It seems like as soon as you announce an engagement, you’re instantly flooded with questions and unsolicited advise, as well as opnions that you may or may not want.  I thought it would be a fun project to reach out to family and friends for thoughts on things that they would have done differently with their own weddings.  I’ve gotten some good food for thought.  I ended up getting several responses and wanted to share them with the BSB World!

I’m happy Nick and I opted to do things our own way and not to feel obligated to do things the ‘traditional’ way. Instead of a DJ and the dance, we had a charter bus and went to a bar and then picked up the tab. We had visited the bar prior and agreed w/ the bar to flag us when the tab got to a certain amount so we would be surprised We also didn’t have a wedding cake because we both hate cake. But, we did have a dessert bar and then our own personal cheese cake.  We got a lot of flack before the wedding because of some of the things we cut out but afterwards received so many compliments on how nice it was because it was obvious it was about us and what was important to us. We also got the idea from ‘Friends’ to have our friend, Peter, get ordained to marry us. I think more people do this now,but 7 years ago it was a bit usual.  Oh, and I had Taylor (my daughter) AND my dad give me away. With so many second marriages or children born first, it was something nice and I know she remember is vividly even though she was 5.

-Jessica, Iowa

I definitely have one thing that has bothered me ever since my wedding almost five years ago that I wish I could go back and do over. We decided to skip the receiving line after the ceremony (for the sake of taking pictures/saving time), and greet the guests at our reception instead. However, our wedding was in our local town, and the reception was about 20 minutes away, downtown. Some of our older relatives decided not to make the drive on the interstate downtown, so we missed even being about to thank them for coming. I really regret that.

-Lindsay, Indiana

We didn’t have a helpful wedding party. My wedding party was more concerned about themselves than helping me – so be careful who you pick!

– Janet, Ohio

I would have NEVER have picked the colors I ended up with – it was a bad compromise & a long story but I hated them (sage & butter).  Something I DID do that was super cheap & effective was look at dresses in stores, write down the designers & styles and then ordered mine online (so naughty!).

-Jennifer, Missouri

I would have had a larger wedding.  We were given a generous budget by my parents, and chose to use part on a smaller wedding, and the other part to buy a new car.  I don’t remember a thing about the car now, but wish we would have had a larger wedding.

    -My Mother, Iowa

I would not have had my sister-in-law stand up with me.  She was a pain, hated the yellow dress, and complained the whole day. 

-”Don’t put my name on this”, Illinois

Photo By Image Trick Photography

I wish I would have taken more time making some decisions. We got engaged on April 17th and got married on August 15th, so that literally left me with 4 months to plan a wedding!  A short engagement is definitely do-able but I wish I would have thought a little more about what I wanted certain things to look like. Don’t get me wrong, I am very happy with the way everything turned out, but if I would have had a little more time I would have probably chosen a few different things: I would have discussed (in details) with the florist what my bouquet was going to look like.  I would have gone over the final look of the cake before the wedding. It had too much ribbon and stuff on it, I would have liked it a little more simple (but it was delicious!) I would have liked more pictures done outside too.

    -Stefanie, Tennessee

If getting married in a facility where you have to use their food and beverage (unless you are tied to a sit-down meal), offering buffet style heavy hor’devours or food stations in a reception style, can many times be more economical than a plated meal.  If your reception time is “between meal times” –plan on approx. 4-6 pieces of food per person.  And…if you are tied to a plated meal….negotiate serving a lunch portion rather than dinner.  For hotels, the per person cost can be as much as half the cost for a lunch portion meal.

-Jill, Tennessee (also works in event planning)

No moonshine!

-Lisa, West Virginia

Things I wish I had done differently are researching/asking around more about my photographer and caterer. Wish I would have gotten a bigger venue. Wish I would’ve waited a couple more months to get married to we could have a little bit nicer wedding. Things I’m glad I did are starting and maintaining a binder with pictures of things I liked and ideas I got about decor, etc. Glad I stuck with the vision I had for the actual ceremony even though some people seemed to think it wouldn’t work. (It did work!) Wedding was January 2006.

