As I dig deeper into the wedding world as I’m researching our wedding, I’ve seen plenty of pictures and videos that have all touched my heart in one way or another, but there was one that caught me singularly off guard.
While perusing the boards on Weddingbee [of course], I happened upon a really old thread on the African American brides board where posters linked to some of their favorite weddings. I clicked on a few of them and enjoyed the beautiful pictures and then I happened upon a link to Kevin Jairai’s blog [of KJ Images] of Jennifer and Jeffrey’s wedding teasers.
I looked through the pictures and suddenly I was moved to tears. I had never experienced such an emotional reaction to a stranger’s wedding before and it took me completely off-guard. It took me a moment to realize the reason why I had such a reaction:
The groom reminds me of the mister.
And suddenly, I had an idea of how OUR wedding day would photograph. How it would look to see him for the first time all dressed up, the sight of him standing at the altar as I make my way down the aisle, our first kiss as husband and wife, and in general, how we would look at our wedding. After thinking about how our wedding would look over the past few years, I finally had a clear mental image and while it was a bit jarring at first, it makes me so much more excited for our future nuptials.
Just thinking about experiencing those small moments with him makes me smile. I can’t wait to finally be his wife.
Have you ever had an unexpected emotional reaction to someone else’s wedding photos or video?
While I was reading through Weddingbee last week, I came across this post from Miss Nachos that really resonated with me. I always like to joke about how rude life can be by tossing itself around and messing up carefully laid plans [as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry] but its important to remember that life waits for no one and will remind us of this fact whenever possible.
My reminder came just a few weeks ago: my dad passed away.
I wrote about it in a little more detail on my personal blog so I won’t get into the nitty gritty here. I will say that I am going to miss him a lot. We didn’t always get along but we did have a special relationship. Out of the three daughters, I was always the only one who could tell him what needed to be said without much argument from him. I don’t know why he only really listened to me but that was how it was with us.
He was really looking forward to attending my wedding. He was just telling the mister during his last visit in February how he was going to walk me down the aisle with a huge grin on his face and that when he handed me over to him at the altar, he would whisper, “No take backs. You’re stuck with her now.” To which I cackled maniacally and yelled, “Yup, you’re stuck with me forever!” He was talking about my wedding even during his last hospital stay, so much so the nurses and doctors started to congratulate me on an engagement that hadn’t happened yet!
I am so incredibly sad that he won’t be here to see me all dressed up, won’t be able to walk me down the aisle and won’t be able to dance with me like he promised me he would. I’m sad that he won’t be able to make a long drawn out speech during the reception. I’m sad thinking of removing his name from my invitation drafts and adding it to the “in memory” section of our programs. I’m sad that my kids won’t have a grandfather here on either side.
But life will continue. My mom will walk me down the aisle and I hope I can talk her out onto the dance floor for a mother-daughter dance. I will still celebrate my marriage with the mister and those who love us. I will smile and celebrate knowing that my dad would have wanted that for me. That even though he wasn’t able to physically be there for me on my wedding day, that he is still there in spirit and that he still loves me very much.
Because that is exactly what he wanted.
budgetinsight.wordpress.com
Have you ever wondered how people pay for their weddings? Do parents have a secret stash of wedding money ready to be dispensed when their kids finally get engaged? Do couples conjure up the money by wriggling their nose [if that’s the case, can you wriggle me up some cash to cover my student loans]? Where are people getting all this wedding cash from?
I will admit that, along with researching the weddening, I have also quietly been setting money aside to cover the costs of our blessed event. My main motivation for saving the money before our engagement was that I didn’t want to worry about where we were going to get the money to pay for our wedding. Since my original estimated budget was on the more elaborate side, I figured it would be smart to begin saving money now. That way we can slowly put aside small amounts of money whenever we had extra and would hopefully have the majority of it by the time we were engaged. I have since readjusted the budget and eliminated the parental contributions because I didn’t want to put any extra pressure on our parents to contribute. If they want to contribute, cool, but I don’t want them to feel compelled to. In fact, I’m not expecting them to.
And I will admit a small part of it was also because I wanted us to retain complete creative control over the planning. I’ve seen too many friends battle against their parents because they didn’t like some of the options their parents were offering but since they had accepted their money, they felt compelled to follow through. I did not want to lose the essence and soul of our wedding day in the swirl of parental obligations and what they felt was “wedding appropriate.”
I know that some people build in extra time to save money for the wedding by extending their engagement period but with a super short engagement, that’s not an option for us, at least, not unless we don’t want to eat or pay rent or something. And I refuse to take out loans. I don’t believe in taking out loans for one day; especially not with student loans breathing down my back! I really like knowing that we’ll be able to essentially pay for our wedding in cash and be done [though I will put everything on a credit card for the purchasing protection and rewards points, I intend to pay of the bill in full each month]. At this juncture, we have roughly about 64% of my proposed wedding budget saved up. I really hope we’ll be able to save up the rest of it before we get married.
Okay, another disclosure: is it weird that part of me hopes he waits to propose until after we have the money, or at least close to it? When I went through that brief episode of the –itis last month, I may have gotten a little freaked out because I didn’t have all of the money saved up yet. Crazy, I know.
