The state of things: 44 days in

• We have our official wedding date!!!
• God-willing, we’re hoping to confirm our reservation at our reception venue either today or tomorrow.
• We took our engagement pictures!
• Having changed our minds about doing them, we designed and ordered our Save the Dates, and will send those out ASAP. (We got them affordably from Sam’s Club and were able to upload our own design. We found a template we liked on GreetingsIsland.com)
• We have a (most likely) final invitation list.
• Our 2 heavy boxes of blank wedding invitations came in the mail – they are beautiful and classy!
• Unexpectedly, we were able to buy both our wedding invitations and a bulk pack of 60 ivory floating tea candles for our reception, all thanks to a gift card from The Dash’s workplace. Free money, and a sweet blessing! 😉
• We bought over 300 stamps, just before the price went up yesterday.
• We’ve discussed more wedding-day details with our wonderful photographer.
• I was able to do some more in-depth research (pricing and ideas) in regards to reception decorations, as they relate to my current attraction to a simple, elegant, mildly rustic summer theme . . . and, naturally, there’s now a spreadsheet for that.
• We’ve tweaked our wedding website, added more pages/wording, tested out the online RSVP system, and then decided we’ll save sharing it until we’ve sent our wedding invitations two months prior to our wedding.
• Friday night, we pulled my mom’s wedding dress out of it’s 26-year-old seal and I tried it on . . . oh, it was surreal! I’m slightly smaller than she was but it fits nearly perfectly! The shoulders need to be taken in a fraction, but the bodice fits to a T otherwise. It’s several inches too long at the moment, too (especially since I’ll be wanting to wear ballet flats) . . . but it’s so beautiful! For years, I’ve wanted to wear my mom’s dress for my wedding day, but at the same time it was difficult to picture exactly what it would look like on me, as opposed to my then-20-year-old mother. Despite the style alterations I would want (mainly just the puffed sleeves being removed! I’m not Anne Shirley! 😉 ), I loved it twice as much as I thought I would. Thanks to my grandmother, it was preserved beautifully and I know I’m richly blessed to have my mother’s wedding dress in a condition, size, and overall style in which I can wear it as a 22-year-old bride! I’m so excited! And now to find a seamstress . . . I hate to torture The Dash (and he is tortured), as this is the only part of our wedding planning that we can’t take full part in together because of the “traditional mystery of the wedding dress” that I insist on . . . but I view this as a small bookend to him surprising me with his proposal 😉
• We’ve talked over our budget two or three times and continued to refine it with must-haves and can-do-withouts.
• We met with our mentor couple for the first time since our engagement and had wonderful conversations!
• We researched car rental costs for our honeymoon.
• We booked our honeymoon! That was when it started feeling real, I assure you! It was so special!
• We’ve decided that we most likely just need a day-of wedding coordinator/DOC and are going to do some research accordingly.
• Being that we’re assembling our playlists and reception timeline ourselves, we are going to start looking for a DJ-role-player who can just keep things running smoothly and make a few timed announcements based off our itinerary.
• We have an up-and-running checking account for wedding expenses that we both have the credentials to.
• We are starting to peek around at wedding ring options and styles.
• Our first Pre-Cana session with Father is this afternoon!

That’s a lot for one week! 😀

My current engagement goals (that have nothing to do with wedding planning)

Engagement is such an amazing time of life, in that you’re in a threefold preparation all at once:

• Planning for the wedding day and all that it entails
• Planning and preparing for your marriage on a practical level
• Preparing for the Sacrament you’re entering into

Obviously, the scale of importance runs from least to greatest here 🙂

Wedding planning has the most “attention-arresting” potential in that you have a whole lotta logistics that must all line up onto one day. You rarely take on something of this level anywhere else in your lifetime. It’s an important day – it has the potential to be one of the loveliest and happiest days of your life – but it’s the “least” on the scale of importance.

Preparing for the Sacrament that you’re going to enter into with your beloved until death is the highest form of preparation during engagement, and I’ll write more about it as The Dash and I walk deeper into it.

