Wedding Week - Planning and Prep

I loved/hated wedding planning. I loved the idea part of it. Looking up pretty pictures, making sketches, letting my mind run wild. It was the actual getting stuff done part I abhorred.

I had never planned any event, ever. Not so much as a Birthday party. And DIY aka crafts? Forget about it. I had half halfheartedly painted pieces of wood at camp and various church activities, but even the thought of wielding a glue gun or otherwise trying to turn little bits and pieces into something real was just not going to happen.

I also had no idea what weddings were supposed to be like. I was the first of my close friends to get married. I vaguely remembered going to some distant family weddings as a kid, and I went to my parents, but all in all I was clueless. Of course I turned to blogs, but all those weddings seemed like fancy, expensive affairs. This wasn't. I was shooting for something in the neighborhood of about 3k, and generally speaking most Mormon weddings are more open houses than nice events. Just a decorated church gym and a buffet. People just kind of stop by, grab some food and leave, no RSVP, no nothing. Obviously some people do nicer, fancier weddings, but I was scared that if I tried people would be uncomfortable, or just plain not come.

Fortunately, the first thing I actually had to do was find a dress. Which surprisingly was the easiest part of the whole thing.

I was sure that finding a dress was going to be a nightmare. As we were planning on getting married in the LDS temple, there were certain modesty standards that had to be met. High neckline, high back and biggest of all, sleeves. I think most wedding dresses with sleeves look so ugly. Like a satin T-shirt with a puffy skirt. They all had their slight detailed differences, but to cynical me I felt like they all looked like the same, just modifications of this (which was actually one of the better ones I stuck in my inspiration folder):

Not horrible, but not really me. And honestly, I was kind of self conscious about getting married so young and meeting my husband at BYU to begin with. It felt so cliche, like I was one of those girls who came to college to shack up and just hopped into eternity with the first decent guy who asked. It's an unfair stereotype, but so much of my identity was wrapped up in not being one of those girls, that the last thing I wanted was to look like one.

I was expecting to take forever to find something I liked and fulfilled all my rebel bridezilla fantasies. I also needed to act quickly, as my odds of find anything that wouldn't need serious alterations and awkwardly added sleeved would plummet upon my exit from Utah after graduation. So first weekend we could, my roommates and I hit all the bridal stores in Provo. I was hoping we would find something there and not need to trek up to Salt lake. Not optimistic, but hopeful.

The first place we went was fine. It had some cute dresses, and even one that kind of made me feel like a floaty fairy. I could have settled for that one, but it just didn't feel right.

The second place barely had anything worth trying on.

The first dress I found hanging up at the third place immediately drew me in. It didn't have the stain T-shirt look, I liked the unique edging on the sleeves, I loved the embroidery. And than I put in on, and that was that. I didn't want to take it off, it felt and looked so perfect. Dare I say, I felt sexy. High neck and sleeves be damned, it hugged all of my curves in all the right ways. The mermaid cut not only felt unique to me, but it also didn't eat up 5'2" me like so many other princess dresses. I wore the hell out of that dress, not the other way around.

It also happened to be one of the cheapest ones I tried on, just a little over $450. I put it on hold and decided to wait a few days for sure, but that was just a formality. From the moment I put it on, I knew it would come home with me. I do wish I had gotten to spend more than a day trying on heaps and heaps of pretty dresses, especially as I doubt I'll get to do so again. But I don't regret coming home with my dress one bit.

Next up was invitations. One of my roommates, bridesmaids and best friends offered to design the invitations in photoshop. No, they weren't fancy letterpress, but they looked fantastic and I loved the idea that no one in the world would have ones quite like mine. I can't find the actual invitation, and it looks much more real on heavy paper, but here is the PDF, minus last names and parents names. And with just the cost of paper, printing at Kinkos and stamps, they were way affordable. We also threw in one of our few decent engagement pictures and a separate insert with our wedding website url.

Engagement pictures were another thing we took care of in Provo. I'm still a little bitter about them. Zach thought the whole thing was silly and couldn't see why we should pay someone to take pictures. The best I could talk him into was the cheapest option on Craigslist. For $40 we got a stranger with a point and shoot and about 2 decent images we could send out with invitations. But at least it got done before we had to enter a long distance relationship for the last 4 months of our engagement.

You see, we both graduated from BYU in April. The wedding was August, in Oregon, where I'm from. His family lived in Oklahoma. It really sucked, but we just couldn't justify either of us paying for an apartment, when we could each mooch of our parents for the summer. So we survived most of the engagement and wedding process apart. To put it succinctly, it really sucked. I don't know what we should have done differently, but I really needed him during that time, and an hour on the phone each night was not enough. (He worked nights that summer, I worked days, so even matching up our phone schedules was tough.) It's not that he would have been the best resource for wedding planning had he been in the same state or that he didn't do what he could from Oklahoma. What I needed most was his presence, his support. And that's hard to do over the phone.

So I spent much of wedding planning process feeling very alone, overwhelmed and overly responsible for doing something I didn't know how too. I wasn't actually alone. I had a wonderful Mother, Stepmother and friends all volunteering. I had so many people offer to help. Just tell them what to do, and they'll do it. Which was great, except I was in a constant state of panic because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get things done. For example, I knew we needed food, but making a concrete plan for what food, how it would be made, who would serve, what dishes we needed and than saying go and do my lovely volunteers froze me.

I was also a little stressed at hearing that my ex who I had been almost engaged to had gotten engaged and set a wedding date of one week before mine, with many of the same people attending. That had nothing to do with the planning, but with my innate competitiveness (It's not that I want anything in his life to be bad, I just want mine to be slightly better) I can't say it didn't add a little my wedding must be awesomer pressure. Because apparently I wasn't sufficiently freaking out before.

Mostly I coped with planning stress by making endless spreadsheets. It felt like getting something done, without the actual doing things part. Oh, and awkward "sketches' in paint, like this one:

About a month before the wedding I broke down sobbing about how I couldn't do this, I didn't know how to get anything done, how to organize everything. (My 1st of 2 and only 2 meltdowns. I think I did well.) Said breakdown occurred during a conversation with family, where they were frustrated with me for not communicating what I needed. Well, I certainly communicated. Sort of a sobbing, hard to make out communication, but it was the most I had done all summer.

And just like that I could finally breathe and enjoy wedding planning. My people knew what I needed, basically other people to handle the organizing, and they were amazing. I still did plenty, but my Mom and Stepmom especially were phenomenal at calling people, hunting things down, and basically making the whole thing move from being spreadsheets and fear into a real honest to goodness wedding.

I still kind of sucked at communication, so some of my plans never really materialized. I had plans for a fun guest book, but never really did it myself or communicated it to others, so we were guestbook less. But all in all I was really amazed at how well an amateur bride and a host of loving people managed to pull off a super budget wedding in a few months.

I swear, this should be the longest of these. I wanted to focus mostly on the actual wedding this week, but I couldn't ignore everything that went into the wedding completely. Hence this book of a post. Starting tomorrow, I'll get into the good stuff.