said boyfriend. Or maybe it was that my college years would be the best years of my life. Or even that my degree would matter...


But in reality I think the biggest lie I was ever told is that you're going to meet the perfect person.



If you would have asked 15-year-old Marvyl to describe who she was going to marry, I can bet you anything that it's probably the polar opposite of the person I'm actually going to marry. Well, maybe except for how handsome he is...that's definitely on point


But the ideal person that I created the Sim version of for years and years, doesn't exist. The person that all my friends and mentors and TV shows told me that I would eventually find isn't real. Because the truth of the matter is that when you find the person you're going to spend presumably forever with, reality comes up and slaps you in the face and shows you that the perfect person you were expecting is only that... a person.


And the truly awful thing about people is that we suck. Boys, girls, all of us...were awful things. We get mad, we get angry, we're messy, we're lazy, we're selfish, we want our alone time while simultaneously needing someone to constantly interact with...we're addicted to our phones, addicted to our games, addicted to food and drinks that are really awful for us.


There are so many things that can be wrong with a single person that when you're growing up that should lead you to believe the chances are, the human you're going to be stuck with has at least a few of those things going for them.


And guess what? You've got a few of those things going for you too. Finding someone to spend forever with doesn't mean finding a perfect person. It means finding a person that you can tolerate, and who can tolerate you. It means finding someone who will take all be terrible, awful things in the human part of you and still think that you're perfect. (While knowing that deep down inside you really love Carly Rae Jepson songs and that you're probably going to skip your workout tonight to eat smores that are even cooked because you don't have the patience to wait for the microwave to finish).


And you're going to realize that the person you love drives you absolutely crazy sometimes because they just have to finish this quest before doing that thing that you asked them to do, and that there really going to want to sit on the couch in their boxers even if you have company coming over and you're going to have to have a real life argument about wearing pants.



But at the end of the day you know that you found the person you're supposed to be with because they're not perfect and you're not perfect but you make each other better. You love all those wonderful things about each other did make up for all those really awful things about human beings.



So the biggest lie that I was ever told was that I will find the perfect person. But the truth I found was that I found a wonderfully human person that has good days and bad days and wonderful things about them and terrible things about them.



I wish 15-year-old Marvyl knew that she shouldn't have been looking for a perfect person. But I guess it all worked out in the end, because I found a whole lot of people that I thought were perfect.

Thank goodness I didn't end up with the perfect person, because I found MY person.

Why is everyone more motivated than me? And More Reasons Real Life Ruined My Diet

It's technically day 14 of the 21 day fix...but if there was a 21 day fix wagon I didn't just fall of it. I jumped, ran, and then took a plane as far away from it as possible.

Because as it turns out, real life makes diets like this incredibly difficult to complete.

The first problem is that it takes a whole lot of time. Between the hours spent on the weekends prepping your food, and the three and a half hours a week you spend exercising I found out really quickly that I literally did not have enough time to pull it off.

I ran out of groceries on Monday, and I worked doubles all week. My fridge looked like the ghost of good meals past.
 

Not only did I not have any healthy food, I had no food at all because I had cleaned out all the no-no list food for my fix.

This left me with the eating-out at work option, which was a real eye-opener for me. At first it was really hard to find food that would fit into my container categories, and then when I got my meal it was VERY difficult to portion it. I'd cut my meat in half but when I finished it, I had the other half laying there wanting to be eaten up!

 


The first week I couldn't even finish my containers, but without a real container schedule I was getting super hungry and I was starting to miss my favorite foods AKA pizza all day every day.

 

I picked up the phone to dial pizza literally a dozen times.

But I tried to stay in as much of a container-approved zone as possible, and since I was working my butt off at work I was still staying active.


So at my weigh-in at the end of the week I was still stuck at the four pounds I had lost, and no inches off my waist.

I could definitely feel the difference of not exercising, and I was actually eager to get back into the routine of things.

So, starting tomorrow I have to start my second week over again. BLEH.



