Wedding Planning

This weekend, a friend of mine is getting married. I’m very excited for her and her future husband, and also interested to see how she planned her wedding. With my own wedding about to hit the year mark, I’m really starting to get more pumped up about planning.

Eric and I have already done quite a bit of planning. The place, caterer, and photographer are all booked. We had a tasting last month and will be going for another one in the late fall, early winter. We plan to book the DJ next and talk more about whether or not we want a florist. I’ve been thinking I might do silk flowers for the bouquets and then have large pumpkins with sugar pumpkins and squash decorate the tables. I’m thinking of having the big pumpkins in the middle of the table with a garland of leaves around them and leaves spread on the tables themselves, and then the little pumpkins and squash in arrangements on the ends of the tables. These can all double as favors as the cooks among my guests can take the sugar pumpkins and squash home for baking, and the parents among my guests can take the big pumpkins for carving for their kids. If we do that, we won’t have much need for flowers, and honestly, I’m not really big on floral decorations for a fall wedding.

I’ve talked to both my sister and Eric’s sister, who will be my bridesmaids. Kidlet will be my junior maid of honor as she said she didn’t want to be a flower girl. Eric’s niece will fill that role, and hopefully she won’t be too scared to do it. I figure in February or March, I’ll make plans with my all 3 girls to go dress shopping. That should give us plenty of time to get them their dresses for the wedding. I’m not sure what color I will go with since my dress is not white and I don’t want them to clash, but I’m thinking either a deep purple or brown, or I can be slightly ironic and have THEM in white while I am not!

My theme for my wedding is basically Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream meets fall, so it’s a Mid-Fall Night’s Dream. The faerie aspect will be in the bubble lanterns with LED candles hanging throughout the pavilion. I also plan to string up some lights to give it more of a whimsical feel. I hope to buy some lighted leaf garlands to put around the windows as well to bring in the fall décor.

We are having our engagement pictures done in a few weeks and I’m really looking forward to that. Our photographer is a girl I used to go to high school with who had very reasonable prices and allowed clients full access to all photos. So, that means that we don’t have to pay more to print our photos, we have full rights for printing. However, if she offers some sort of wedding album after the wedding, I will probably buy it from her just because it’s less work for me. But it’ll be nice to be able to upload our photos to facebook pretty quickly after the wedding.

Initially, Eric and I were not planning to do much of a honeymoon. Since our wedding is during the school year and I can’t very well leave kiddo for a week, we originally planned to go to a place in PA for a long weekend. But then I realized that the week after Christmas next year would be Travis’ week of visitation for kiddo. He may not be able to keep her the whole week, so I plan to discuss with my sister and other family if they can care for her for a couple of days until Travis can take her. Once we realized that, we started looking at cruises and all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean. We’re looking at Mexico and a cruise out of Jacksonville, Florida. If for some reason, no one in my family can keep her for the first few days of that week, we may do something closer to home.

I remember being very disappointed last year when I realized that we’d have to put the wedding off for a year in order to have the wedding we really wanted, but now I’m actually really glad we have the extra time. We’re still a little over a year out from our wedding and we’ve already got many of the major things booked. Next on our agenda is the DJ and rental company (as we may need tents if the weather is bad), bakery for the wedding cake, and possibly florist or farm for the flowers and/or pumpkins. I will also likely need a few alterations to my dress, so a seamstress, and we need our officiant, so we will need to look into that as well. We are not sure about transportation as our venue has two separate areas for the ceremony and the reception and it’s a bit of a walk for some of our older relatives, but we’re leaning towards some sort of limo/bus service.

Most importantly, it’s coming together well. I feel like since we have not been procrastinating and we have been booking things every few months since we started planning that everything will come together well by next October. In the meantime, I also don’t feel like wedding planning is taking up all of our lives. That may change once we pass the year mark and the timeframe gets tighter, but I’m hoping our early planning will help alleviate that. No matter what though, I’m excited to marry Eric and continue building a life with him and kiddo.