Father knows best?

Okay, I've never seen Father Knows Best. But I was talking to someone tonight about the wedding planning, specifically, talking about my indecision between using paper/plastic table products (tablecloths, tableskirts, dishes, silverware, etc) versus using real stuff (i.e. linen tablecloths & napkins; real plates and cups, etc). And though there's a history of informal weddings in my family, I want to make sure that the wedding is tasteful. And though I've had family members use the paper/plastic products before at a wedding (the one I know it happened at was a 2nd wedding...can't remember about three first weddings if they were used or not), I'm still not sure about it.

Which brings us to Father Knows Best. Because most of my family is very easy going, but my dad has more particular tastes. And he is contributing to the expenses of my wedding. So I figure I'll ask and find out if he even cares what I use. If he does, then I'll go with what he chooses. If he doesn't care, then I'm back in the land of indecision. But for all the brides that complain about meddling parents in wedding planning, here's one place where I don't mind getting some extra input!

Picture from tvshowsondvd.net

Will you please shoot me?

After a lengthier process than many brides go through (my anal ways don't allow me to not research every, single option) I have reserved my photographer. She's wonderful. In addition to photography, she majored in peace and global studies in college (how cool is that?). Besides shooting weddings, she also goes down to Central America and shoots some amazing photos of the people down there). She goes to my church (which we didn't realize before we met). And because she just recently moved down here from New York City, her prices are a steal. Her name? Jennie Aleshire. All photos in this post are by Jennie Aleshire. (And yes, she does shoot in color. But these are two of my favorite photos of hers, and they just happen to be in black and white.)

Catching my breath

Things are finally beginning to settle down a little so that my life is no longer so hectic. And when I say things, I mean wedding planning. Before getting engaged I thought about all the things that would be cool to do for the wedding, and had various ideas, but it wasn't getting down to the nitty gritty, as that was supposed to be for when we were actually engaged. I thought the nitty gritty stuff would be pretty easy since I had done some research beforehand. I was wrong. Okay, my research probably did help me over all the completely clueless brides who hadn't given their wedding one thought, but not as much as I thought it would.

First there was the stress of trying to find out the wedding budget. This involved developing a tactical plan of how to assuage sensitive personalities and work diplomatically through the landmines that are family politics.

Then I attended a bridal show where I was practically the only bride getting married in 2010 as everyone else was planning a wedding in 2011 or 2012, for crying out loud. And nearly all the vendors were horrified at how little time I was leaving myself to get the planning done. Panic started to set in.

I had to multitask. I had to get save-the-dates because I needed enough people to respond so I could have a ballpark number of attendees while talking to caterers . But how tacky is it to not have the save-the-dates coordinate with the invitations? So I was looking at all my invitation options and comparing the costs.

I had to figure out if I was really going to do a fellowship hall reception, or if it wouldn't be a better deal to have it somewhere else. So an investigation of reception sites ensued, as well as caterers, to see where I would be better off.

And at the bridal show there were already several photographers who were booked up on the day of my Sunday wedding in November, 9 months away. So I had to research photographers whose work I loved at a price I could stomach.

Lastly, if I was doing save-the-dates then I would want to put down our wedding website's address. But what would it be? Would we pay for our own domain name or use one of the free sites? Which wedding website hosts had the best services, or templates that worked well for us, or...? Again, one more thing added to the list of things to accomplish NOW.

But now that I've made some decisions, things can slow down and I can start to appreciate the process. I'm not doing stationery save-the-dates (more on that in a different post). We've decided to use the fellowship hall. We're this close to signing our photographer. And our wedding website has been born. Not bad for being engaged for 3 weeks. Now I feel as though we can relax a little and make decisions with less pressure on us.

And this will be my last post until next week because tomorrow I head to a wedding in New York and won't get back until Sunday evening. So have a fabulous weekend and I'll catch you next week!

When do they find the time?

You would think that once I became engaged that the posts would just start flowing. And frankly, there's a lot of stuff I could be talking about. But now that I actually have to do the planning, I have no time to write! No time to cogitate and reflect back on everything that's going on. Because there's a certain number of hurdles I've got to jump over in a rather quick amount of time (or so WIC seems to tell me) and between my job, and my life, and all this searching, I just don't have time to post. So how do all these other bloggers find the time to do this stuff? Or do they just wait until they're later in the process? Or do they just take longer than 9 months to plan a wedding?