Advice for Brides: Making decisions

The first free moment we had after getting engaged last spring, I made a quick trip to Target for a very special purchase: a wedding planning binder! I found a beautiful pink watercolor pattern & it was even on sale! It was so exciting to have it & begin filling it with different hair, dress & makeup ideas from bridal mags plus inspiration for a venue, centerpieces and more.

Slowly but surely I began to collect more ideas & options for our wedding but realized something: I wasn't making any decisions.

One Saturday I went on Etsy to look through save the dates options & searched by color, theme, style, price. There were probably hundreds of results with each new search. And I wanted to look through ALL of them. Every. single. one! Dean came over later that day & was like, "Sooo are we ever going to even have time to mail them out?"

Which leads me to today's tip for brides: a huge part of getting married is making decisions.

Guest list, order of bridesmaids, rehearsal dinner menu, ceremony music. These are just a few of the decisions that are the behind-the-scenes of actually planning your wedding. But instead of crossing things off the list, I just wanted to linger around each decision, gathering every possible choice, but not actually picking out the color/time/place. And with all the amazing wedding sites, blogs & online shops, it would've taken me years to look at it all!

My now hubby, on the other hand, was in a different mindset as we started to plan & helped encourage us to actually be choosey. If you're hired a wedding planner, this is the exact kind of situation where having their expertise & guidance is a huge asset! Our wedding planner Sami was incredible about guiding us through the process & keeping us on track with everything from picking our venue to reception flowers.

> If you're like me & you LOVE having tons of options, that's great but don't let them all stay options. Set a deadline for when you want to have reached a decision.
> Enlist your fiance's support! We realized I could've looked at save the dates, bridesmaid dresses and more all the up until our wedding day if it hadn't been a team effort.
> There's a time for everything. If there's something you don't need make a decision about right away, like guest favors, then give yourself time to enjoy browsing the options.
> Narrow it down to a few faves & let your fiance/maid of honor/wedding planner weigh in.

Hope these tips help those who are planning! Have y'all struggled with making decisions? What are some ways you've worked through it?

Advice for Brides: The Top 5

Advice for Brides: Get more sleep

Advice for Brides: Seeing your groom

Advice for Brides: Your bridal party

Advice for Brides: Creating your registry

Advice for Brides: Putting the wed in wedding

Advice for Brides: The Top 5

Hey y'all! This is the first post of my Advice to Brides series & I am SO excited to be writing about all the helpful hints, inspiration resources & other wedding related deets that helped us plan our wedding last November. (You can photos from our rustic barn-filled day here & here!).

So he asked for your hand, you said yes, now what??

First of all, congratulations!!! Engagement is such a sweet, joy-filled time!! What an amazing experience to find the one whom your soul loves, as Song of Solomon so beautifully says it :) After you've called your family, texted all your friends & toasted to your upcoming day, I think it's so important to take a few moments & think about you & your fiance's top 5.

What are the top 5 things that are most important to you about your wedding?

For Dean & I, we were tremendously blessed to have done this pretty early on in planning. Once you can actually visualize what you value most about your big day, it's SO much easier to budget, plan & invest your time! If not, and if you're anything like me, the reality is I would just be pinning my little heart out & find myself frustrated, pulled in so many different directions. Handcarved save the dates! Letterpressed seating cards! Sequined tablecloths! (Yes, I actually would've considered the last one if they had been more within our reception budget!).

Our top 5 looked a little something like this:

1. Honoring the Lord & celebrating the true meaning of marriage
2. Ceremony - Sharing the Gospel with our guests
3. Guest list - Being able to invite all of our family & closest friends
4. Photography - duh ;)
5. Venue - Finding an outdoor ceremony location & spot for an indoor barn reception

So, what are your top 5? Another way to think about it: When you look back at your wedding, what do you want to remember most? Take some time to sit down with your fiance & talk through the aspects of the day - location, music, food, time of year, photography, entertainment, decor - that you want to prioritize. If you want to write your own lists & then share it with each other, that works, too! You may find that 3 of your 5 match & the other 2 will give you the opportunity to practice communicating & problem solving :)

Happy planning!

Advice for Brides: Making Decisions

Advice for Brides: Get more sleep

Advice for Brides: Seeing your groom

Advice for Brides: Your bridal party

Advice for Brides: Putting the wed in wedding

Advice for Brides: Creating your registry

Introducing Advice for Brides

When my now hubby proposed last May during a beautiful hiking trip, I immediately started pouring over all things wedding - Pinterest, blog, photographers' blogs, bridal mags and more - as soon as I got back home. Deano was such a champ through the 7 months of our engagement. I mean, I wanted to know ALL the options on ANYthing before making a decision (including all the possible Save the Date options in our price range on Etsy. Let's just say, that's a whole lotta options!).

And I didn't know where to begin! Any brides feeling the same overwhelmingness? Deano & I had talked about marriage, sought counseling from our pastor & parents & prayerfully considered the commitment before we went ring shopping. But until the day he put the ring on my finger, I wanted to hold off on any plans of any kind.

I wanted to enjoy & be present for every moment while we were dating - not months in the future deciding what kind of flowers I'd have in my bouquet. For those of you that are able to be in the here & plan for the future, cheers to you! That was not something my brain could handle :)

In August I shared my heart with y'all about this very thing & gave a few tips for what I learned through our engagement. The more I talk with brides, the more I realized a lot of us were in the same place. We've never been engaged/planned a wedding before & then there's pressure to suddenly become the perfect wedding planning fiancee/bride. Here's something to keep in mind: At the end of the day, if you're more married than when you started, the wedding day is a success. Yay! Time to drink a big mug of coffee & cheers to that!

