Wedding Wednesday: Where We Are In Our Planning Process Pt. 2

It’s been a while since I did a wedding planning update (over 100 days actually!) so I thought I would use today’s Wedding Wednesday to share where we are in our wedding planning process! You can see the last update here. When we first started to plan our wedding it was all logistical stuff. Vendor booked: check. Item crossed off of the list: check.

Now that we’re four months out things are actually coming together. This past month we’ve done a lot and we’re starting to see our visions come to life. I’m not going to lie, wedding planning is a really fun, but really emotional process. I can’t tell you how many times I have teared up or cried (happy tears!) during the planning process haha.

WHAT WE’VE DONE SO FAR

• Since the last update I said yes to the dress! I think I have looked at the photos of my dress every single day. I cannot wait for it to get here and to wear it as I marry Nick and celebrate our love! Speaking of the dress, I had a bit of an issue with it though and ended up having a mini-meltdown last month when I was working from Starbucks (it was embarrassing, but whatever!) I am working with a designer for a semi-custom dress. My point of contact left the company and I found out when I was following up on swatches for something. I thank my lucky stars I followed up because it turns out my dress had never gotten ordered. *insert giant panic attack* Luckily everything got handled and ordered quickly, but man, I was a m-e-s-s in Starbucks that day haha. So now my dress ships out 60 days before, so the timeline will be kind of tight! WHEW.
• Other than that slight snafu, everything else has been pretty smooth! We have secured our videographer, our florist, our wedding planner & our rehearsal dinner location. The rehearsal dinner location was almost as hard to secure as our venue!
• We sent out our save the date cards! We loved assembling these together and sending them out! So many of our friends and family members sent us photos when they received them and it made us so happy. We even kept the design and everything a secret from our parents so they would be surprised when they got it in the mail too. 🙂
• I have had to get suuuuper organized. All of the contracts, papers, and notes can be a little overwhelming if you don’t find a way to organize it all. I found that the Erin Condren wedding planner was the best for helping me mark important dates, due dates for payment & deadlines. I’ll share a post on how I’ve stayed organized soon!

• We had our engagement party! We had the sweetest group of family friends host our engagement party and it was the best time. We had it on May 6th (Kentucky Derby Day) so we had a Derby themed party full of big hats, mint juleps & southern fare. It was so fun to celebrate with everyone together and see how everyone dressed up!
• We had just started pre-marital counseling at our church when I posted the last update, but we have completed counseling now! Our program was through Prepare/Enrich and I can’t recommend it enough. Before starting, each of us took  a ~300 question survey to get to know us better and the results helped determine what topics to discuss in counseling. Each week we met with our pastor and went over different topics in the couples workbook. It was really nice to talk about certain topics that we hadn’t really discussed in detail yet. The workbook also gives topics and “homework” that you can work on together at home. I feel like our relationship progressed and grew so much as a couple during our sessions. We ended up signing up for the emails afterwards and they’ve been really great reads so far.
• My bachelorette party is less than three months away! We’re heading to Tybee Island/Savannah, Georgia for a long weekend of fun! My MOH, Bre, has been a rockstar with planning stuff and I am SO excited. The girls are keeping a lot of it a secret, so I’m definitely counting down the days.
• I selected the bridesmaid dress color, which was a relief! It was difficult to decide because colors vary SO much between fabrics and they all look different when viewing on a computer screen. I ordered a few different fabric swatches and took them to our venue(s) so I could see the true color in different lights. I ended up choosing a “pewter” color– the one with a portion cut out of it! It is the exact color I was searching high and low for and I can’t wait to see their dresses in the color.

WHAT WE ARE WORKING ON:

I don’t even feel like I can accurately describe what we are working on because the list is a mile long. It can be a little overwhelming if you try to look at it all at once, but we try to take it all in stride. We plan nights in our calendar that are for tackling wedding stuff. This is helpful so that we can keep everything on schedule and make sure we aren’t overwhelmed the last month or so!

• Music. We have our band & they have a great song list, but we still need to determine our entrance song, our first dance and work with our parents on the father-daughter dance & the mother-son dance. If anyone has any good ones, let me know! We also need to compile a list of “must play” songs and a list of “do not play” songs!
• Dance lessons. Speaking of music, we need to take a few dance lessons for our first dance. My dance moves are more embarrassing than anything else hahaha!
• Seating. This has been the most daunting task to even think about. We still don’t have a full layout of the room yet, but we want to start working on a tentative seating chart for our guests.
• Day of Paper Goods. We need to finalize our invites, figure out our programs for the ceremony, and figure out what other paper goods we need for the wedding.
• Welcome Bags & Favors. We have an idea of what we want to do for both, it just comes down to executing it!
• Finalize the cocktail hour & dinner menu. We plan on changing a few things that we originally thought we wanted so we need to do that & make sure everything is good to go.
• Book our honeymoon. A few weeks ago I asked for honeymoon recommendations on instagram stories and got an overwhelming response from y’all! I wrote down every single one  and we just need to narrow down our options and book it!
• a million other things. Truly, about one million other items! The fun is in the process though and we’re taking in every moment together because I know we will look back on these memories forever 🙂