Justin and Amber

One of the first things I experienced almost immediately after the announcement of our engagement was the feeling of being completely overwhelmed. Amber was asking me questions left and right, things like “whats the date going to be”, “who are we going to invite”, “what kind of food do you want”, and “who do you want in the wedding party.” Some of these are of course rather big decisions, but there were tons of little ones to that just kept coming.

What made it all worse was that there was no “completed” thought process. One moment we would say something like “let’s have this at the wedding”, and the next day it was “I think I like this better”. That’s ok, but the more we did it, the more I lost track of which idea was winning, which ones were set in stone, and what was tabled to be decided later.

Luckly, Amber found something that I felt was an amazing help in the process. It was a workbook titled: Tying the Knot: The Complete Wedding Organizer. This 3-ring-binder included like 100 worksheets to basically “fill in the blank”. Everything from calculating budget costs, to putting together an invite list. It had like a fill in the blank for every key decision (and then some) that needed to be filled in.

Now, this by itself wasn’t the total solution by itself. Although it provided us a path and place to organize our decisions, finding the time to make some of the bigger ones together was rather difficult. In fact, I still find us filling in more and more blanks every day… BUT, I did discover something that got us off to a great start in getting everything planned…

I call it – “The Road Trip”

That’s right… The best thing I found in planning a wedding was an 8 hour drive to Nebraska, where Amber could sit back and write answers to things while I drove. There was nothing to distract us in the decision making, and it made the trip go about twice as fast (perceptually, not actual time travel). One thing I learned here though… Make use of an alarm or nav system if you have to drive on a road for a long time and then make an exit. I found I was having so much fun planning the wedding that I completely managed to miss not 1 but 2 major highway exits…

So the gist of everything I saying is this: find something to write down what your thinking… Rumor is the knot has it all online, but for me, there’s nothing better than paper and pencil worksheets.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Author Justin, Helpful Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.