Weddingbee Blog

It’s really hard to believe that Mr. Jam and I have been engaged for almost a year. It feels like yesterday he surprised me with the ring o’ my dreams and put it onto my freezing cold finger amid a Chicago ice storm, and then we kept the biggest secret ever from our family and friends for over 24 hours. (Yes, that was incredibly hard and I hated it.)

And now that we’ve planned this long engagement so we could leisurely plan our shindig…we realized we have done NOTHING. OK, not really nothing. We booked a photographer, DJ, and venue. And I got the dress.

But other than that, we’ve done NOTHING. I realized this when we went to dinner with some couple-friends who are getting married a mere month before us and have everything booked, done, and paid for. Mr. Jam and I felt like failures.

Sure, I’ve spent hours melting my eyeballs out of my head looking at endless “wedding inspiration,” which seriously seems to form one big meaningless mass in my brain at the end of the day, and we’ve talked about what kinds of stuff we want. But we’ve not acted on anything, and now that we’re mere months away, it’s time to get serious.

Ready, set…PLAN!

While my beloved was out deer hunting innocent Bambis all weekend (…don’t get me started), I was a hunting widow. And you know what? Being a hunting widow for a weekend is not all bad: I went shopping. I ate food that Mr. Jam hates and got the bed all to myself. I got uninterrupted snuggle time with both pets. And I watched the documentary Babies, which almost made me want to drop everything and have a baby. Almost.

But perhaps the most substantial thing I did all weekend was start the wedding-planning ball on a slow roll. I took the collection of sloppy, vague notes Mr. Jam and I have been scribbling for the last year, which included “ideas” that were nothing more than a song we like or a color that makes us happy, and I expanded them.

And you know what? Wedding planning turned out to be kind-of-hard-but-not-so-much.

I had to have a starting point, and that starting point was Google Wedding Docs. Seriously, go on this site and make yourself a damn spreadsheet if you haven’t already. And color-code it if you’re feeling sassy or incredibly organized.

And now with just seven months to go, we’ve compiled our guest list. Huge accomplishment! We’re ready to take on the world! Look out, wedding planners of the world: The Jams are taking yer jobs!

Unfortunately for us, blathering about our 150-person casual summertime wedding fiesta turned out to be for naught…it’s now an over-200-person casual summertime wedding fiesta.

HolyOMG. More on this later because we’re too weirded out about the fact that we even know this many people, let alone are inviting this many people to our, ahem, intimate affair.

So until I can muster up the cojones to write about how the guest list grew and refused to be wrangled, here are some other wedding decisions we’ve (I’ve?) made:

I went to this store in the mall called Icing for the first time ( it’s somehow related to Claire’s but not quite as terrifying) because I’m on the hunt for a necklace to wear to an upcoming wedding. Anyhoodle, I got this feather hair flower and necklace for under five dollars…combined. Yes, I added a brooch in the center of the flower and made some adjustments to the necklace, but that price? Deeelish.

This necklace is also from Icing and was a whopping three dollars. Maybe I’ll force this stuff upon unsuspecting bridesmaids or wear it myself at the wedding or in engagement photos? Not sure yet. But I got it. And it was a deal.

And this is our wedding-cake substitute, which will be covered in cupcakes abounding on the big day. I was sort of thinking about DIYing a cupcake stand, and then for a hot second I wanted to just collect a lot of cake stands and have them stacked and spread out over an entire dessert table (clearly I stole this from the multitudes of wedding-inspiration photos I’ve been mindlessly gazing at for the last year), but both of those ideas were scrapped.

I picked this up at some random home-goods store for 15 dollars. Not only will it look fancy at the wedding, it will look downright delicious covered in cupcakes at our annual Christmas party this month.

Anybody else out there slack during their first months—or year—of being engaged? Did it hurt or help you in the long run? Are you finding any good deals out there on wedding accessories? Yeah? Then spill your guts!