You really CAN'T please everyone!!

Okay, so this post is mostly a copy-and-paste job, but I just came across this post by Bride in Exile over at Wedding Planning in Exile, and it made bells of joy go off inside me. That's a strange image, but really - it resonated!! So I just wanted to share them, in case there is anyone out there who missed them. I myself am a newbie to her fantastic blog - and if you haven't read it yet, go there now (or after you read this)!!

"If you throw a Saturday night wedding in the summer and limit your guest list to family and close friends, some people will claim you're being selfish by having a "fancy" wedding at the expense of including more people. If you throw a lunchtime wedding on a Sunday for 300 people, including everyone's dates and roommates and pets, some people will gripe that they barely got to see the bride and groom and wonder why you needed to have so many people there. Hire a live band, and you're sure to hear someone complaining that the "real" songs played by a DJ are more fun. Hire a DJ, and someone will tell you a live band is always better. And if you throw the fanciest Saturday night wedding imaginable for 300 guests, have a ten-hour reception so you can visit with all of them, and you somehow manage to have a DJ and a live band, someone will sniff that you shouldn't have "wasted" all that money.

So accept now that whatever choice you make, someone somewhere on your guest list probably won't like it. Guess what? It doesn't matter. It's your wedding, and you get to set the priorities."

Ah. Can you feel the fresh air? She's put into words what I felt in my gut but was having trouble expressing in a non-violent way :) Check out the rest of this post for more refreshingly clear, wise, guilt-relieving words...

130 days to go

isn't the knot just so delightfully helpful? i log on ( i am using it for it's guest list feature! thats ALL, i swear!!), and it blares 130 DAYS TO GO!!!! all i have to say about that is zoinks.

granted, we are having a pretty short engagement (about 6 months - which seems kind of ridiculous to me, that 6 months is short, but anyway, thats another post altogether), but it is definitely freaking me out a little bit that we can't seem to nail down our venue.

here's the saga: first, we looked all over jersey, but realized pretty quickly that we were never going to be able to afford a typical wedding venue for the number of people we wanted to invite. we weren't willing to cut our guest list (as it is, we've trimmed it a few times, and in order to afford a traditional wedding, we would have to at least cut the guest list in half, and since our families alone make up almost 50% of the list, that was not really possible), so we decided to explore less traditional venues. like my parent's suburban backyard! long story short, i got insecure about that plan, and started looking at some other options, and two possibilities magically popped up. things started to align themselves for one of these places; they were affordable, available, and had indoor AND outdoor space. but we didn't want to put the deposit down until my sister had a chance to look at it (it's a few hours away from us), but it seemed like a go. our officiant saved the date, our caterer saved the date, all seemed well. i felt like the stars were aligning! but then, glitch. our caterer is a family friend, and she is able to give us a great price, partly b/c she was assuming we were holding it at my parents place, and so she wouldn't have to charge us for insurance. silly me, i assumed that she had insurance. so when i asked her to show the venue her license, well, obviously i found out that wouldn't be possible. SO. basically i had a minor breakdown.

i called my parents, and my dad said "give me this guy's (the contact at our desired venue) name and number, and maybe i'll go talk to him in person, and see if something can't be worked out." matt thought this was great ("what is he, don corleone?"), and i agree. we've been getting so much support throughout this process, it's really pretty amazing. i never would have thought to ask my pops to do such a thing, and i was pretty touched that he offered. we're a very lucky couple :)

so who knows at this point what's going to happen. i'm revisiting the pot-luck or bbq at my parents place idea. in a way this might be a good thing, because it may force us to remember our original intentions for the day - simple simple simple!! the trimmings are not important to us... but it is so easy to get caught up in wedding shenanigans. so now i'm concentrating on being zen. whatever happens will happen. the important thing is that matt and i are getting married. as long as that happens, the rest is just details.


this is helping.....



via a practical wedding via Hannah of Stonehouse Photo.

disheartened

sometimes, it feels impossible....

i must remember this......

sara over at 2000 wedding offered this wonderful post about the trickiness of the wedding industry last week, and somehow i missed it until today....

here's a taste of her wisdom:

The really sick part is that the wedding industry tries to tap into our psyches by feeding us crap about our weddings being "The best day" of our lives and our one chance to have "The perfect day." With that kind of pressure, of course we're going to think that the benefit of hiring profesionals outweighs the cost. We become convinced that we need a professional to write our friends' and families' addresses on invitation envelopes or to put flowers in a vase or cover the chairs at our receptions.

Suddenly, all of these things that would never seem necessary for a regular party feel like non-negotiables for our W-E-D-D-I-N-G-S. We start to doubt our ability to have a meaningful and memorable wedding if we can't afford all the professional services (or--gasp!--choose not to use them).

really, i'm posting this so that i will always have it nearby when i find myself overcome by wedding insanity :) reality check, please!!

also.....

lovely anna left me this comment - and it just sums up my feelings about the wedding so nicely (my bolding)....

