The Procrastinating Bride

It took me a little while to get used to the fact I'm getting married.
As a kid I wasn't one to dream up scenarios of my Prince Charming, or the Big Day.
I wouldn't call me, "girly".
Feminine but... white wedding dress, femme?

Sure, I've thought about tossing the garter into a small crowd of single women, but only because it goes against the status quo. No - I did not mean bouquet.
No one is going to tell me what I can and cannot have at my wedding. Who says it should been in the summer? Not me. Who says I need to have a "theme"? Not I. Who said a wedding has to be a one-day event? Nobody I want to know.

I guess the greatest thing about planning your wedding is you can take all the time you need.
It is your wedding after all.

We even waited nearly a full year to choose the date.

I thought for a long time about the date of our wedding. I wasn't sure that it should be on a Saturday. Saturday weddings are fabulous but the Sunday morning after? Yikes, no thank you!
The date had to include either a 2 or an 8 and when it doubt, 'try both' is my motto. And 28 it was.

Lucky for the procrastinating brides like me, there are a bunch of helpful websites, apps and tools online for the very purpose of planning a wedding. While I have said 'I want someone to plan the wedding for me', if I'm honest, I don't need someone else to plan our wedding.
I just need an Assistant Wedding Planner.

But first things first: Where do you have your wedding?

Today we can use our smartphones to easily search for popular, local wedding venues. Actually, we use our phones for everything: advertising; paying bills; sharing photos or video; assets and goals.

A quick search on Google for: How To Plan a Wedding, gives you a long list of To-Do's starting up to sixteen months before the wedding date. The Number 1 being a wedding folder or binder to keep everything organized (or at least together).

My wedding binder started as a sketch book. I made a couple notes, a few lists and Voila! 
I had nothing.

Number 2, and possibly the most important component when planning a wedding is the budget.

Budgeting your wedding is a tough one. It's important to answer a few tough questions before deciding how to spend money on your wedding.

Do you have any savings? Okay, maybe just one tough question... but let's get real, money makes a lot of things easier. And if this is your first wedding then you probably want it to be incredible.
And if you ask me, I'd like it to be my last one too.

But if your wedding is in the winter and you'd like to have real flowers in attendance but you live in a "winter city" you'd be charged more for flowers then, right? So you have that cost to consider.

And speaking of attendance, if you are having out of town guests it's a good idea to consider finding them accommodations. Then there's the time off work you'll need.

If you asked me two months ago, Guest List should be Number 1, Venue would be Number 2 but then that bumps Budget down to Number 3. Or is Budget Number 1 and Guest List Number 2 and Venue Number 3?

Fuck...
Good thing I just started?

After having attended many, many weddings (7 in 2014 alone) I can certainly say the budget will get you your dream venue, or perfect attire or epic menu. I have seen weddings cost anywhere between $5,000 and $95,000 in Calgary. Some of the coolest and craziest things will happen at weddings.

People today are having big, bouncy castles at their wedding receptions. I think I only love this idea because my younger brother and I share a birthday month, so Mom and Dad always celebrated us together with a backyard BBQ featuring a bouncy house. Every kid who lived within two blocks would be there. It's like getting married in a tiny town, where everybody knows everybody and everyone's invited.

One of the most difficult things about getting married is finding the venue. I can't speak for those of you who have been waiting for the opportunity to plan your main event all your life. But I wasn't one of the kids who got married on the playground in elementary. I think I was actually the officiant.

And it wasn't so much that I had never thought about getting married before, as it was about becoming someone's wife. Because being a bride is all fine and dandy but what you're really doing is committing to someone for the rest of your life.

It's one of the wildest things for me, to see people become engaged and married and then separated and divorced in the blink of an eye almost. What are you doing to each other? Life is short.

You can't waste too much time planning your wedding(s).