However, lately my mind has been filled with little practical things – goals – that have nothing to do with wedding planning but a lot to do with getting ready for marriage on a practical level. Given that, God-willing, I only have six months left of unmarried life, that short amount of time (while so exciting because I don’t want to be engaged a day longer than I have to be! 😉 ) does take my breath away, because I feel I have so much to personally prepare for and instill in myself!

Most of these goals are habits. How can I incorporate, alter, or remove certain habits before I get married to The Dash?

Here’s a list of what’s been on my mind to start working at . . .

• Charting (Creighton Model). It’s something I was introduced to when I was 19 and first dealing with endometriosis symptoms (which still persist today). I did it for a few years, had a great experience with it, but then (not being in a relationship at the time) took a break with the thought that, most likely, I would pick it up with my practitioner again and get a good view of my health once I was engaged. And now, here I am, engaged and on a timeline to get started on this! I know I can’t control everything, but for a long time, my symptoms have indicated low progesterone (often linked to endo), which can possibly put me at a higher risk for miscarriage, so that’s certainly something I want to have as much knowledge about as I can, so that I can do anything reasonably available to me to improve my health for the sake of my future family, if that is part of God’s plan for me.
• Switch to anti-inflammatory foods (significantly cut out refined carbs, sugar, and dairy). I haven’t exactly been patient with this process, and have given up when I’ve tried to eat better but then still had the same symptoms . . . but I know it will improve my health overall, and that I might even see some symptom relief if I’m just patient and persistent. My amazing Dash is going to do this eating change with me for support and hopefully some mutual benefit, and we are planning to start on February 1st. Even if I didn’t have some underlying health issues, we would want to be eating healthier by the time we got married anyway, just so we would have established good habits (and consequently been able to better handle the stress of wedding planning . . . 😉 ) We’ll see how it goes!
• Work out more. Now, by this point I know I’m sounding like every bride who wants to just lose weight before her wedding 😀 I’m blessed to be at a normal weight right now and would be honestly happy if I had the same weight on my wedding morning. My goal to work out more is simply for the incorporation of the habit – I want to do it to improve my hormonal health (especially my sometimes oppressive PMS . . .). Also, The Dash and I really want to be reasonably active together in our marriage, so if we get used to the rhythm while we’re still engaged of working out several times a week, we’re anticipating it that we’ll more easily be able to fall into doing it together once we’re married.
• Wake up earlier. This is a lot easier when I don’t have PMS, but I do want to have an earlier wake-up time overall . . . ideally 6am, but I’ll have to take it in strides since right now, I’m not waking up before 7 or 7:30. At least during our early married life/before kids, I really want to get up with The Dash, get him some coffee, and be up when he’s leaving for work. I know that would be enough incentive for my desperately loyal self to get up early, even if I came in with no habit at all . . . but I want to have the habit! Right now, I’m looking at writing up a reasonable plan for my morning and making sure it won’t clash with my sisters, since we’re all sleeping in the same room 🙂
• Continue mental prayer. The prayer group I’m in has been reading and discussing Conversation with Christ and the necessity of mental prayer. I’ve been persevering but have a long way to go. I foresee a great opportunity as a stay-at-home wife, early on, of having a lot of solid quiet time to choose from for the purposes of mental prayer. But until then, I’m determined to keep doing it every day – for my own spiritual life more than the direct purposes of preparing for marriage, but my mind is still lumping it in to “things I must do!”
• Collect all my recipes. I can cook a decent variety of meals right now, but being the visual person that I am, I’m going to need all my go-to meals in one place for meal list inspiration once we’re married. Lena is miles ahead of me on this . . . but then again, there’s only one Lena in the world and we can’t all be quite as amazing as she is 😉
• Learn how to budget shop. These lessons will come from my mom – how to plan groceries and shop on a budget for two! This is my area of least knowledge when it comes to housekeeping; everything else, I’m fairly confident in.
• Build up my savings a little more. I’ve got a significant project in the works that might work towards this, on top of tutoring for the rest of the semester and anything else that might come my way in the meantime. But now my savings are becoming my dowry and will one day be brought into The Dash and I’s future joint bank account (most likely for the purposes of a second car I can use), so I do have the incentive to do my part and bring in whatever I reasonably can!
• Go through my possessions. I honestly don’t feel like I have a lot, but . . . I know I’m going to blink and then be suddenly confronted with boxing it all up and moving it, and that it will seem like a lot then. I do need to start considering what I must/I can/I should take with me into The Dash and I’s future apartment . . . I’ll definitely be doing that in the months to come, but an early start of cleansing/organizing my stuff can’t hurt . . .

