Weddingbee Blog

I have yet another secret to share with you. If you, like me, are trying to have a great home or backyard wedding on an extreme budget, you will love me.

It’s a fabulous place where you can get basic stuff that you need for very little money; so little, in fact, that you might be tempted to buy your glassware and tableware rather than mess with renting them. Because, dear friend, while renting dishes sounds like it’s the best thing ever, it’s not. Before you return said dishes, you have to wash them. Um, what? Yes. Wash. Well, okay, technically not “wash”, since you don’t have to use soap, but you must remove all food particles and ensure that they are “eye clean” before returning them. Swear.

WTF?

Given that, spending a fraction more to avoid dealing with it all seems worth it, at least to me. And we all know what a cheapo I am.

Anyway, back to my point: this place is awesome for gals trying to plan simple, meaningful, straightforward weddings with a minimum of madness (and thus, vendors).

And when it’s all said and done, you can keep them. You never know when you’ll need to throw another party for 80 people, or when you will just want to throw a dish.

Here, I’ll show you.
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So, on a recent post, I got called out on the fact that I’ve been blogging about planning a wedding, and not actually telling you about the plans.

And whoa, boy, have I been busy. You’ll be proud (and if you’re not, can you fake it for me, because I’m rather proud?) of how much I’ve done in a few short weeks.

What prompted the flurry of activity, you ask? Why, a BRIDAL FAIR! Uh huh, a whole bunch of vendors in a big convention center all asking, “Do you have a caterer? Have you ordered your linens? Who’s doing your rentals? Have you taken dance lessons? Where are you getting your dresses? Do you need a room for your wedding night?” does WONDERS for getting your patootie in gear and getting things done. And let’s be honest, so does the fact that at some point, y’all were bound to catch the fact that I was all talk and no inspiration. {Thank you for loving me anyway.}

If you haven’t yet been to one, I do have a couple of hints to offer (most of which I failed to do and could have kicked myself over):
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I’ve collected quotes for a while, copied into the notes section of my email program. Here are a few more of my favorites:

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

~Toni Morrison, Beloved

A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults.

~ Charles Kingsley (1819-75)

You must never feel badly about making mistakes,” explained Reason quietly, “as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.

~Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.

~Anna Louise Strong
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I know that the all-wedding, all-the-time mode that I seem to be on is tiring for you, especially because I know that you’d be perfectly happy with a quick courthouse wedding and a nice dinner out. I also know that part of the reason that my obsessing drives you nuts is that, it seems to you, it just leads to me stressing out. You hate to see me stressed out, you sweet man, and sometimes you think that I work myself into a tizzy over things that don’t matter. Fair point.

Here’s the thing: the most important thing to me is that I get to marry you, but only slightly less important is the idea of celebrating that milestone with our people. Since that leaves eloping out, we have a minimum of stuff to get through in order to make a wedding happen, and I need us to do it together - because I can’t do it all alone, because I don’t want to do it all alone, because I want to be doing this with you. You’re my favorite guy, and this thing is all about us. It’s exciting to me, and I want to share exciting things with you!

So, with your agreement, I propose a new way of working together. I think we can agree that I care more about the details than you do and that I am more specific about what I like and don’t like, so for that reason, I will do the legwork. I will find the inspiration photos, narrow them down to the ones I like, and present them to you, because not only do I want to plan our wedding together, I want you to be involved, and that means discussion. I know that you may not have a preference, but I’d like you to consider the options and come up with one, then tell me why. That’s what I like - the discussion. The dreaming. The planning of the future together.

In exchange, I’ll stop griping about how I have to do a thousand things and you only have to do ten.
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I’m a words girl. These words are some of my favorites.

When I talk about “my people”, this is the context I’m referring to. I can’t think of a more concise description of what marriage is.

Ruth 1:16 -

Entreat me not to leave you, or to return from following after you, For where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. And where you die, I will die and there I will be buried. May the Lord do with me and more if anything but death parts you from me.

This is my definition of intimacy:

George Eliot -

Oh, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

And this one? This one is the goal, the reminder that you are to be each other’s shelter and support:
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{You know the movie reference, right?}

Yesterday’s rant about our dear fiances and their sometime lack of understanding of the bazillion details that brides have to handle struck a chord with me. Yea, duh, since I wrote it, but also because I so related to all of your comments. I kept thinking, I’m having a hard time with the details — yea, because I don’t want to have to deal with them and because it annoys me that Mr. Stinky Cheese has no clue how much I’m dealing with — but I’m not having to worry about the task management aspect. Meaning, I’m a trained project manager, perfectly capable of handling dependencies and shifting timelines and priorities and delegations in my head. Woe to the poor girls who have to plan a whole wedding without that background.

But I might be way off base. Perhaps it’s easier for the rest of humanity (first-world brides, anyway) to deal with it than me. Maybe it’s my background that causes my frustration that it’s not easier and faster. Maybe if I buckled down and got it all together, I’d be better off. But if that’s not the case, and you’re struggling too, what do you need? How can I help? Who knows, maybe it’ll make me get it together and treat this like a work project. There are a thousand templates and checklists and systems out there, and quite a few good references on this site.
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“Don’t you ever think about anything else?” he asked in all honesty and naivete, not knowing the kind of wrath that question could invoke.

We were laying in bed and I’d just asked if he’d thought about what the groomsmen should wear, because the guy on the TV commercial looked pretty good in dark slacks with a white shirt and tie.

I just stared at him, not sure how to respond, but certain that I felt offended, upset, annoyed, and maybe, just maybe, like he had a point. I don’t think about much else these days, yet I feel like I am justified in obsessing a little. We’re four months away from our wedding at our home and I’m only now doing any real planning—and a flurry of it, I’ll admit.

