Blog Swap: Featuring Tabitha and Her Wedding Woes

Hi there, Bag Stranded fans! My name is Tabitha, and I’m here visiting Cameron’s little corner of the blogosphere for the 20-Something Bloggers 5th Blog Swap event. If you’re really hankering to read something of Cameron’s, you can stop by my blog, where he’s writing today, or just skip right over this post and read his other stuff. (I’ll try not to take personal offense.)

Anyway, this is my first time “swapping blogs” with anyone, so I was kind of clueless as to what I should write. It probably doesn’t help that lately my brain has been filled with wedding planning logistics...yep, I’m getting married in two and a half weeks! So, as you can imagine, I’ve been a bit preoccupied the last few months (which is why you should check out some of my older/featured posts if the more recent stuff doesn’t quite thrill you).

But I digress. I signed up for this blog swap, and I want to stick to my commitment. Luckily (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), none of you have had the pleasure of hearing ANYTHING about my wedding yet, right? So I’d like to share with you a few things I’ve been mulling over as a soon-to-be wife.

Logistical Questions about Marriage:
• What comes first in the whole name-changing process? DMV? Social Security card? Bank accounts? It might take me awhile to “officially” become Mrs. Joseph C. In fact, if I wasn’t so ready to lose my current last name (only because it’s one that can easily be made fun of), I might have considered skipping the hassle and calling myself “liberated.”
• Because of our Christian/moral beliefs and backgrounds, Joe and I are not moving in together until we are married. But I’ve already begun moving some of my stuff to his place, like books and other things I don’t have an immediate need for. The question is, should I try to move everything to his place shortly BEFORE the wedding, so that we can return from our honeymoon and be all ready to settle in? (At this point, I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. And I’m pretty sure the first few months of our marriage are going to involve a LOT of organizing, rearranging, redecorating, and rethinking all of the organizing, rearranging and redecorating we just did to make it all work better.)

• How do wives who work full time jobs manage to put dinner on the table every night (without ordering it from Baja Fresh)? I don’t want to be a TV-dinner kind of “cook.” I want to experiment and perfect my own special dishes...but it may mean that we eat at roughly 9:00 every night.

Things about the Wedding:
• I’ve come to realize that, in spite of our best efforts to plan a “small” or “simple” wedding, it’s just not possible with the size of my family and the do-it-ourselves methods we’ve carried out. Yes, we’ve come in WAY under the average American wedding’s total budget. I mean WAY. And we’re super proud of ourselves for that. But having an affordable wedding meant doing pretty much everything ourselves, and/or milking our resources (i.e. talented/creative/specialized friends and family) for all they’re worth. Our cake? Baked by my good friend Kristen (and it will be SO much more delicious than any store-bought cake). Decorations? Designed/executed by my mother-in-law-to-be, which first required going to Michael’s to deplete them of every purple silk flower they possessed in about four different stores. Point is, DIY projects are a bigger undertaking than I ever realized, and when you combine about twenty of them over a span of a short (less than five-month) engagement, on top of us both working full time jobs, it can be a tad exhausting. So, while our budget has remained fairly small, this wedding will be anything but simple. (It will be amazing, is what it will be. Heh.)
• I’ve learned that I am definitely not called to be a wedding planner. Not that I ever considered it as a possible career move for myself, but this whole thing has confirmed it. It’s been a blast, but it has been the most draining, time-consuming, stressful thing I’ve ever done in my life. The only saving grace has been reminding myself WHY I’m doing it. That it’s not just about one day of dress-up and nonstop smiles and photographs. It’s about celebrating the life I’m starting with a wonderful man, and letting our loved ones witness the first moments of it. Of our LIFE together. Of course, since the “life together” part is ultimately what matters, I suppose you could argue that we may as well have invited a bunch of people over for a barbeque and a quick ceremony. But what girl doesn’t want to put on a white dress and just...glow for a day?
• Here’s the thing I’m dealing with this week: seating arrangements at the reception. Maybe we should’ve opted to let it be a big free-for-all, but surprisingly (as I’m not usually a big “organizer”) I really wanted to give it at least some structure. So the question is: do I group all of my family together as best as possible, as well as Joe’s family, and people from the same circles or geographical areas, or do I mix it up a little and put, say, four of my family members plus four non-family members at one table? I guess this event is sort of a substitute for a family reunion, and given that I have about 30 cousins just one ONE side of my family, it’s pretty hard to get people all together otherwise. So maybe I should keep them together to allow for catching-up. I dunno.

I could go on and on about the topic of my wedding, but I already said more than I had anticipated, and to a bunch of strangers this might not be the most interesting topic... So I’ll leave you all with a question I would really love your input on (serious, sarcastic or otherwise):

How long are the bride and groom expected to stay at their own reception before they can leave and get started on that little “deed” they’ve been waiting for-stinkin’-EVER to do? My vote is “long enough to eat cake, but before Uncle Hank* starts reminiscing about his hillbilly wedding in the ‘40s.” Would you say:

A. 2 hours
B. 3 hours
C. Until the last person leaves
D. Some other “appropriate” length of time

Thanks for letting me share your space today, Cameron! And thanks, readers, for humoring my one-track mind. If you happen to like my blog, I promise that after my honeymoon, the wedding-planning posts will end (and likely be replaced with a series called Cooking Fails...I’m just trying to be honest, here).

*Note: I do not have an Uncle Hank, nor any relative who has, to my knowledge, ever had a hillbilly wedding in the ‘40s. It was a hypothetical statement.