calm

 

I am happy to report that things seem to be moving along in the wedding department and I feel so much better!

After some sleepless nights and lots (and lots and lots) of tears, I finally took it upon myself to email our wedding location and ask them if we could possibly downsize and come up with a package for the deposit amount we'd already paid.

Now this solution occurred to me right at the beginning but I was afraid we'd only be able to have a ceremony there and as we'd had to cancel the rental house, we had no place for a reception meal and couldn't afford to take everybody out to dinner, especially in the Orlando area. And I really didn't want to have everybody travel for the ceremony and send them home without feeding them; I just think that's rude.

Then we thought about a local buffet restaurant here in town. We love that place and go so frequently that we've made friends with the owner and several servers. They have a private room that would be perfect for a dinner and, luckily, it was open on our date so we booked it. This is a really cheap (and hopefully not too tacky) option that will allow everyone to eat their fill and make their own food choices and we should be able to pay for it without causing any problems to our fragile budget especially since we have 6 months to save.

Then, on that sleepless night, I was playing around on the ceremony place website and found a small food package (served out of the most adorable retro trailer) that could be added to the smallest ceremony package bringing the total right to the amount we'd already paid them so we'd be able to offer a little food and drink to our guests especially the ones that might not want to make the hour drive back to our town and the buffet. I feel like this provides the perfect celebratory ending to the ceremony portion of the day and let's get real, the ceremony really IS the most important aspect of our wedding day; I never want to forget that.

I spent an anxious 7 days waiting for the ceremony site to get back to me to see if this would be possible but just this afternoon they finally wrote back and said we could work something out! Now I'll get the beautiful ceremony site plus a photographer (pictures are very important to me) and then we'll head off for a fun dinner and after that we'll have a Halloween costume party at our house and Chris can invite half the town to that if he wants. I know he'd been going around town inviting everybody and their brother to our wedding even though we could only have a set amount.

Now I know that none of this is really important, we could get married at the courthouse and being married to each other would be the only important part...however, I've already done that and I had allowed myself to dream about finally having a wedding with all my family and friends around supporting us and it was hard to let that dream go so I'm glad I don't have to and that we'll still be able to have a family celebration...along with beautiful pictures.

Throughout all the wedding drama we still had to be parents, making sure the kids weren't affected by the drama. We had a lovely Easter weekend and the kids got to go on a couple of egg hunts and visit with the Easter Bunny.

And now I'm going full bridezilla for the next 6 months, focusing on all the little details that nobody else will probably notice but will bring joy to my heart. We don't need any decor for the ceremony, the site is beautiful all on its own, and we won't need much for the buffet and we've already collected all of it. For the party at the house we will finally be able to use all the Nightmare Before Christmas Halloween decorations that we collected last year, things I wasn't sure we'd even be able to use at the rental house but we'll have plenty of room and set up time at our own house.

Through this whole thing Chris kept saying everything happens for a reason. I'm not so sure about that, sometimes I think the only reason is that you're stupid and made bad choices, but it really does seem like this is going to be even better than our original plan, more intimate and personal.

Now, if we could just figure out a cheap but beachy mini-honeymoon to replace the Hawaiian dream we'd been planning.