“Honey, we’re only four months away from our wedding, and I’m only now doing any real planning,” I explained. “Many weddings take much longer than that to plan.” He thought that four months seemed like plenty of time, and then he said it, his second dangerous phrase of the night:

“I’m sure it’ll all come together.”

Um, yea.
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Why, hello, there, hive! How the heck are ya? It’s been a while, I know… don’t hate me. I’ve been a busy little bee, and you’ve been well taken care of by the other fabulous bees (and c’mon, don’t you just love the new bees to death?).

Before I take you through the details of the stuff I’ve been doing (you’ll be so proud of me, I promise… more on that later*), have you seen this site?

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I’ll admit, they totally had me with that tag line, but then I found this in a section titled “For the Bride”:

Have you lost your voice, strained your “stink eye” and threw your shoulder getting him to help?

All’s not lost. You might just need to deliver the message in a way that he’s more comfortable with. After all, men are creatures of habit. And picking flowers, linens and fruit platters are not habits they have picked up. Yet.

So how can we help?

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Part I

The problem is that I want it all. I want it all because I don’t want to have regrets, but if you’re the kind of person who is afraid of regrets, chances are you’ll find them no matter what. (I know of what I speak.) I want a traditional wedding, an intimate wedding, and a private wedding all at once, and I believe I can make that happen.

So, I sat myself down and made lists: what appealed to me about eloping, what appealed to me about a traditional wedding, and anything stressing me out. The rest of this post is taken directly from my private notes, and I made a sincere effort not to edit in case my thought process is helpful to anyone else. Yes, I’m nutty. I’m okay with that.

• Elopement (my version - a private ceremony with a reception to follow): private, personal, low-stress (less stress about other people, anyway)
• Wedding: public, higher-stress (all around), meaningful
• Stress Factors: catering/ food, seating, expectations, “guests”, wedding parties, walking down the aisle

I can do this! Stressful things first (in reverse order, for some reason):

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I’ve been fighting against the idea, reality, necessity of planning our wedding since virtually the moment we started talking about marriage.  I’ve fought it with every ounce of my being, every cell in my body, every negative emotion I can summon, every bit of brain power and reasoning that I can bring to the task of avoiding the inevitable.

I want to marry him.  I want to be his wife, for him to be my husband.  But I’m scared.  I’ve failed before, and refusing the simplest of wedding-related tasks is somehow my talisman against more failure… and to be even more honest, a way of avoiding my embarrassment.  We don’t really get to begin with our slates wiped clean, no matter how amicable the divorce or well learned the lessons are.  People remember, people were there, I was there.  I floated through my first wedding like a bystander, content to have planned a really great party and entirely missing the sentimentality that I love about life.  That makes sense — in my early 20’s, I craved emotion and sentimentality while managing to avoid it like the plague.

And now?
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Today, dear friends, I’m dreaming about the big E.

E. L. O. P. I. N. G. *Eloping* Eloping!

Now, don’t lie to me — you think about it, too. At 3 AM when you’re up to your elbows in glue and slips of paper that are somehow supposed to turn into beautiful, professional-looking invitations all MacGyver-like, it crosses your mind. When your fiancé says, “Whatever you want, Honey.” When you bring up the bazillionth wedding-related difficulty that’s keeping you up at night, you think, “if only.” When you contemplate the flexing of diplomatic muscles required to handle all of your visiting family, in one place at one time, in a city they know nothing about (and you do), never mind the likelihood that some or many of them will be staying with you — oh, you think about it.

Oh, or maybe that’s me?!

I have it all dreamed out.
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I have a tradition of my very own for New Year’s Eve, one I’ve had for as long as I can remember. Every year, I look back at the past year, at the things I’m grateful for, at what I’ve learned, and what I’ve succeeded at and where I’ve failed. The next day, after recovering from whatever partying I might have done (full disclosure: almost never anything terribly exciting), I put together a few goals for the next year. Not resolutions, mind you, because I fail at those, but personal goals.

For 2008, I wrote:

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I’m gonna be honest here: I’m not doing a whole lot of what I usually consider “real” wedding stuff. In fact, I haven’t spent money on anything directly wedding-related in, um, months. Since I picked up my second wedding dress and paid the remaining seventy bucks, in fact.

All along, I’ve been feeling like a slacker (and a little bit dishonest) for not putting my money where my blog was, so to speak. If you look through my archives, you’ll see that most of my posts have been about relationships and marriage rather than weddings, and that’s not by accident. I do tend to spend more of my time on energy preparing to be married than to get married, but with the economy the way things are, I want as little of our money tied up in contracts and promises as possible. While we’re continuing to work on our house and talk about our plans, we haven’t bought any of the many things on our wedding lists.

Now I’m ‘fessing up, because this economic thing isn’t just about me and my cheapness any more. Many, many friends (on the ‘net and otherwise) are being affected by it, from reduced hours to lost jobs, not to mention the general stress that seems to be pervading life right now. And that leaves you and I, dear friends, in an odd and often uncomfortable situation.
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I got this book on the clearance rack of the local bookstore when I went home to New Mexico, so my expectations were really low. Really, really low. Yet, it turned out to be one of my very favorite books because it depicts the first year of marriage with a good solid dose of reality. And we know how much I try to stay in reality.

In the author’s words, “This book, 52 Fights: A Newlywed’s Confession, tells the story of how Matt and I survived our first year of marriage without strangling each other. I’ve written about the challenges we dealt with from coping with our various incompatibilities and our very different families to the sudden absence of the romance we knew in our courtship, our encroachment on each others personal space, and my identity crisis.”

Not to be a total dork, but I learned a few things reading this book.

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