Initial Forays Into Wedding Planning

Anyone who knows me has probably heard about my plans to elope at one point or another. For many years, the whole idea of planning a wedding seemed incredibly daunting. But now that I actually have a wedding to plan, I'm finding myself more excited and less overwhelmed by the whole thing. I bet that will change between now and when I actually get married. In the meantime, I'm using my excitement to start getting things done.

Kevin and I have a really good idea of the (rather small) guest list. Knowing the size and date that we're aiming for means we can start looking at venues. We went to a few this weekend, and found two that we're really excited about. We're still waiting to hear about the pricing on one of them, and after that it'll be a matter of figuring out how much money we want to spend and what we want to spend it on.

There are other details that I've been set on for a while. I think I know what colors I want. I must have chocolate cake, which means we're getting two flavors and Kevin gets to pick the other one. I know exactly what song I want for the last dance of the evening, and I think I've settled on a song for the father/daughter dance. I reserve the right to change my mind, though.

I also signed up for weddingwire.com, initially because that's where all of our friends seemed to make their wedding sites. But it turns out that it's a lot more than that. They have checklists to remind you of everything that needs to be done. There are also a ton of sponsored vendors with reviews, which provides a nice starting place for a figuring everything out. And they have a nice little auto-budget too, where you can put in the amount you want to spend and it will automatically split it up across all the things you need to buy. We'll have to spend some time playing with it, though, as it doesn't really match up to our expectations. I'm not sure if that means we need to drastically alter our expectations or start looking for deals.

Additionally, we started work on a wedding website. There isn't much to it yet, but I'm still pretty happy with it. Everything seems to be on track, and I'm really excited for things to start coming together.

The only thing I'm still really dreading at this point is shopping for a wedding dress. I'm not really a fan of shopping to begin with, and I get frustrated at the whole process of trying on a million things. Plus I'm still trying to wrap my head around the concept of spending over $100 on something I'm going to wear once. I know I'll likely end up spending more than that, but it still seems like such a waste of money. I expect the whole thing to be an Experience, and I apologize in advance to anyone who comes along for that particular ride.