“Plans”…

As expected…while I was back home over the Labor Day weekend I was bombarded with wedding questions.  Most of them were typical, where’s the wedding gonna be, what does your dress look like, what type of flowers will you have…and then there’s my mom.

ok picking up from where we left off…

Much like finding our photographer, searching for and finding our venue took place mostly via the internet.

Considering that the whole entire purpose of a wedding is… (wait for it)… to get married (!!! who knew, right?), it was shocking how little focus there often is on planning the ceremony that actually binds two people together.  Of course, we were no different – waiting until what felt like the last minute to really get down to the nitty-gritty of our ceremony.  But once we began talking about what we wanted said – to our guests, about our idea of marriage, and to each other – it really sank in how monumental those 20 minutes were going to be… the first 20 minutes of our lives together.

While the Monica Geller in me imagined my wedding looking a thousand different ways over the years, one element remained a constant: I would be married – come hell or high water – in my home town of Austin.  There’s no other city like Austin in the world – the energy of the people and the natural beauty of the landscape are beyond compare, and we wanted our wedding to reflect that same energy and beauty.

Along with my hair trial and DIY bouquet trial a couple of weekends ago, I also met with a good friend of mine from college who will be our DJ at our Saturday evening reception. We went over the basic flow of the evening including which formalities we’ll be including (toasts, first dance, father/daughter dance), which formalities we’ll be skipping (bouquet/garter toss, dollar dance, any unecessary cake smashing), what songs I’d like to avoid (ALL group dances including but not limited to the electric slide, YMCA, and the macarena) and what songs I’d love to hear. For the last few months I’ve been bookmarking YouTube videos of songs as I hear them and get excited. My collection is completely random, but these songs are always guaranteed crowd movers among the party animals in my family. I’m hoping our playlist will include at least some of these sure crowd pleasers.

I have to admit I’ve been scouring wedding blogs since well before I got engaged. In my defense, I’d been considering wedding photography since about 2.5 years ago, so in some ways it made sense that I was in on the latest in nuptial events.

As writers and lovers of literature, M and I are excited to be writing our own wedding ceremony to be officiated by my stepfather’s sister. While my stepaunt is a minister, I’ll be perfectly honest in admitting I don’t know much about her faith as we’re planning a ceremony that is largely secular. At this point in my life I most closely identify with being agnostic while M could best be described as vaguely spiritual more so than religious. Simply put, religion does not and never has played a role in our relationship so despite having both been raised Roman Catholic, we knew a church wedding wasn’t for us.  What’s most important to us is creating a ceremony that is reflective of our relationship, our personalities and includes as many personal touches as possible.

Sorry for the absence in the recaps everyone!  I’m really hoping to have my full disc of pictures soon to show you but until then, some logistics!

In an effort to take you through my planning process, I will attempt to narrate in the order in which things actually occurred.  After getting engaged and determining that the wedding would take place in Atlanta, we knew we had to start by choosing the ceremony and reception locations.  Neither Ryan nor I was currently a member of any church, but we knew that we wanted a Catholic ceremony.  Therefore we did what other lazy couples do on Saturday night – map out the closest Catholic church!  And the first church in our search, amazingly enough, was the Cathedral of Christ the King.

Ed note: We have some really fun news for you guys!  Rachel G is moving her weekly column to Thursdays to make way for her husband-to-be, M, who will be joining us each Friday.  We are so excited to follow the ins and outs of wedding planning from the both the bride’s AND the groom’s perspective!  Visit tomorrow for M’s first column!

First of all, hope everyone had a great holiday break and Happy 2009. I am very excited to be in 2009 and there is now only 5 months to go until our wedding day.

So, last week I told you about the ceremony location and the date of our wedding. This week, the reception venue. As we are having the ceremony in a chapel, the reception by definition had to be elsewhere. Before starting to choose the venue, you have to give thought to the least pleasant aspect of wedding planning: the budget. No good finding the perfect venue for it to be outside even the most stretched budget. So we had to have that talk with my parents. In England it is traditional for the bride’s parents to host and pay for the wedding but in our case, my parents are hosting in a ‘dignitary’ fashion as we are marrying away from my home town. So, after some honest discussions between us, we decided that my parents would put in some money and M and I would pay the rest, partly from our own savings and partly from money his parents had given us as a wedding present.

I suppose the first thing to be decided when planning a wedding is the location and the date. I know that some people have a firm idea where they wish to get married and the date is chosen purely on availability. However, in our case, we had no idea about a venue so we had to start with a rough date and work from there.

Welcome back to part III in our series of posts on Sari and Andy’s wedding invitation. If you are just joining us, please check out part II to see the invitation for this amazing celebration.

There is no doubt this in an intense time of year for all across the nation. With the future president to be decided in a few days, everyone is on edge, myself included.

My husband and I agreed that we wanted a quick yet meaningful wedding ceremony. We also wanted our guests to recognize it to be unique to us. Our wedding ceremony took place in a courtyard on a warm summer day so I knew that a “ten to fifteen-minute soap opera style ceremony” suited us just fine!

If you’re having a full dinner reception, one of the most important decisions you’ll make is the style of service you’ll offer.

Sometime in the middle of planning a $2,000 wedding, it occurred to me, “Why not think of it as a reunion instead of a wedding?” Weddings tend to focus on surface things like flowers, attire, and centerpieces. Reunions tend to be about fun.

Last summer, I went to a very traditional wedding: stained-glassed windows coloring and diffusing the light, the priest commanding the audience with his noble presence, the flowers framing the scene, the bride and groom posing picturesquely.