Fear The Knot

Okay, so I did own this book as a child,
but reading the book is as far as my wedding planning ever got.

I'm told that every little girl dresses up her Barbie as a bride and acts out her dream wedding.  It's one of life's stages.  You act out things that could happen to you in life, kind of like a mental preparation.  It's imaginative, it's playful, and it's dreaming of what life will be like when you grow up.

Yes, I owned Barbies and I played with them, but I never planned Barbie's dream wedding to Ken.  I was more of a career Barbie kind of girl.  I had the Barbie dream house and the pink Barbie Corvette, and even had horses for Barbie to ride around on when she wasn't working, playing house, or cruisin' in her Vette.  But, dressing Barbie up in white and having her walk down the aisle towards Ken's molded plastic head of hair wasn't my style. 


I have not spent the last thirty years of my life planning my dream wedding in my head.  Imagining the bridesmaid dresses and the flowers and the first dance... I was never that girl!  So, now that I'm newly engaged and in need of wedding planning, I seem to be a bit behind the curve.  I have no idea what I want the big day to look like.  I know I want to get married at my church and that's about it.

I took to the internet for some inspiration to the myriad of questions everyone was starting to ask me.  There were so many options to look at and I had to idea which site to choose, so I went with a site that I had at least heard of before, theknot.com.  It seemed like a pretty cool site, at first.  There were lots of articles for clueless brides-to-be, like me.  Articles on how to choose your color scheme, what to ask when checking out caterers and reception halls, etc.  Then I saw something I thought would be totally helpful, a wedding planner and checklist.

The Knot's Wedding Planner is supposed to be the ultimate guide to all things bridal.  With it, you can plan every last detail of your big day.  I thought that would be perfect for me since I was feeling like so overwhelmed by the enormity of the task I had just taken on by telling the love of my life that I would marry him.  All I needed to do was give The Knot people a few simple details about myself and tell them when the big day would be and they would help me to fill in the rest of the blanks.  Sounds so easy, right? WRONG!  HORRIBLY WRONG!



Fear The Knot!

Holy Crap!  Just telling them that my tentative wedding date was nine months and one week away meant that, of the 280 things on The Knot's to-do list, I had 40 checklist items to complete by Friday and 33 of them were overdue!  I'd been engaged for 18 hours and I was already behind on planning my wedding.  How the hell did that work?

The Knot's wedding timeline clearly operated on the assumption that everybody takes a year to plan their wedding.  I'm a teacher and getting married during the school year just wasn't going to work for me.  It was going to have to be a summer wedding, which meant either I was getting married in 8-9 months or I was going to be waiting 21 months to get married.  For some reason, a really extended engagement didn't appeal to my fiance.  Can't imagine why? 

I totally spazed out after looking at the wedding checklist.  I logged off the computer, walked over to my fiance (the artist formerly known as my honey), and crawled into his lap telling him that I didn't think we were going to be getting married when we wanted to because theknot.com said we were behind schedule.  My honey held me and kissed me and told me everything would work out just fine.  The perfect thing to say.  If only I had been in a frame of mind to believe him at that moment, I would have felt so much better.  My honey told me we should call my mother and have her over for dinner the next day so that she could help me get started.  It was a good call on his part.

I posted to Facebook later that night that theknot.com had scared me to death and every woman I know that was recently married told me to ignore the checklist and just focus on three things this week: the church, the reception hall, and the officiant.  I was assured over and over again that once those three details were locked into place, everything else would somehow work itself out.

I sure hope they're right!