Justin and Amber

If you were me, how would you have decided who is in the wedding “party” and who isn’t? Amber and I both have it setup such that 66% of our wedding party is family of some sort, the other 33% is friends (at least in the stand up group). There’s potential that we might make it 50% by growing our wedding party to 4 each.  I’m not sure though if I want 4… I had a hard enough time picking past 1 (picking the best man was the easiest thing I ever had to do).

I heard a story today of a couple getting married at our church that will be having 13 brides maids and 6 grooms men. Made me think that they believed in “2 girls for every guy”. But still, very strange in my mind. They are also having their reception at their home and are flying in plexiglass to cover the backyard pool as a dance floor. (They have money). I guess to top it all off, they are planning this wedding in under 7 weeks… Wow.

If there is something you think we just “Must Have” at the wedding (besides brad being the flower girl), let us know in the comments!

It is a great thing that our wedding is just a bit under a year away! Justin and I are so busy right now. He is getting MSA ready for school to start and working for his other clients.

I have just started my fourth year of college, but I will have an extra year before I finish.  I am majoring in Lutheran Classroom teacher-social studies.  I hope to be teaching in an LCMS high school in two years, God willing.

So since we are so busy, we are not making much progress on anything wedding related!

I do have my dress ordered, which will arrive in October.  I am so excited about that!  When I went to Germany this past May, I was on the airplane looking over a wedding magazine and I found my dream dress.  I just cannot wait to actually try it on!

My bridesmaids and I have also picked out their dresses.  It is early, but we all won’t be in the same state until maybe a day in January, and then in June.  We have not ordered them, but we picked out the colors.  Which makes our official wedding colors are cranberry and ivory.

We will try to keep you all updated on our planning and news.  Please comment on our posts and keep checking back!

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.