Weddingbee Blog

Warning: ahead you will find much venting of wedding steam. Proceed at your own risk.

You may have noticed that I’ve been a little more absent lately (so sorry about that!), and I’m sure you can guess that the reason is because our wedding is fast approaching. At this point we are working on the wedding 100% of every waking hour (and when we’re sleeping, we’re both dreaming about the wedding so we can’t even really count that as a break). When we do take breaks, to eat or shower or whatever, we are doing so while we talk about the wedding. In my quiet moments, I am thinking only about the wedding and it never seems I have sufficient thinking time to actually resolve any of the issues I’m thinking about in the first place. There’s no time to see friends or family, and when we do all we can talk about is the wedding. Our tiny, lovely little house is full to the brim of wedding stuff. There’s not a single uncovered surface to be found, and until very recently none of it was organized in the slightest (which, for an overly organized person like myself, is just sheer torture).

It’s. All. Just. Too. Much.

{I can’t believe I’m letting the blogosphere take a tour of my house in such disarray.}

Two years ago we started planning this shindig in earnest, and back then we both thought we’d have plenty of time to take on any and every project we could possibly imagine.

What we didn’t know is that there’s a lot of stuff you just can’t conceivably do two years before your wedding. You need to know things like the venue, vendors, budget, timeline, guest list, style, and so many other details in order to finish a lot of the projects that need to be completed for a wedding. Well, that’s not totally true. For some things you can do what we did, which is to just make your best guess and plug ahead. It’s not a bad option, though I will say that some of the stuff we made way in advance is very different in design than things that we’re working on now, and that’s just going to have to be okay. Other things have to be scrapped altogether because they no longer work with our timeline or our budget. I’m guessing that’s just what happens when you plan a single event over a ridiculously long period of time.

So here’s the truth: No matter how much pre-planning you do, everything comes down to those last few months. I know before I was planning this wedding I would read other bees saying those same words and I thought, “I’ll be different. I’ll plan ahead. I won’t let everything pile up like that.” Haha… funny joke. Now I know just how wrong I was, so I think it must happen to everyone. One project gets crossed off and it feels amazing, but then we have to add two or three other new things that have popped up. Even if you’re not incorporating very much DIY into your wedding, the sheer number of things other people (your partner, vendors, friends, family members, and wedding party members) will ask you to have an opinion about is simply mind-boggling.

Then there’s the fact that many things take four times as long as you thought they would (invitations, for instance), or something doesn’t work out exactly as planned (like perhaps our large string balls, which are currently sad and saggy). And there are those notorious decisions that need to be made but thinking about them makes you feel immediately crazy and overwhelmed so you just can’t bring yourself to get even close to considering them (maybe, say, floral alternatives for yourself and your bridal party). So projects come off the list, only to go back on later. Or they stay on the list, haunting you with their stubbornness.

Sometimes I’m sick of our plans and projects. Sometimes I just want the wedding to be here already so I’ll know that we’re really and truly finished with everything, whether we like it or not. But as soon as I think that, I immediately flash back to all those nightmares I’ve had where we show up at our wedding and I’m utterly devastated because nothing’s been completed and no one knows what’s going on. So I think what I really want is more time. The other day I told Mr. Ferris Wheel that I think we need at least an extra three months in order to do everything and not go crazy in the process.

Alas, we don’t have an extra three months. We just have the two we’re left with - that, and a never-ending list of things to do. What option do we have but to make the best of it? So that’s what we’re doing. Trying to keep our spirits up while we’re drowning in wedding tasks. Feels like it’s gonna be a long two months…

Did wedding burn out happen to you? If so, when did it set in?