Welcome to the 2nd installment of All Things Wedding!
Today's is a bit of a bummer; it's about disappointments. I'm not totally sure if I'll want to remember these parts, but maybe when I'm sad the wedding is over I can read this post and not be as sad!
Top 5 Wedding Related Disappointments
I love our church. I mean super love it. It's beautiful, it's got that super awesome church feel (ya know, not contemporary), and it feels like home. But what disappointed me was not their rigid wedding rules, which I actually came to appreciate, but their required $800 'donation' to get married there. How you can put 'required' and 'donation' in the same sentence I'm not sure. They use it for upkeep of the church, so it's not just going into their pockets but still.... I felt a wee bit like I was paying for a sacrament. What I really wanted to do was request that my 'donation' be used in the one stain glass window where Jesus looks sort of nauseated (he's greenish) to be replaced with the normal colored skin in all the rest of the breath taking stain glass windows.
We never got to meet our videographer. Now there's an up side... we haven't met him because he is in SC. We picked him because he is $200+ cheaper than anyone we could find in NC. Isn't that odd? But I've seen his work and may...erm... know a guy who used him for his wedding (super awkward moment of looking at the videos on the videog's website and realizing "hey, I dated the guy in this video!) so he's legit, but there just hasn't been a good time for him to drive 4 hours to us or vice versa. I only care because he'll be around for 6 or so hours on the wedding day, sort of following us around, and we don't know him at all. But hopefully we'll be on cloud 9 and won't even notice him.
Cake tasting. I wanted to be a fatty and go to town. But when they stare at you and you are supposed to slowly savor to judge the texture, flavor, etc. it's really hard. Steven had no problem shoving face. But I was all self conscious and left some cake on my side of the plate... which Steven promptly ate... and then I was sad. We are dropping off two containers to the reception venue. One is for cake to go in the freezer for after the honeymoon, and one is for cake to go in for us to eat when we get to the hotel. There are three flavor combinations in our cake, so I will need LOTS of it.
I didn't lose weight before the wedding. I just didn't have the motivation, and then I self sabotaged because I couldn't believe I didn't have the motivation. I might, might be 10 pounds smaller than this time last year, but that's it. Ten pounds on my frame isn't really obvious or helpful. It wasn't for lack of exercising. We began exercising last Lent and have done it almost continuously since then; it was for lack of weight loss type exercising, and not for lack of eating healthily, but for lack of really controlling portions. I knew what I needed to do, but just didn't do it. Such is life.
And my biggest one of all? Our complete and utter budget fail. You know how I am about money, so not sticking to the budget was hard for me. But really, I set a budget before I ever even looked into how much things cost. Could I have done it for cheaper? Oh, absolutely. But there were certain things I wasn't willing to give up for myself or for Steven and me, and certain things I really wanted for my guests' comfort. So... are you ready? I'm not laying any numbers out here, but I will say that we more than tripled (but less than quadrupled!) our original budget. However, the MOST important thing to me was coming out of the wedding with NO wedding debt. And I'm proud to announce (I had to have something positive in this blog) that we are coming out of it with a little padding because we did such a good job saving... once we had an "oh crap!" moment and started saving like crazy. The other positive? We are already living without one of our paychecks now (because it goes to wedding savings) so there is only one more check to learn to live without in preparation for operation: stay at home mom.
So again brides and wives :)... what was your biggest disappointment? I will move on to happier things again in the next edition!
You make me happy that I am planning for a 10 year anniversary instead of for a wedding - so stressful!!
