Weddingbee Blog

I’ve been reading a lot about goal setting recently (the Lululemon blog is particularly helpful if any of you are interested!), so I thought I would write about goal setting and our wedding today. I’m not a crazy goal setter or anything but I had a few goals in mind for myself for our wedding. Here they are:

1. Don’t freak out
2. Eat food
3. Send excellent thank you notes in a timely manner

Here’s how I did:

Don’t Freak Out

Despite my worries, I am proud to say I didn’t freak out about anything on my wedding day. There were definitely moments of stress and I wouldn’t go so far to say I was completely zen, but overall I think I did pretty good.

Not quite me, but close enough:

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The moment I really could have freaked out was when we arrived at the Faculty Club to take pictures before the ceremony and absolutely nothing was set up. I’m proud to say I didn’t freak out at all. I just kicked off my shoes and started running around getting things done and assigning tasks to the wedding party. I really wish someone had thought to take a picture of this, because it’s kind of hilarious. There was no pre-wedding lounging with my BMs for me. We were all hard at work.

I’m pretty proud that this is how I reacted. I’m still a bit upset that we didn’t get to take any pre-ceremony indoor photos because we were busy setting up the things that I had been told would already be set up, but I totally kept my cool and I think that’s pretty great! If I had freaked out at that moment I think I would really regret it now.

Eat Food

I didn’t do quite as well on this one, but I’m okay with that because I didn’t eat a lot of food because I didn’t have much of an appetite and not because I logistically couldn’t. I really planned to ensure that Mr. Knitting and I would have an opportunity to eat because this was important to me. One way I did this was by having a selection of appetizers delivered to us right after the ceremony.

Food for us:

This way we could eat some food privately without having to talk to any of our lovely guests and then we could go downstairs and completely focus on them without trying to search out a waiter.

Another strategy was to have a receiving line so that we wouldn’t feel obligated to go from table to table during dinner, and instead would be able to eat our food. These were excellent plans, but when it came down to it, I just couldn’t really focus on eating and ate much less than I usually would. Oh well…I’ll make up for it at other people’s weddings.

Send Excellent Thank You Notes in a Timely Manner

This one was important to me. I felt really grateful that we had such lovely people at our wedding and I wanted to make sure to acknowledge that. My parents once received a thank you card that said, “Thank you for your monetary contribution” and that was it. I wanted to do the opposite of that and took my time writing what I hope were pretty thoughtful cards. My desire to do this was definitely also helped by the fact that I was really excited about these gorgeous cards (ours said Thank You):

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I sent the cards out in waves and I sent the last one just about a month after our wedding. I definitely could have done it more quickly, but I’m ultimately really happy with that since.

I highly recommend goal setting for your wedding. These were all things that were important to me and identifying them, being aware of them, and coming up with strategies to achieve them was really helpful. I know that sounds a bit crazy and rigid, but for me it wasn’t. For me, particularly with the not freaking out goal, by just being mindful of the potential problem I managed to avoid it, and that definitely helped me have a more enjoyable wedding day!

Did/do you have any goals for yourself for you wedding?