My daughter got married last summer.
Two pieces of advice
First piece of advice–hire my older daughter (the one who is still single) as your “wedding planner.” You’ll thank me over and over!
Seriously, I know you can’t hire my daughter, but find someone who is calm, cool, and who deals with crises without falling apart to help you with all the details. It might be your mother or your sister or your maid/matron of honor.
My older daughter is a professional stage manager, and she is used to dealing with twenty problems at once without getting upset or out of sorts. She’s also very comfortable doing business over the phone.
TWO days before the wedding, the boardinghouse that we had booked to house the wedding party (bridesmaids, groomsmen, sound man, pastor, musician etc.) called to tell us that due to extensive flooding (rainy spring), they had to close and would not be able to provide housing.
All of us were running around crying and ranting and sweating and shaking our heads, and of course, the my daughter, the bride, was hysterically sobbing. But while all the rest of us were acting crazy, my older daughter immediately got on the phone and calmly booked a lovely inn that just happened to have several rooms still open (miraculous). Although the inn didn’t have the Victorian charm that the boarding house would have had, it was still very comfortable and pleasant for the members of the wedding party. (And it was cheaper.)
And then she proceeded to calm all of us, especially her sister, down.
So find yourself a good person to take care of all the million details. You’ll be so glad you did.
Second piece of advice–don’t forget about your fiance while planning the wedding and DON’T FORGET ABOUT HIS MOTHER!
I know this sounds obvious, but many brides tend to totally overlook their fiance’s preferences, and instead, make him jump through hoops like a trained poodle, and then cry when he refuses to jump. And many brides do not include their future Mother-In-Law in much of the wedding prep.
My daughter’s fiance probably would have been happy to get married in a courtroom in front of a justice of the peace. But my daughter (and her older sister, the wedding planner) involved him as much as possible in various details like the food for the reception, the photographer, the car, etc. He wasn’t left out at all. My older daughter even included a game at the bridal shower in which he had to answer a series of questions (she called him in advance to get all his answers)–it was so much fun. (When asked how many children they wanted, he said two, and my daughter said six–it was hilarious, because that’s not what he expected to hear!)
Also, my daughter constantly involved her mother-in-law, who she was already close to since she started dating her son when he was just 16. A few weeks before the wedding, MIL and me, along with other family members, got together to decorate the veil (my veil–very old-fashioned, but we modernized it a bit for the wedding). Very precious time for all of us.
And as long as you asked, here is some more advice:
I agree with what many others are saying on this board. I’ll warn you, though, that no matter how determined you are to be thrifty and not go overboard, you
will spend a lot more money than you planned, and there will be something that you will wish afterwards that you hadn’t invested in. My advice is to just go with it. Don’t get upset or fret or feel guilty. You’ll pay it off eventually (or your parents will), and the world will go on and you’ll be happy. Just relax. It’s your wedding–it will only happen once. That doesn’t mean that you have to go broke. But don’t fret over a few hundred dollars or so.
What do we regret? My daughter has two regrets about her wedding:
- She wishes she had followed my advice and invited EVERYONE she knows, instead of trying to limit the list. A lot of people ended up turning down the invitation, and she would have had plenty of room at the reception to acommodate more people, like her high school teachers, various school friends, old skating pals, etc. She was trying to be thrifty, and instead, ended up leaving out people that she would have love to have seen at the wedding.
- She wishes she had NOT had a flower girl that she didn’t know well. She invited her eight-year old cousin, and it was a disaster from the beginning, but we didn’t know that since the child lives in a far-away state. I won’t go into all the details, but for starters, her parents refused to allow her to miss school, so she left with her daddy on the plane at 10:30 at night the night before the wedding. They flew into an airport over a hundred miles away from us (cheaper), and didn’t arrive til one in the morning, and then they had a two hour drive to get to our city. The next morning (the wedding day), they arrived only a few minutes before the wedding (11:00 A.M. wedding), which meant no photo opportunities, and the bridesmaids had to get the little girl dressed and her hair done with only minutes to go. (My older daughter took charge of her and gave her instructions how to be a flower girl and threatened her life if she didn’t behave like an angel! We have a charming photo of my daughter’s hand on the little girls shoulder, and if you look close, you can see that it’s a death grip–the knuckles are white!) The little girl was sullen (probably tired) and unsociable and just plain ill-mannered and thoroughly unpleasant. We’ve found out since then that her parents are having her evaluated by a psychiatrist because her schoolteachers say that she is unable feel empathy for anyone, and is mean to the other kids.
My daughter wishes that she had invited her fiance’s cousin, who was 12 years old, possibly too old to be a flower girl, but she’s a sweetheart with great parents.
So think very carefully about any children you invite to be in the wedding. Make sure that they are your special pals and that you can trust them to behave in a way that you find acceptable. Don’t include children just to keep their parents happy or because everyone expects a cute child or two in the wedding.
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