Weddingbee Blog

… and a teaser, but you have to read through the post first.

There are a lot of things I wish I could have changed about our wedding and the planning. The first and most important thing I wish I could have changed would be asking for help. Like Ms. Beagle, I have a hard time letting go and asking for help. I had very little help planning and prepping for the wedding until about 10 days before the wedding. I knew I would need the help, but I didn’t do a good job of planning that help.

As friends and relatives started to arrive, we started getting a lot of offers to help. Instead of accepting the help immediately and assigning someone a task, I politely thanked them for the offers and told them I’d let them know if anything came up. BIG MISTAKE! What I should have done was make a list of who offered to help and noted what their special talents were, if they had recently gotten married, and if they had access to a car.

Why is this important?

Because when it came down to it, I ended up asking the same people over and over again for help on tasks that may not have been their strong suit. Take for example organizing wedding day details (like who takes what where) - I blew it! Our friend Cliff offered his help in any way, and we should have put him in charge of making sure everything from the chapel was packed up and brought to the reception, that he made sure we had a way to the reception and the hotel, and asked him to help my parents get all the gifts to their house or our apartment. I know these are things that the Best Man does, but BIL Joey has 2 really young kids and we knew he’d be busy with them. Cliff runs promotional events for a living. Arranging details like these are easy for him. We should have asked him. Instead, I asked my sister to grab my stuff and we scrambled at the end to get gifts to our apartment and had to have tired Mama Joey drop us off at the hotel.

Another area where asking for help ahead of time would have helped was with the flowers. I did them myself and had originally planned to do it the Thursday before the wedding so I could give myself enough time on Friday for last minute issues. Unfortunately, because of the freak heat wave, I couldn’t do the flowers until Friday morning. The flowers would have died in my apartment with no air conditioning. What does this have to do with help? Well, because it was last minute, I asked my sister and cousin to help me arrange flowers. My sister and I have different tastes and her idea of simple isn’t mine. It’s not bad, it’s just not mine. I also had no idea if my cousin had an “eye” for flower arranging. I needed help, and they were able to be at my apartment at 9AM. I should have arranged for my friend Jen or Jacqui to help me. Jen is really crafty and Jacqui studied stained glass in Europe. Either would have been great at helping to get my flowers to look right. What my sister and cousin did wasn’t wrong, it just wasn’t entirely me. It was a little more busy than I wanted. It worked out in the end, but it could have been easier and more organized.

I know planning the help out in advance would have worked because I did do it when it came to the sewing. MIL Joey offered her help and I knew she was handy with a sewing machine, so I had her make the coin pouches and the tie for the ring boy. She did a great job, and I didn’t have to think about either project. I knew she’d be able to handle them without help from me, and she did.

The #1 thing I would change about the wedding is asking help. What about you?

Oh, I almost forgot teaser #2. Remember the bright yellow shoes?

image : Jess Carmichael