Note: I wrote this November 27, 2009 and never published it until now. I currently have two friends both recently engaged who might be able to make use of this. Congrats to both of them and I hope you find this helpful!!

I wanted to kick-off my wedding re-cap posts with a wedding graduate post much like Meg does on A Practical Wedding (her blog kept me sane throughout the entire planning process and her wedding graduate post made me teary because it’s close to what I want to write). I know when I was planning there were so many times I wondered “Is This Normal?!?” or “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?!?” so to all of the future brides I know in the midst of planning a wedding or just starting to think about planning these are the words of wisdom I have to pass along:

You will receive a lot of advice and opinions on wedding (including my list here). Realize that people are just trying to help, are super excited for you and most of the time are remembering their own wedding. You and your future spouse are under no obligation to take anyone’s advice or opinion into account (unless they are contributing financially….).

Post-engagement: take a week or two to just enjoy the engagement glow and then some more time to discuss what you both want out of your wedding. After congratulating you, people will jump right to “so have you set a date?” and it’s okay to not have an answer to this question. Contrary to popular belief immediately after getting engaged most couples do not sit down and compare calendars. We, or rather I, jumped right into planning with my list of to-dos and it took me a little while to realize that I was acting out my vision without taking the time to listen to Nick’s. (Oh and disregard those timelines for planning in bridal magazines — 6 months was plenty of time for our 250 person wedding).

• Remember the bigger picture. When I started to feel overwhelmed with planning or making the umpteenth decision, I knew I needed a break, a wedding-free night with just me and Nick. Sometimes we would talk about our future but those conversations were for things that were going to happend after-the-wedding and it was awesome to start planning our future together.
• Wedding planning happens in spurts. There would be 1-3 weeks of intense activity followed by a 2-4 week lull. Enjoy the lulls!!! Plan non-wedding related activities!!
• You will cry and this is perfectly normal, in fact probably healthy. And you will disagree with your soon-to-be-spouse, yes on wedding details, but more than likely on bigger life/faith/work/family/kids issues and the engagement period is the right time and place to address these topics.
• You are starting a new family of 2 (or more if you are bringing kids into the mix). I think this was a real revelation to Nick in the planning process when I mentioned that the two of us were going to be a family (I think he thought the definition of family had to include kids. It doesn’t). Realizing that we were starting a new family together gave us the opportunity to put our new family first before the immediate families in which we had been raised. Luckily, we both have incredible parents who agree with that statement 100%.
• Find a support group/community/etc. My mom and my sister-in-law were incredible listeners over the most mundane details that Nick thought were crazy (so I wanted to register these storage containers….). I also followed 3 blogs throughout the planning process A Practical Wedding, Eat Drink Marry and Style Me Pretty. Maggie at Eat Drink Marry had a wedding date before mine and Meg at A Practical Wedding had a wedding date the week after mine. I enjoyed reading their journies and it inspired me to write (a little) about mine (I don’t ever expect to have the following that they do, I just write for kicks).
• 5 great, fabulous decisions that we made:
• 1. We analyzed super-fun weddings we had been and came to the conclusion that if the bride and groom were having fun then everyone else seemed to too. So we vowed to have the most fun possible and we did.
• 2. We saw each other before the ceremony (our priest’s suggestion) without 250 staring at us (and as a result have the best photo of the weekend)
• 3. We were at our own cocktail hour (who wants to miss their own party for posed pictures?!) and
• 4. We ate at our very own sweetheart table, just the two of us sharing our first meal together.
• 5. We had a sign-in book that I created while traveling in Switzerland based on the “engagement” photos my mom took 2 weeks before the wedding and people wrote the sweetest, nicest messages: http://www.heritagemakers.com/projectBrowserStandAlone.cfm?projectID=974762&productId=9
• 3 other things that worked out nicely:
• 1. Setting the RSVP date a month ahead of time.
• 2. Only working with vendors we felt comfortable with. They were all fantastic. If anyone is not fun or excited for you, drop them.
• 3. DELEGATING – when people offer to help, they really mean it. Folding and stuffing invitations, gluing programs, buying bagels the day of, directing the photos the day of, the list is endless and our helpers were amazing.
• 3 things that I didn’t realize would be so painful:
• 1. I ended up REALLY caring about the invitations. The paper, the colors, the fonts, I didn’t realize I would be so into pretty (expensive) paper.
• 2. Seating charts are a pain. We re-did ours about 5 times and hearing from someone the day of the wedding that “I’m obviously not important as you sat me so far away” made me want to tear my hair out. Seriously? We probably cared too much!
• 3. Leaving my fiancee behind when I started making plans… big life and marriage lesson learned here…
• Remember to pack advil for the night / morning after. Lucky for me, Nick had some.
• Get a video (if you can). We watched ours on our 1 month anniversary and got to see many things we missed.
• And finally, I read this list to Nick and I asked if he had anything to add. First he told me he loved me and then the only piece of advice he had (more for the guys) was “pick a good lady.”

I think that’s a good note to end on :)

– Mary