I hate the word cheap – just because someone chooses the cheaper avenue does not mean they haven’t spent just as much time on their wedding. If anything they have often needed to think more to make it a beautiful or individual event.

Oh dear I feel a mini rant coming on! I want to make my own invites. I want to print them on my gocco and then type them on my typewriter. Oh I’m being cheap again – just because I detest the cookie cutter wedding and want to be different does not mean I am skimping on my materials!

CAKE CUTTING FEES – In London I’ve had hotels quote me up to $12 per person – really, really?!!!!!

I was sucked in by wedding magazines – but now have seen the light – I hate how they force the perfect wedding onto everyone. I have no desire for my wedding to be perfect. I just want my closest family and friends to see me marry the man I love and help us celebrate the first day of the rest of our life. Preferably with great unpretentious food and yummy wine.

hooray anna!!

as i see over and over in my obsessive reading-of-wedding-blogs, this getting-sucked-into-wedding-bullshit is SO common, and SO commonly something that really intelligent women have to fight against (internally and externally). as meg at a practical wedding calls, it, "losing the plot". even the brightest and most evolved among us lose the plot in the planning process. just remember YOUR plot points, and breathe...

and that concludes another rambling think from yours truly :)

the wedding industry is a piece of crap and totally disgusts me

i know this isn't news to most people, and this has been written about many many times (see here, and here, and here, for some of the best examples) - but GAH!!!!!!! i just have to vent a little bit!! i've been researching wedding stuff all morning (in other words, it has been a completely typical day for me so far), and am about ready to puke.

matt and i have decided to buck convention and have the ceremony and reception in my ever-loving-parent's backyard. sure, it means that there are a million more details for me to obsess over (and believe me, the control freak in me is doing the happy dance and clocking in some overtime), and since my parents live in suburbia there is a privacy issue to deal with, and neighbors to butter up, and who knows what kind of noise permits we might have to russle up, but it means that we'll be able to make our wedding that more personal and fabulous without taking out a $50,000 loan. which is not even a SLIGHT exaggeration of what we would very easily spend on a "standard" wedding these days.

ANYWAY, this morning i woke up swimming in anxiety - convinced that we were doing something completely ridiculous and insane. i was worried that the music would be too loud, causing our reception will be interrupted and shut down by the police. i worried that we wouldn't be able to come up with an asthetically pleasing and affordable way to block the yard from passersby and that our ceremony would become a street spectacle. i worried that 150 people wouldn't fit into my parent's yard. and yes, i worried that people would tsk tsk us for being cheap (the word i imagined them using) and untraditional.

and so i found myself this morning at work, resuming my hunt for the perfect venue: somewhere spacious and beautiful, with enough indoor and outdoor space, somewhere that would allow us to bring our own caterer in and basically have total control over the day. oh, and someplace we could actually afford. needless to say, my search was as fruitless today as it has been for the past month. HOWEVER, it was not a total loss, as i now find myself even more thoroughly disgusted by the cost and expectations of a "typical" wedding, and my anger has me totally gung-ho about our little backyard diy-fest.

a little taste of what made my blood boil: an historic home with surrounding gardens, in the bronx, informs ever so matter-of-factly on it's website that in order to have your wedding there, you must:

a) become a member (for one year) at a cost of $5000
b) pay an additional $1500 site rental fee
c) use their own caterer - at an AVERAGE cost of $250 per person

that, ladies and gentleman, is over $40,000. and, if you're having a "traditional" wedding, that means you still have to spend thousands on a dress, a tux or suit for the groom, a band or dj, a photog, a videog, invitations, save-the-dates, programs, flowers, an officiant, bridal party gifts, and favors. not to mention decorations, a guest book, CAKE CUTTING FEES (seriously? how can anyone even say that with a straight face??), shoes and jewelry for the bride, hair and makeup for the bride, and a wedding planner. the fact that anybody does this drives me batty (it is really, REALLY hard for me to refrain from certain four-letter-words right now). all i can think about are the people who are working 3 jobs to feed their families, kids who are starving, all the suffering in the world, and people choose to spend tens of thousands of dollars on one day, on all this shit (oops, that one slipped out) that usually just ends up obscuring the whole point of the day. i understand that people dream about their weddings, i understand the desire to make the day important and special and unforgettable. i TOTALLY understand getting caught up in the wedding frenzy and suddenly feeling like you absolutely, positively MUST have those $200 table runners. it's such a big, convincing, culturally ingrained machine (the wedding machine, that is). i myself have been sucked in many times. but today i feel like i've been slapped in the face (in the best possible way :)) - i don't give a flying rats ass what anyone thinks we should or shouldn't be doing/spending. this is about me and matt loving each other and wanting to make a formal committment to each other, in front of everyone we love. thats it. it's not about the food or the flowers or the music or even the party.

so there.