Wedding Planning Survival Tips

Heyyyyy....remember me? I've clearly been spending too much time living my life to and not enough time actually writing about it. Oopsies.

My Thanksgiving was absolutely perfect and was followed by my bridal shower and bachelorette party on Saturday. I want to tell you all about it but I feel a bit overwhelmed with my to do list now that we are just a few weeks away from our wedding. I'm hoping to have some down time later in the week to fill you in on the fun and happiness that made up my Thanksgiving weekend. In the meantime, I'm linking up for Wedding Wednesday today!

We're less than a month our from our big day so we are busy wrapping up the last few details. Being in the home stretch of this whole wedding planning business, today I want to share a few tips that have helped me deal with the stress that comes with planning a wedding:

1. Don't go crazy on Pinterest. I know you're probably thinking I'm crazy seeing as most of us ladies start pinning to a wedding board well before an engagement is on the horizon, but hear me out. There is such a fine line between using Pinterest for wedding inspiration and being completely overwhelmed with ideas. Pinterest is such a great place for finding inspiration and helping you plan your wedding, but there is soooo much out there. Yes, there are great guest book ideas on Pinterest, but if you over-do it, you could end up making it more stressful on yourself having to narrow down your ideas and settle on one. So yes, use Pinterest. It has been super helpful in my planning, but once you have most of the big details figured out, I recommend scaling back a bit so you don't start to overthink and re-evaluate every decision you've already made.

2. Focus on the marriage more than the wedding. It was pretty early on in our planning when it occurred to us that the wedding can start to seem like something you are doing to appease everyone else but yourselves. At the end of the day, you know it's going to be an amazing day for the two of you, but it's easy to get frustrated making decisions that seem so insignificant to you in the big picture. My only advice is when the little details start to seem completely stressful and overwhelming, slow down and focus on the marriage part...the part where you say your vows, the part where you walk down the aisle, the part where you are announced as husband and wife. Those thoughts will bring you back to the most important thing, you as a couple. Your marriage and the life you're about to start together. Focus on that.

3. Take a break every now and then. Especially in the early stages, there are times you'll feel like all you do is discuss wedding stuff with your fiance'. No matter how excited you are about your wedding, there are times when you just won't be in the mood to talk about it. As much fun as wedding planning can be, it's a lot of mostly expensive decisions to make and tiny details to think about. It's absolutely necessary to purposefully take time off from anything wedding-related. What we've tried to do is have an overall goal of the things we want to talk about or accomplish each week and try to plan ahead what days/nights we are going to tackle those items. This way you have time together to just be together and enjoy some down time and not let the wedding take over your life.

4. You can't please everyone. The sooner in the wedding planning process you accept this, the better off you'll be. After getting engaged, it won't be long before you encounter the many, many opinions people want to share with you. For the most part, everyone of these people have the best of intentions, but there's just no way you can make everyone happy. There's also the possibility of people you weren't able to invite being upset with you and a million other things people might not be thrilled about. All you can do is show appreciation for input from others, be apologetic and straightforward with people who may be unhappy and move on from it. At the end of the day, this is your day and you have to do what's right for the both of you, even if others don't understand it or agree with it.

5. Keep it in perspective. It's just one day out of the very long and happy life you'll have together. In the very beginning of planning our wedding, I realized the chairs our venue provides aren't exactly the style chair I would prefer on our big day. After looking at how much it would cost to rent fancier chairs, I quickly came to the conclusion that I don't think when I look back on our wedding many years from now, I will even remember what the chairs looked like and I made up my mind to not worry about it again. I wish I could say I've been that laid back about everything throughout the process, but I do try to keep in mind that at the end of the day, we are going to be married and the little things that seem like a big stress aren't really going to have a huge impact on the happiness of our life together.

What would you add? Is there anything that has helped you remain cool and collected during the wedding planning process?

Next week I'll finally be back with an update on what we have left on our to do list!

 

Linking up for Wedding Wednesday!