Friday, May 20, 2011

The Joy of Booking

In 141 days I will marry my best friend and the love of my life.



That's a thrilling and frightening thought. Thrilling because we have waited so patiently for this and we are more than ready and excited to start our lives together, to form a new little family. Frightening because we still have so much left to do to prepare for our wedding.

Earlier today I called the woman who made the cake for my future brother- and sister-in-law's wedding a couple years ago. I was so excited to book this appointment because she's apparently fantastic and incredibly affordable. I was excited to put one more thing on the calendar and be able to cross one more thing off of our list of to-dos. Well, she's booked for our date. Bummer.

Planning a wedding isn't easy. Lots of time goes into researching vendors, finding inspiration, and making tough decisions like whether I'll wear my hair up or down (kidding, that decision was easy once I found my dress). Certain decisions are easy on their own: choosing our home church for the ceremony, deciding on the color palette, picking our wedding party. Some are difficult and almost impossible to decide on just yet: where are we going to live (we're both looking for new jobs), who should we add to or cut from the guest list, how can we have the wedding we want while staying under budget?

Other decisions, like finding a cake vendor, fall somewhere in between. In theory this is a simple enough decision. But when plans don't work out how you think they will, when the cake vendor you're sure you'll use is booked less than 5 months before the wedding, what do you do?

We ran into similar struggles when booking our photographer and reception venue, even though these were among the first duties we tackled right after getting engaged back in January. Everything we looked at seemed too expensive, too cheap, not what we had in mind, etc. I remember being on the brink of having a panic attack when I was calling different reception venues to set appointments when a few were already booked. How where we to know that October was suddenly "the" time to get married? We thought we were being clever and would have our pick of any vendor we wanted because we're getting married well past the summer wedding season.

In the end, we booked both a photographer and reception venue that will work out best for us and our guests. There was no need to panic, just as right now there is no need to panic about finding someone to make us a cake. Yes, finding out the baker we wanted is unavailable is stressful, but we'll get over it. After all, it's just a cake even if it is our wedding cake.

So now I'm off to research more vendors, set more appointments, and focus on the bigger picture. The details of our wedding day are certainly important; this is a huge milestone worthy of celebration and attention. The worst that will happen is we'll go over budget on our cake or, on the other hand, settle for a sheet cake from Meijer just so we have something to cut and serve our guests. But either way we will be fine because the end result is still the same. In 141 days we may not have all the details ironed out and everything may not go as we hope or plan, but we will be married.

And we will have our cake.

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