How to Plan for a Beach Wedding (Our Dream Beach Wedding)

July 4, 2023August 22, 20238 Comments

It’s been two months since we did our dream beach wedding! It happened on May 5, 2023 at 5PM, dusk, my fave time of day. Happy 2nd Beach Wedding Monthsary to us! My blog is on US Time Zone but it’s July 5 now in the Philippines. I’m starting a beach wedding series and this would be my first blog post about it. If this is your first time to get to know me, you can go back to my previous post about our pre-wedding film which would also connect you to a series of my wedding engagement posts. I’m sort of an OC kind of person and I just want the documentation of my memories organized. This is in case I get Alzheimer’s in the future (I hope not!) and honestly, just doing it this way makes me so happy. It’s like I get to relive each moment as words pour out of me… Teehee. So, let’s start…

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Secret Civil Wedding: Becoming Mrs. Villanueva Part 1

December 30, 2022August 22, 20237 Comments

It was supposed to be a “secret wedding”… We wanted our partnership to be legal and official even before we lay out all the plans for 2023, one of which is being able to do our dream beach wedding. Blame it to my “segurista” and OC personality, I just want everything ironed out on the legal front before the year ends. And I’m very grateful for the fact that Mahal has always wanted to marry me and supports me all the way, til forever and beyond… ❤

Actually, if we didn’t have the funds to do a beach wedding next year, a simple, “secret”, intimate civil wedding one is what we’ll really do. We are both introverts after all. I was even content to just have a piece of thread tied to my finger as a promise of his love. But thank you, God, for blessing us with a beautiful engagement, complete with an engagement photoshoot and engagement video shoot, and even an engagement honeymoon in Camotes Island which I’ll share here soon. We really feel so grateful plus I feel like such a celebrity (lol!) doing 2 kinds of weddings. Actually, even before J.Lo and Ben Affleck did their two weddings, doing the same had always been my plan… the two stars just beat us to it! Lol!

Didn’t JLo say

“Life is an art… and we are the artists… make it as beautiful as you want and create exactly what you want it to be…”

So that’s what we did!

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Of Weddings and Breakups [a Raw Conversation with a 6 Year Old]

December 11, 2022February 2, 20243 Comments

On October 30, 2021, about 14 months ago, even before Mahal and I got formally engaged, we faced a lot of trials in our relationship. We actually fought and broke up a few times and Tuz was there to witness it all.

We didn’t mean for our young son to see our fights at that time because we always did our best to be careful. But he is such a perceptive and sensitive kid that even if Mahal and I are not shouting, Tuz can recognize the differences in our verbal tones and non-verbal expressions.

It’s a good thing that the stormy season in our relationship has passed and we are now in a much, much better place. Because of those fights, Mahal and I learned to communicate better, love each other better, and Tuz witnessed all of that too. Perhaps that is why he is such a happy boy who acts and thinks more maturely for his age.

Anyway, this video that I am sharing with you here is my raw conversation with Tuz at that time. Mahal and I just patched things up and I wanted to document how it affected our 6 year old boy. (Actually, he was just 5 but would be turning 6 in 17 days at that time, so I just rounded it off, hihi!)