How to survive planning your wedding

Planning a wedding is exciting, but overwhelming. It’s easy to let the big event overtake your whole life- but there are ways to stay calm and take it one step at a time.  Let’s learn some successful strategies for making wedding planning manageable.

  • Have perspective:  Any large undertaking can seem insurmountable.  It’s important to put things in perspective.  Planning a wedding is akin to eating a life size chocolate elephant.  You need to do it in pieces, and a little at a time or you’ll feel very uneasy in your stomach.

    Liz & Kathleen_Ceremony 173
    A well planned wedding: Liz & Kathleen
    photo by Max & Friends
  • Know where your strengths are:  There are going to be parts of the process that appeal to you more than others.   Are you a foodie? Focus on the menu.  Fashionista? Designing the event will be oodles of fun.  For the places you’re dreading, don’t force yourself to slog through – recruit help, professional or friends and family.
  • Don’t rush it: We get it.  You’re in love, and don’t want to wait around.  But Rome wasn’t built in a day! Rushing through details will cause details to be overlooked, details that properly looked after, could be the moments that mean the most to you and your intended.

Being engaged is a joyous time – make sure you breathe and savor the interlude!  Once the streamers are tossed and the  DJ has packed up her records, chances are you’ll remember the process as much as the day itself.  Enjoy the journey.

Be well, and love well.

Dinah

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The language of wedding planning for gay couples: bride and groom?

Congratulations to all who got engaged on New Year’s Eve! All over the country there are happy couples now planning weddings that were a mere twinkle in the eye (or jewelry box) a week ago. For so long it’s been a transition from happy pair to bride and groom.  But with the dawn of marriage equality, (cue the heavenly chorus) people of all orientations are popping the question, and the old language just doesn’t fit. So we in the wedding industry need to be conscious.  So much marketing is aimed at “brides,” it can be exclusionary.  We want to be open and helpful to wedding planning for gay couples, too. So I’ve come up with a new term to use in the blog: “to-be-weds.”  Applicable to any couple or individual, it invokes the excitement of the wedding, and the special status of the celebrant.  I don’t think I can cut out “bride” entirely, but my New Year’s resolution is to try and be as inclusive as possible as we move forward in 2014.

Jerry & David - such a happy couple!
Jerry & David – such a happy couple!

You can help!  Are you a My Little Flower Shop newlywed? Send us your wedding photographs for use on our website and blog!  We love all photographs, but are especially building our collection of same sex weddings. All the photographs, regardless of the content, help inspire wedding planning for gay couples all across the country, and the world.

Happy New Year to all, to-be-weds, newlyweds, and all readers.

Live well, and love well.

Dinah