Already having a budget in mind helps with the wedding research because I can get a good idea of what we’ll be able to afford with our money. Though I’m still trying to figure out the cash allocations for each budgeted item but it’s hard to fine tune. I keep going over our budget! I need to find a good budget calculator. Does anyone know of one besides The Knot and Brides.com?
i am a planner. i plan just about anything that can be planned. i have a file dedicated to vacations the boy and i can take one day. i started planning my 28th birthday party about a week following my 27th birthday [and can i say it was awesome!]. i’m already thinking of ideas for my 30th birthday [yes i just skipped a year]. i have planned the classes i’ll be taking for the rest of my master’s program. i am a planner. this is what i do.
there seems to be a weird taboo feeling surrounding planning or researching a wedding before you’re engaged. and in the interest of full disclosure, i was one of those people who gave the side-eye to girls who were actively planning their weddings before being engaged. i was never the type to think about weddings so i never really understood the idea of pre-planning. obviously i’ve since changed my tune but in the very early stages, while i was looking at ideas with my bestie while she was waiting for her husband to propose, i kept my researching a secret from everyone BUT the boy [i'm positive i'm incapable of keeping secrets from the boy. i told him a few days after i started looking!] because, oooh, i had become a “binder girl.” boo! hiss!
okay, another disclosure: for a few months i actually AVOIDED putting anything in a binder because i didn’t want to become a “binder girl.” lame, i know.
but i don’t think researching is totally a bad thing. it depends on the girl. our case isn’t one where i have planned a wedding with every guy i’ve ever been interested in. or one where the boy was completely unaware that i was planning. or even one where i haven’t talked about marriage with the boy or been told to stop planning. the boy and i have had that talk: we both discussed this relationship being The One [we had been talking about that and marriage since our second month together], we discuss marriage, where we’re going to live [this is an ongoing conversation], have gone ring shopping, and talk about aspects of what we want for our weddings. we’ve discussed ring budgets and savings accounts [oh, so i've been saving for the weddening as well. i'll write about that in another post]. we’re just not in the position to get married at this moment but he is fully supportive of my researching because he knows just how happy i get about planning things.
plus, i feel confident in my ability to keep things in perspective. i take a step away from researching whenever i start to feel overwhelmed or whenever i just need a break because i get bored [i get bored often]. it doesn’t occupy my every thought nor conversation. researching our future wedding doesn’t make me weird or abnormal and i don’t think anyone should make someone feel that way either. i don’t think i’m putting an inordinate amount of focus on one day…to be honest i’m more excited about being married to my best friend than anything else, but did you see the amount of planning that’s involved here? this is like the super bowl or world series for planners!
so why am i researching pre-engagement?
1. i’m a planner. duh.
i enjoy researching every single detail and figuring things out. it makes me happy. seriously, it does. i get a real thrill out of finding a way to recreate the perfect idea. not only that, but i tend to make things a lot more complicated than they need to be by researching every single apsect of a project and that takes time. a lot of time. i’m kind of a nerd like that.
2. we’ll be on a really short timeline.
the boy has always been vocal about how he doesn’t want a long engagement. in fact, he’s on the record of saying that he wants us to be married within 6 months of us moving together. and the six months is longer than he would like. during this last visit he told me that he wants us to be married within 3 months of the proposal. so…you know. while we plan on having two ceremonies [a civil ceremony just for the two of us and then a larger party with family and friends], ideally i’d like to have both within the same calendar year. in order to accomplish this, a lot of coordination will be needed and i’ll have to hit the ground running.
3. i want to do a lot of the details myself.
i love details. i spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about details. not only that, but i am intent on creating a lot of the details myself in an effort to save some money. so between the stationary [save the dates, invites, thank you notes, etc], ceremony decor, centerpieces, personal flowers, et al, i need the time to plan out those elements, find out which is the most cost effective approach [yes, i have priced every one of my potential diy projects], the most efficient way to create them and have options for the boy to choose from if he doesn’t like my first choice. i don’t joke around when i plan.
4. i want to enjoy the engagement period
i have watched many of my friends plan their weddings and saw just how stressed they were in the process. between figuring out what needs to be done, which vendors to choose to do them, and dealing with life and family, by the time their weddings rolled around they were one gigantic ball of nerves and stress. i did not want that to happen for myself.
5. planning a wedding is overwhelming
many people have said just how overwhelmed they felt when they began planning their wedding. there is just so much information and inspiration to discover, digest, and decide to use. there are numerous vendors to narrow down and sometimes it’s enough to stop most people cold in their tracks. it’s nice to be able to take a leisurely stroll through this planning stage and start to get the lay of the land.
the plans i’m gathering now are not the final details of our day. i intend on sharing what i’ve gathered with the boy and discussing it together once we get engaged [he has deferred until we're engaged before looking through the binder] and planning the second reception together. he is wholly responsible for planning our first marriage ceremony because it requires much less coordination than the second ceremony, so i guess you can say that technically i’m not really planning our wedding. hmm, what an interesting wrinkle.
whether you’re engaged and actively planning or just taking a look around to see what’s up before the proposal, i think the wedding world is large enough for everyone.
did you plan before your engagement? or did you wait?