I realize there are super humans out there that either wake up two hours early or go to bed after midnight so that they can work in their thirty minutes of work out and their post-workout shower, but I am not one of those humans. I love my sleep, I love my body not hating me.

I think there is definitely a balance of diet and still living life that is appropriate, and if nothing else it has definitely made me more conscious of what I'm putting into my body.


So this week is do-over week!

Day 5: The First Weigh In

Oh, man.

Day 4 was ROUGH.

I actually cried during the Lower Fix workout and wondered if I would even be able to continue on through the 22 minutes I had left, let alone the rest of these 21 days.

I was not happy at the end, I didn't feel accomplished or proud, I just felt miserable. I barely had made it through, and I had no desire to finish eating my Boca Burger patty for my meal that night.

I was sweaty. So. Sweaty. And all I could think about was how tomorrow was the "Dirty 30" and it made me want to die.

 

I crawled into bed, feeling awful and not prepared for another day of this.


But, day 5 arrived.

DAY 5

I woke up, and surprisingly felt pretty good. My legs weren't in that much pain, my abs only had a slight hint of burn left, and I was well rested (for once). The combination of my new medicine making me feel like part of the living again and me exhausting myself each day left me sleeping pretty well and waking up in a shockingly great mood.

I was ready to take this day on!


I packed my containers, and before I left I did my first official weigh-in since Monday.

THREE AND A HALF POUNDS HOLY CRAP.

I excitedly threw off my dress and ran in to grab a pair of jeans.

 


Well, I got them on. And baaaarreeely got them buttoned but DAMN IT THEY ARE ON!

I'm only seven pounds from my goal, and I've got some new motivation to carry me through.

Three pounds, four days. I got this.

Autumn says you just have to be better than yesterday.

I think I can handle that.

 


I'll update you after the Dirty Thirty tonight.

Day Four: I am Kat

Today started off with a Nyquil hangover.

I slept through my alarm and battled with this cold all day.
 


DAY 3

I didn't eat any of my containers for the day, except for my cottage cheese and peaches for breakfast. I felt like crap and couldn't do it.

My Lumberjack Crew took me out for lunch for my birthday, and it was brought to my attention once again that everything in my life is centered around going out to eat. Luckily, salmon was an option and I used one of my red containers and green containers and skated by.

Before I even headed home I had already talked myself out of today's work out. The pain of the two workouts was finally settling in, and I was pretty sure both my legs had been beaten with baseball bats while I was asleep, and I knew there was just no way between my head and my legs that today's "Lower Fix" was going to happen.




But that's why people like me HAVE to have a coach to force us into doing what we're suppose to do.

So she bargained with me, and we decided to flippityflop today's Lower Fix with tomorrow's Pilates.


I was not a happy camper. I did not want to be sitting on this floor with Jackson dragging squeaky toys over my face and attacking me because of my exhales which he believed to be directed at him.

 

This goes out to all you people working out in a zoo...

Anyways, the warm up starts and OH MY GOD it's so hard whyyyyyy.

I immediately send a voice message to Coach Melissa blaming her for subjecting me to this torture. If the warm up is this hard, what the hell will the next twenty four minutes be????


But once we actually start, I have to admit to myself it isn't that bad. Me and Kat are hanging out in modify-land today.

I AM KAT TODAY. 

We're making our way through and even though my abs are on fire, my head actually feels a little better, and I could do a slightly (VERY SLIGHTLY) longer plank today. Autumn tells me again, "It's not getting easier, you're getting better!"

I feel like an idiot, but I smile when she says it anyway. I've come to terms with the fact you have to buy into it, even just a little, to make it through.

I've also realized Autumn's catch pharse is, "Yeah?" and I lost track of how many times she asked it and how many times I stupidly answered back with the group.
 


AND SERIOUSLY....

LOOK AT THEM! HOW???


Eventually it ends, and we all applaud.


I'm in considerably more pain than yesterday, but I feel extra proud that I suffered through and did it.

Day three in the bag, and hopefully I'll feel better for tomorrow.