Weddingbee Blog

It’s OK if you want to tap your foot and sing with me… “hmmmm Pretzel’s been a bad bad blogger”.

What? Pretzel? Oh yeah that bee with the brewery wedding. *crickets* You remember her? *crickets* Sigh. I secretly hope that my lull in posting the past few weeks has gone unnoticed. But seriously it’s all I can think about. I’ve got all these cool things I want to write about and it seems like the past two weeks I’ve had NO TIME.

OK, Catholic grrrl confession time.

*deep breath* Mr Pretzel and I have time management issues. Whew, I feel better just admitting this. Hummm “time management issues” doesn’t seem to have the right ring to it. How about, “We suck at time management—complete FAIL”? That sounds more accurate.

Source

Exhibit A: We overextend ourselves. For example, this week we committed ourselves to attend 7 separate activities in the evenings or over the weekend. That’s an average of one per day! Admittedly, this is a busy holiday week, but this isn’t the first time this has happened.

Exhibit B: We amass to-do lists that are *huge* and potentially overwhelming! For the house there are light fixtures to be hung, lockers to be refinished, faucet to be installed, boxes to be unpacked, closets to be organized. On the wedding list there are bands to be researched, transportation to be figured out, flowers to be made, milk glass to be found. Oh my… my brain hurts…

Exhibit C: We don’t balance time well. We either spend all of our time at the Duplex I rent or the townhouse we own—neglecting the other abode. This doesn’t help with the to-do lists from exhibit B. It is also hard on my relationship with my mom. Mama Pretzel lives with me at the duplex and when I don’t see her for a stretch I’ve noticed that she gets a little cranky with me… as do my cats. They have been known to stage an all out kitty revolt when Mr P and I are spending a lot of time at our townhouse. To keep a happy home we need to balance our time.

Exhibit D: We work a lot—something I am sure many of you can relate to. Mr P and I just have really bad timing at getting our busy times in sync. This past weekend was the first weekend in—I don’t remember how long—that Mr Pretzel didn’t have to do work. But it was the first weekend in the same amount of time when I needed to work. Booo.

I am certain that we are not unique. Throw some wedding planning in with an already busy schedule, toss in a bit of newly purchased house and you got a recipe for S-T-R-E-S-S. We realized we needed to get us some time management—and fast. Here’s what has worked for us so far.

• We synced our Google Calendars and started putting EVERYTHING on the calendar. – Seriously, nothing is too small to go on the calendar. Every Sunday we plan out our week, where we are going to eat dinner, appointments and social plans. We try to alternate which abode we eat at and to coordinate dinner with Mama Pretzel a couple times a week. After planning to eat with Mama P a couple times only to find out she already had plans, and a failed attempt to get her to use Google Calendars, I made a dry erase board center for the Duplex. So now we use Google Calendars + the Dry Erase board.

• We simplified weeknight dinners. Even though we like to cook from scratch we started using Dinners Ready for most weeknight dinners. We pick out a menu (1 month’s worth at a time) and go in one evening to assemble the ingredients into meal kits. We freeze the meal kits until we are ready to cook them. It has saved us a lot of wasted time at the grocery store or wasted money eating out because we didn’t have anything to cook. We still indulge in lots of creative cooking, but usually on the weekends when we have more time now.
• We make dates with our house. We try to set aside a whole weekend every month or so to spend together at our townhouse doing house stuff or wedding stuff. We try to minimize the distractions that we have and we’ve found that we are able to accomplish so much more this way.
• When you’re cramming too much into a day or week, don’t be afraid to cut stuff out. As you can see in the photo above, this week is a mess. Knowing that I don’t have time to do everything, my stress meter is pegged. I am in the process of canceling plans to make sure the important stuff gets done.
• If you love blogging like I do, schedule yourself for blogging time. Keep a notebook handy all week to jot down ideas and give yourself the “OK” to set aside time to write posts and edit pictures. Pretzel confession: I FAILED at this the past two weeks—I need to respect my blogging time.

We’re slowly working on it. I know that some members of the hive are juggling much more than Mr Pretzel and I are. How do you do it? What works for you?

P.S. Big props to all you planning weddings while in school! I don’t think I could have done it while studying for finals.