The last few months have been big for me, so while I haven’t been able to post a lot on here, I promise I have been busy. Jared and I got engaged (yay!!!!) so it’s been a wedding planning frenzy over here. In all of the craziness, I have been learning a lot about planning your own wedding and all of the little details that are included in that. So I want to share that and lots of other wedding updates with you. Over the next couple of weeks (and periodically over the next year until the big day comes!), I will be chronicling our wedding planning journey from the beginning parts of the process (engagement! planning your vision! asking your bridal party!) through all of the fun middle parts (finding your venue! getting THE dress! invitations!) and up until the big day and the honeymoon.
Getting ready for our wedding also means getting in our best shape for the big day. So I’ll also be focusing my upcoming recipe posts on healthy eating and finding the balance when all you really want to do is to eat chips and ice cream.
In today’s post we start with the engagement (and all of the exciting things that come next!).
Jared and I met twelve and a half years ago on a family ski trip when we were just two young kids. All of these years later, he proposed in the same place that we first met and fell in love. Afterwards, we celebrated with a delicious dinner, drinks with our family, and the next day took some amazing engagement photos. (He really killed it on the planning!) It was everything I could have imagined and then some.
Everyone always talks about the engagement (because duh it’s so exciting to have some sparkly new bling and a committed life partner) but what comes next?
There are lots of important conversations that you will have (and hopefully have already had) with your future spouse – but let’s just focus on the wedding related items. You don’t have to dive right into wedding planning, you want to make sure you have some time to enjoy your engagement and all of the love surrounding you. But once you’re ready to start planning, there are a few things to think about.
- Do you and your future spouse share the same wedding vision? Consider things like if you want a religious ceremony and if you want your ceremony to be in a church or temple, or if you’re happy to have it at the same place as your reception. Think about the style of your wedding – does one of you want black tie while the other wants a beach setting? How about wedding size – are you envisioning 200 people while your future spouse wants something more intimate?
- Do you want a short or long engagement? I think you will want to be open on this one. Some people are really set on a certain date or month or season for when they get married. But we were pretty open as long as it wouldn’t be too hot or too cold. This ended up helping us because we found that a lot of venues we were interested in were already booking up for peak season. We also found that some venues would give us discounts for getting married sooner. So being open with our timing was really helpful in finding our right fit. More to come on this as we discuss finding the right venue, but it’s important to consider right off the bat if you have some strong opinions on timing.
- Are you in agreement on what your budget will look like? This question may be directed at different people for each circumstance. Maybe you and your future spouse are paying for the wedding entirely so this is a conversation to have with them, or maybe it’s a conversation to have with your parents if you are fortunate enough to have them footing the bill. No matter who the conversation is with, it’s definitely an important conversation to have. Wedding planning will not be fun if you are envisioning a grand ballroom with flowers everywhere but the person financing your wedding is thinking more along the lines of the courthouse and small bouquets. This is also an important conversation to have around other wedding related items that you may be sharing the expenses of, like your honeymoon. More to come on this as well, but budgeting is definitely one of the key first steps of the wedding planning process.
I thought that planning a wedding would be really stressful, but it has actually been a lot of fun. With the right tools (and enough time) preparing for your wedding can be stress free and actually enjoyable. And of course, it’s even better when when you have people to help you out, like your families (shout out to my amazing mom who has been killing the wedding planning), your future spouse, your new family (another shout out to my future mother and father in law who have been so supportive) and your wedding party.
I’m excited to share all of the tips I am learning along the way so your wedding planning experience can be as enjoyable as my own. Stay tuned as I chronicle our journey and all of the tasty (but healthy!) things we cook and eat along the way.