This is a silly question. Everyone knows that a wedding occurs when two people get married. But, what is a wedding beyond the saying of the vows and the blessing of the minister or justice of the peace? What does it take to actually make a wedding? That’s where we all begin to differ because no one’s vision of the perfect wedding is exactly the same as anyone else’s. This fact has already become abundantly clear to us, and we have just begun making plans.
So, the purpose of this blog (at least for the next 12 months), will be to document our family’s adventure planning our daughter’s wedding in order to help other families learn from the mistakes and successes we experience along the way. Reading my blog will not be like reading a bridal magazine, all light and frothy. No, I’m going to get down down to the actual nitty gritty of putting this thing together, the highs and lows, the scary and the ridiculous. So, tighten your seat belts!
Our daughter, Jessie, and her boyfriend, Thayer, had been together as a couple for quite awhile, so when Thayer asked Jessie to marry him, my husband, David, and I were thrilled! We danced around the kitchen cheering, then took the newly-engaged pair out to dinner to celebrate. It wasn’t until the next day, though, that the enormity of this event hit us. We were the ones who had to plan the wedding – David and I, Jessie and Thayer. Everything was up to us, but we, like most families, had never done this before. Where to start? We were overwhelmed.
The experts tell you that the first step to planning any wedding is finding the site where it will take place. We weren’t sure where to begin looking for this illusive place, so we started where everyone today begins every search – “…on the Google…”, (as G. W. Bush would say), where we Googled “wedding sites” for our area. There were a lot of properties out there, and every one of them looked beautiful. How to choose? We began with the question of guests – how many would each place hold? How many guests did we want to invite?
We called Jessie. Of course, she and Thayer had already come up with a list of 300 people! When I told her that most places I’d been looking at couldn’t accommodate more than 200, she said, “But we can’t leave out any of our friends! We’ll have everyone bring a potluck dish if we have to.” But we all knew that a potluck wasn’t going to happen, so we wrangled back and forth for awhile and finally settled on a guest list of 200 – still a pretty large number, but one that would allow us to hold the wedding in some place other than a county park.
The first step in wedding negotiations had begun. We realized there would be many compromises ahead.