          -Lauren, Kentucky

I would have never had an open bar.  The cost ended up being a LOT more than we had anticipated because we paid on a per-drink basis.  I felt like we were secretly looking around to see who was drinking a $15 glass of champagne.  We also had a few people “overindulge” and cause drama, which may have been avoided.

    -Nicole, Tennessee

Keep things about the two of you– My wedding was more my Mother’s than mine.

-Annonymous, Ohio

Photo By Henderson Photography

I would have asked my bridesmaids in a more creative way.  I would also recommend a venue that does not make you cater from them alone, but allows outside catering.  They get you with that!

-Lindsey, Tennessee

My next few posts will probably bounce back and forth between pre-wedding, wedding and post-wedding, since I totally dropped the blogging ball the last few weeks before my wedding….

Let’s talk wedding disasters. You know how in your wedding planning, when you’re stressing that something is going to go wrong, and eeeeeverybody insists that the things that always go wrong are the tiny little things that no one notices? Ignore them when they say that. Sometimes you have a disaster, or even two, and all 150 people notice. However, when those same annoying advice-givers tell you that everything will work out in the end and people will have a great time, listen to that part. That part is actually correct.

My wedding ceremony was perfect. Absolutely, down to the last detail, perfect. Which was funny, since I really hadn’t put a ton of thought into the ceremony except slaving over our choice of processional and recessional music. The reading choices took about 10 minutes. But for now, I’m going to skip over the perfect ceremony and jump to the partially-horrifying reception.

Call me old-fashioned, but I didn’t see Dave before the ceremony. So after the ceremony and big family group photos, the wedding party had about 45 minutes of late afternoon winter sunlight to get all our pictures. We took our pictures and then very haphazardly told each other we’d see everyone at the reception (Mistake #1: not organizing transportation better).

There was a 40-minute drive between our ceremony site and our reception site. When Dave and I got there, after being what we thought was a few minutes behind the rest of the wedding party, we were surprised to find very little of our wedding party waiting for us. We had completely lost one of our groomsmen, who had ridden with a non-wedding party friend, and that was cause for a bit of a stress, because we were slightly behind schedule and wanted to get into the reception. But that wasn’t nearly as stressful as finding out where most of the wedding party had disappeared to- they were in the reception room, trying desperately to fix the two full kegs that weren’t working At All. $250 worth of beer, trapped in non-functioning kegs. Dave and I found this out through his very blunt grandfather, who came out to the lobby to tell us that everyone was cranky because they wanted food, there was no beer and no music was playing. I found my father and asked him how bad it was, and he very reassuringly said, “Oh, it’s bad.”

At this point I’m already in a panic, and I haven’t even figured out why there’s no music. Dave’s brother/best man told us there was a problem with the music, so the playlist we’d slaved over had not been playing for the last hour and a half. As we finally gathered all of our wedding party and our emcee got ready to announce us, Dave’s brother turns to him and said, “So I might as well tell you this now, Dad spilled a Coke on your laptop and that’s why the music isn’t playing.”

Dave just sat on a chair with his head in his hands. I almost punched his brother right then and there. Not exactly the most opportune time for us to be told this. So while most newly wedded couples walk in to their receptions dancing and pumping their fists, we walked in with fake smiles and slight grimaces. With all the pressure our male relatives were giving us about everyone being hungry, we just kind of walked to the head table, didn’t sit down, said screw this and I just walked over to the buffet line to get it started.

It was a miserable start to the reception. I was trying not to cry or scream, nothing was organized, Dave’s poor cousin who was supposed to be emceeing and dj-ing was in a panic; it was a horrible mess. As Dave and I started to eat, I looked at him and very pathetically said, “This is not how I want to remember my reception.”

To make a long story short, we got my laptop out of Dave’s car (Thank God I had grabbed it at 3 a.m. when I left my house, with my exhausted bridesmaids asking me why I needed it), and a dedicated groomsman and bridesmaid’s boyfriend sat together and downloaded music and logged on to Youtube to get songs. The beer never did get fixed, so less than half of one keg was salvaged from the two kegs we had. Luckily, the lodge didn’t have stringent alcohol rules, so I had told all my friends that they could bring their own liquor if they wanted it. Some of them did, the rest became wine drinkers for the night. I don’t know how the wine lasted- as my dad said, “Loaves and fishes,” i.e., somehow it kept multiplying.