Although you'll still have many wedding planning decisions to make, the freedom that comes with knowing that is hugely awesome! And having been right there in those same wedding-planning shoes not too long ago, I'm starting a new weekly blog series about all the helpful hints & wedding tips I've learned: Advice to Brides, from one bride to another :) I'm so excited to passing along what has worked for our wedding & other couples' weddings, too! Check back on Friday for the very first post!

Advice for brides: Putting the 'wed' in wedding

As soon as you get engaged - if not before, the well-meaning questions start flooding in: SO, when's the date? What are your colors? Have you picked out favors yet? For Mr. D & I this started as soon as we climbed down the mountain after our beautiful proposal hike & were driving back to Arlington. 

Colors?? Um, no, we've spent all day hiking miles up & over a rocky terrain. I'll have to get back to you...

The stress & pressure to transform into the perfect wedding planning fiancee, who knows exactly what types of blooms she would like in each centerpiece & has already determined her processional music like 5 years ago, can lead to major meltdown sessions.

It happened to me after the very first week we were engaged. Driving back from one of Mr. D's soccer games, I completely burst into tears. "I...can't...do...thiiiis" is what I managed to get out between sobs.  We were engaged in May, hoping to be married in late fall which left a little over 6 months to get it all together.

Looking back, I'm so lucky not only to have a fiance who is as understanding & supportive as he is but also that I was able to vocalize those thoughts. Not addressing the feeling of impending doom for your big day is not going to change the way you feel. 

Just as we're told in our walk with the Lord: Doubt your doubts. Believe your beliefs.

So, if you get to the point of feeling crazy frazzled & not knowing how you'll ever pull off a wedding, just remember this: yes, it's one wonderful, special day that y'all will be able to look back on for the rest of your lives. But it's also the day that before God & all your family & friends you get wed. Become one with your groom & begin the journey of marriage. Here are a few things that have helped me over the past 3 months of planning:

Remember why you're getting married. This is obvious but in the midst of scouring the e-n-t-i-r-e internet when searching for the exact shade of mint green for your bridesmaid dress (as I felt like I did), it can be easy to think, "Fiance, who?" Remember that amazing guy, who holds your hand during car trips, puts up with crazy talk about silly things like red pants, agrees to go to country concerts though he would rather not, makes brunch for you & loves you to the moon & back. That incredible guy has asked you take the adventure of a lifetime together, not spend tons of months stressing over teeny tiny details that only you will notice in the end.

Take time to go on weekly dates, ***no wedding planning allowed.*** I'm guilty of this - trying to squeeze in questions about our wedding music & planning the rehearsal dinner like it's my job. Buuut without spending some good quality time as just two lovebirds, no wonder we brides-to-be can get so charged up & emotionally stressed out, am I right? Mr. D & I are doing better at dating during this busy time but y'all, it's so important not to allow less important things to take the place of the important people in our life. And hey, maybe it's your groom that's getting swept away into TheKnot.com land & overwhelmed with registering for everything today. Then you can be the one to initiate a fun date night this weekend :)

And actually, funny thing is I was feeling like we needed to go out & just have a lovely dinner & a movie night together several weeks ago so I mailed Mr. D a date night invite & was super pumped about our time together that Friday. The wait at the restaurant we'd been wanting to try was 1 1/2 hours so we went to get Mexican instead. It the hottest day of the summer & we had to be in the hottest restaurant in Arlington. And there weren't any movies out we wanted to see. Needless to say, we've had much better dates but prioritizing the relationship is key & so, so crucial :)

The only things you need at your wedding are you & your groom.  Repeat it after me: you & your groom. (Oh & a photographer to capture the special moments between you two ;) ) Reading this lovely blog post over on Southern Weddings (y'all, if you haven't checked them out, do it now!) is a huge breathe of fresh, engagement air. Despite what coworkers, friends, ladies you meet at Target, strangers & anyone else may tell you, you don't need a live band, an expensive venue, formal tuxes, an open bar, fancy welcome bags, the garter toss to make your day complete. Now, if these are things you want? That's wonderful. Get a vision for how you & your fiance see the day unfolding, budget it all in & plan away. But don't believe the lie that the world, & the wedding industry, will try to push that spending $$$ on your wedding is the only way to go. All brides have different budgets, different priorities, for their special day. Don't allow what someone else says to be the only way. It's not true.

The coolest part, to me as a photographer & guest, of a wedding is seeing how two people, two families joining together are represented throughout the details of the day. If you like brunch & jazz, then by all means, have a jazzy mid-morning wedding. If you would really like to serve homemade desserts instead of a tired wedding cake, serve it up. It's easy to allow all the pretty things we see on Pinterest to consume our thought process. But doing things because you feel like you should? That's not genuine. It's not you. Mr. D & I came up with a list of what's important to us & what we wanted to include in our upcoming day (only 85 days away!!!) & that's what we use to determine if we should/shouldn't do something. We both want to honor God & have a fun time of celebration of the Lord has done with our guests. If whatever the dilemma is (do we need this? Should we include this?) falls outside that criteria, we let it go.

At the end of the day, if you're more married than when you started, it's a success. One of my upcoming couples shared that with me over the phone when I asked what was most important to them. If they left with rings on their fingers, having committed their lives to one another, that would be a happily ever after. I couldn't agree more :)