I’m sure there’s more to be discovered, but that’s all I can think of right now 🙂

The state of things: 37 days in

So, what’s the state of things, 37 days in to our engagement?

• We are 90% of the way there to confirming an actual wedding date. This took longer than it might take others since we were engaged right before Christmas, chose to enjoy the holidays before we started doing any intense planning, and are now in the process of coordinating with our understandably very busy parish priest.
• We’re one week away from having our first marriage prep meeting with him.
• After doing a bit of searching and a lot of assessment, we have a likely reception venue (off the beaten path of commercialized wedding venues, thankfully!) and are waiting on our wedding date to be confirmed so, God-willing, we can make a reservation on their calendar, if they are still available.
• Although we’re waiting to ask everyone until we have our wedding date, we’ve decided on our wedding party.
• We have a wedding website in the wings (from Minted.com, which I was able to snag for free while they ran a sale!), which we’ll personalize and make available to all our invited guests once we have a date.
• An amazing photographer friend and I are starting to discuss photography for the wedding.
• We have a large Spotify playlist (waiting to be sorted/organized/purged/added to) for our wedding reception.
• I found a sweet, picturesque location for our engagement pictures whenever the weather is nice!
• We’ve drafted a comprehensive guest list (pending a few details), using an Excel template. Want to guess if our guest list was larger or smaller than we initially expected? (*cough*) We are tremendously blessed to be surrounded by a community of big families and many supportive friends!
• We’ve had approximately ten serious planning/budgeting talks, the last of which (on Saturday) was by far the most successful and enjoyable, now that we’re (by which I mean I’m) finally figuring out how to communicate about it!
• We’re starting to nail down our unified vision for our wedding day on a lot of different fronts, which is a huge blessing!
• We’ve written out a basic reception timeline/flowchart.
• We’ve been designing our wedding invitations and programs.
• We’ve calculated our maximum spending budget for wedding, reception, and honeymoon.
• We’ve worked out a roughly clear idea of our newlywed monthly budget/savings plan.
• We’ve done budgeting research and have estimated spending on:
  • Venue rental
  • Wedding ceremony costs (priest, servers, schola, attire, flowers, etc.)
  • Alcohol costs
  • Cake costs
  • Favors costs
  • DIY invitations costs (yes, we’re designing and making them ourselves!)
  • Program printing costs (also DIY!)
  • Some details of our honeymoon, mainly where we’re staying
• We decided on our “day of the week that we don’t talk about wedding planning”

Our planning mostly tools consist of:

• The Dash’s very nice work laptop
• Excel spreadsheets and various templates
• Microsoft Word for invites/programs
• Mint.com budgeting tools
• A hardbound spiral notebook I got for Christmas: white cover, with a glittery gold “Hello” on the front
• A pink wedding binder The Dash’s mother gave me for Christmas, which will become quite useful once I have paperwork to keep organized
• Pinterest
• Tea/coffee
• Hand holding

Of course, we’re at the tip of the iceberg . . . there’s so much left to figure out and to plunge more deeply into . . . but, for 37 days, I think that’s enough work to be proud of!

Plans in our immediate future are:

• Set the date!
• Reserve the venue
• Meet with Father
• Take engagement pictures and order photo prints
• Create our first joint email account for wedding/post-wedding purposes 😉
• Print our invitations; address and mail them (at this point, we’re bypassing Save the Dates because of extra postage cost, and are instead sending our invitations slightly earlier than we otherwise would, with a picture included)
• Have our wedding website up and running
• Pull out my mom’s wedding dress and start investigating how we can alter it!