So in the end, everyone had a great time. Most people knew there was no beer, and a lot of people knew there was a music problem. I don’t think anyone remembers the awkward march to the buffet line. We ended up doing the toasts, cake cutting and first dances all back to back, instead of having some informal dancing between the first dances and the cake cutting, like we’d planned. While the awesome playlist that Dave and I spent weeks on was not used, and a lot of my favorite songs were not played, everyone danced and had a great time dancing. When I hear a fun song that was on the original playlist, I get a little wistful that it wasn’t played, but in the end you just gotta let things go.

My reception was far from perfect, but it was a blast. My brothers tossed me in the air in my wedding gown, the boys had a mosh pit over catching the garter, and Dave and a couple friends had an impromptu concert toward the end of the evening.

As they say, at the end of the day, you’re married, and nothing could be better than that.

This is what matters.

How could this not be fun?

 

 

 

No one ever told me what a pain in the you-know-what RSVPs would be. When it came time to put together invitations, I thought there were only two options for RSVPs. Either you required them, or you didn’t, and if you required them then you sent a card and people were supposed to return that card to you by a certain date. For me, I knew I wanted to assign tables, so I knew I needed RSVPs (not to mention needing to know how much food to provide).

When my cousin sent out her wedding invitations, she did not put her own postage on the RSVP cards (even though she paid extra postage for square invitations). I thought that was tacky and thoughtless, and I thought putting stamps on the RSVP envelopes would mean everyone would send them back easily.

I was so, so wrong. We sent out about 125 invitations. By the week before our RSVPs were due, we had received 50. I went into panic mode, and no amount of attempted soothing from Dave was going to calm me down. We both knew that there was no way we would receive 50, let alone 75, RSVP cards in that last week. It was Thanksgiving, so I encouraged Dave to spread the word with his family when he went home, and I told him I was going to start calling people after our deadline of Dec. 2. By the time that deadline rolled around, we were still probably 60 RSVPs short, although that included some wedding party members and a few others we knew would attend. We still had a pretty lengthy list of people to track down.

A week into tracking down coworkers, family members and old college friends, I really wish I had those hours of my life back. The phone calls and online messages are just awkward and time consuming. We still haven’t gotten definite answers from everybody, including one who has a tentative role in the wedding, and I really just want to be able to finalize my seating chart and cross it off my to-do list.

If I had only seen this photo about three months earlier, I never would have suffered through this:

One couple on Green Wedding Shoes gave their guests these options for RSVPing- I would have gone with carrier pigeon!

What a ridiculously simple thought. Ladies, let me tell you, those little RSVP cards are not exciting to scrapbook. They don’t add any fun to your corner of wedding supplies. And after the first week, going to the mailbox to look for them is a major source of stress, not a thrill.

Don’t require your guests to send in RSVP cards. You will end up resenting your friends and family for their role in wasting your time and money, because they ignored the card you took the time to type, and they threw away the 44 cents you placed on that envelope.

In this tech-savvy, overly-busy, forgetful world, people don’t want to be bothered with filling out a card and remembering to put it in the mail. If you need a definite headcount (and most of us do), then I highly, highly, highly recommend what this smart couple did, and just give your guests a deadline to let you know if they will be there or not. Make sure you give them that deadline, but allow them to give you their notice in whatever way is easiest for them. It will save you money on postage and some major headaches. And I would imagine it will save you a lot of time—there will of course always be people that can’t make up their mind, or manage not to talk to you for six months, but you will have a lot fewer people on your to-call list if you let your friend Sally text you that she’s coming, and have Uncle Don mention over Thanksgiving dinner that he will not be able to make it.

Head over to Perfect Bound to read a great list of things that a real mother-of-the-bride learned while helping to plan her daughter’s wedding. *Cough, cough* Mom… go there…. *cough* Pay special attention to #1.

Advice for the Mother of the Bride