ReplyDeleteI think my major disapointment was actually after we moved in together (after we were married) and I realized we should have bought a king size bed. I need my space when I sleep! Oh well, ten years and five kids later it's served us well and we are currently shopping for the king bed I've always wanted :)
I am sorry about all the disappointments! All of it will be wonderful in the end though once you are married to your best friend! :) Our biggest disappointment was at the end of our wedding reception...we did an exit from the reception place with our guests holding sparklers only to realize that my dad didn't bring the keys to my car that we were driving off in. (He and my brother had dropped it off earlier in the day). All of our guests left, and we were just hanging out with our families while the people at the reception place were cleaning everything up, waiting on my dad to go get those keys! Kind of funny now, but we were so sad to see everyone leave before us and to see all the decorations get taken down!
ReplyDeleteIt will all work out fine and you might remember, but won't really care about this stuff. I already told you about how I didn't get any of my cake (and how I starved our wedding night because I didn't bring any clothes to change into so we could go get something to eat). We also rented a photo booth for our guests, but the person who came and set it up couldn't get it to work - in the end, that was ok, we got our money back and most of our guests never even knew we were supposed to have one.
ReplyDeleteThe worst disappointment was that our church's wedding planner broke her hip the week before and we had a replacement. She was awful and kicked us out of the church shortly after the wedding was over before we got all the pictures I wanted. She was really mean about it and made me cry too. The priest later apologized to my mother and said it would never happen again, but we can't redo the pictures we missed out on.
But when I think back on it, none of it really mattered, our Nuptial Mass was amazing and holy (Catholics and non-Catholics alike said it was the most reverent and beautiful wedding they had been to) and the reception hall was beautiful and we had so much fun dancing.
Your wedding will be amazing!
OMG Mandi that sounds as bad as my cousins church's wedding planner. She went on this big lecture that she didn't want anyone to come to the church drunk. (In her defense she just had a wedding leave the church and half the wedding party showed up drunk)
DeleteI agree with Colleen... go for the king size bed!
ReplyDeleteMy wedding day had a few disappointments - the musicians at the Mass (who confused liturgy with concert), the wedding video (they didn't tape the liturgy as we had requested, so that footage is gone), and the reception DJ (who, despite my request, played YMCA and other questionable songs).
But you know what? There were plenty of other aspects that turned out beautifully. And at the end of the day, I got to marry the most handsome man in the world, which is really what it's all about!
One tip? Take a moment at some point in the day to step back and watch - enjoy the fruit of your labors :-)
1. feeling rushed with post-ceremony photos
ReplyDelete2. not getting photos of me with specific people at the reception. I hoped/assumed there would just naturally be photos of pretty much everyone at some point, but in reality, if they're not dancing and you are, they probably won't be in a photo.
3. not getting to eat ANYTHING off the Viennese table, and no cocktail hour foods (they brought some out to us but I was in every photo so I didn't get a chance to have any)
4. feeling pressured to dance when I was feeling so done because the dance floor was barely breathing after the first few hours. I would've enjoyed eating desserts and visiting with people a little more
5. weight loss for sure...everything in your post regarding that, I felt exactly.
6. not having cake saved. I wish we'd thought to bring containers. We just trusted that someone would make sure we had some for later.
7. not having a reception send-off...hard to do when most of your guests are already gone!
8. the hurricane cutting our honeymoon way short, and leading to more anxiety than fun in the final days because we were worried about our cats and felt helpless
9. after a year of stressing, STILL not having found something borrowed!!
Churches just need to charge an x amount and not even call it a donation. My last parish my priest didn't charge ANYTHING. We had a high percentage of hispanics and rather them all get married in the church than not get married due to money constraints. Although he did a lot of wedding things incorrectly (but that is another story).
ReplyDeleteI have a friend that got married in a baptist church and in her "wedding fees" was like $200 to the "wedding coordinator" and all that person did was turn the lights on and off. She's like really? I could have done that myself! At my current church they charge I think $500 if you are an "active parishioner" but no one can tell you what you need to do for that status. I guess I will worry about it all when I get engaged.
I always thought Cake Tasting sounded a lot harder than it looks. It's not you just eating cake. It's you eating cake and making a decision on which you like the best (which to me as an indecisive person sounds SOOO HARD!)