Photo Credit: Button Bouquet by kottonkandy52 on Etsy
There’s something really tangible about planning a wedding– the fabrics, the colors, the details, the food. But when you’re planning your wedding with 6,000 miles between you and your wedding location, things can get digital quick. Now obviously I love me some internets but picking out a table cloth color or ‘getting a feel’ for the centerpieces just ain’t the same. Luckily, I’m not planning this wedding on my own, 6,000 miles away from both my partner or my family. Alex and I are together in London picking out stuff bridesmaid favors and our save the dates and sending them to my maid of honor and my mom back home while their sorting out things like the wedding shower and bachelorette parties. And they’ve been brilliant in getting things in order–venue, caterer, white knots, jam, hotel rooms–but still, sometimes, I get the blues.
I want to TOUCH the button bouquet that arrived at my parents’ house last week and PRANCE around in the living room with it. I want to SEE the jars of strawberry jam my grandma has made and FEEL the fabric she has picked out for the lids. I want to meet with the caterer in person and walk Alex around the ceremony site in my hometown. And I definitely don’t want to figure out how to print, label and post wedding invitations in two countries OR not try on my wedding dress until a week before the wedding. But, that’s the way it is.
So, what’s helped with the long distance wedding planning blues so far? Here are a few things I can credit for my current levels of happy wedding sanity:
- Wedding Blogs: I think it’s a combination of seeing that people get married ALL the time and that every wedding is different that continues to buoy me. There are so many ways to get hitched, so many options to seal that union and decorate that table that I am able to fight off the “How are we going to make this one different from the last?!?!?” and find a multiplicity of ideas that I can easily share digitally with our loved ones in California.
- Skype: Sometimes, I just need to SEE my folks, my friends, the stuff I’ve bought on Etsy and had shipped to somebody’s house in California. And sometimes I just want to hear that voice, be able to double over in laughter, and make silly faces. All totally necessary in any wedding planning process.
- Deciding what can be done where you are: One of the most satisfying things I’ve done so far for our California wedding is buy two Crown Imperial Qt jars while on vacation in Canada. Like our bowl of postcards for our guestbook in England, we want a jar of red button as our guest book for California. Yes, I really did buy two glass jars in Canada, fly them back in my luggage to the UK, to bring them with us to California in October, to bring BACK with us to the UK. But see, I can touch them, Alex knows what they look like, they can hang out in our bedroom to be reminders that we’re doing it all over again as we count down the months (weeks, days…). AND we’re buying some of the other pieces of our wedding schtuff here: like Alex’s shirts, my cowboy boots, fabric for decorations…
- Music: When I get down about ‘not being there’ to plan the wedding, I often put on one of two songs: ‘Love Serenade’ by The Waifs or ‘Something ‘Bout a Woman’ by Lady Antebellum and I can get lost with Alex in our first dance song or remember the look of the mountains in the country where I come from…
- Communication: Communicating with Alex, my family, my friends, my co-workers, etc, about how I am. I work for an educational charity that funds personal development programmes and the tools I’ve learned from the courses and working in the office have been invaluable in keeping a level head, whether it’s with regards to long distance wedding planning or not! Sometimes, all you need ‘to do’ to make it ‘better’ is to express how you feel and get that it is how it is! Because at the end of the day, I still wouldn’t want to have my life any other way.
So, that’s how I’ve been handling my long distance wedding planning blues. And with 2 months still to go, I’m open to suggestions!
What an original bouquet. