I would like to start out, by saying how much I loved my wedding day. From the Groom to the ceremony; to the decorations to the guests; and from the food to the fun, I loved it all! Of course, the day had a few blips, but that is inevitable! What it all came down to, was that I had just married the most perfect man for me, and we were celebrating that fact with people who loved and supported us. Almost any wedding malfunction that happened, or could have happened, was not going to ruin that day for us.

Here are a few tips I have for planning, and enjoying your wedding day.

• Create a motto of what is most important on your wedding day. It is easy to lose focus on what is important, when diving into the world of special occasion details. The most important things to us, was the ceremony, celebrating with family and friends, and no stress! It was nice for myself, Trevor, and our moms to refer back to that motto, throughout the planning process. After voicing that, little details didn’t matter as much, and the people-pleasing pressure was lessened. When a dilemma arises, ask yourself, “Is this going to cause us stress on our big day?” or “Who matters most in this particular situation?” If the answers follow the lines of your motto, the decision-making comes a little easier.
• Look at all the aspects of a wedding, and decide what is most important to you and your fiancee. (This kind of correlates to the above tip.) Photography, flowers, decorations, the wedding attire, the food, the bridal showers, and the entertainment, are many aspects to a wedding. I focused on what would provide us with the most memories. So naturally, the photography was the most important, and a program/entertainment. Those were the things that would have more allotted money in the budget. Once again, ask yourself questions: Are real flowers more important to me than having fake flowers?
• Use technology to organize, coordinate, and display the details of your wedding. We have so many awesome tools available to us that can help make planning so much easier. It began first, by “pinning” on pinterest a bunch of ideas, so that I could visualize it properly. (I’m SURE most of you already have a board started of that day, LOL. ) Then I started using Google docs on Google Drive, which ended up being the most helpful tool. The spreadsheets were perfect for making a guest list, and counting it. The documents were perfect for typing up an overall outline of the entire wedding day, and creating separate task lists for each person helping. The best part about this, was being able to share it with our parents, so they could add to the guest list, or cross things off the task list. (This is especially helpful if you are doing long-distance planning!) I also threw a wedding “pow-wow” handing out the main outline of the wedding, along with tasks that I needed help with, and swatches of my color scheme and style. Doing this allowed the girls in our families, and friends, to all collaborate on ideas, know who was doing what task, while telling everyone the same details only once!

Throughout the course of planning,

• You will probably want to make big changes to your plans, because it becomes overwhelming, stressful, or you realize you are trying to please too many people. This is OK. It doesn’t matter if people call you bridezilla. Just try and explain your reasoning for the changes, and do it in a timely fashion, so the people helping don’t get frustrated.
• You will want to ditch the wedding planning, and just elope. Don’t. You will most likely regret it. It’s all worth it, if you stick to your wedding motto.
• Problems may be created in your personal relationships because of a number of factors. Be careful of this one. No silly wedding detail is more important than your relationships with the ones you love.

Hopefully these tips were helpful. To see how these tips can be applied even further, please read about what we did on our wedding day !

• all
• celebrate
• engagement
• finances
• journal
• religious
• romance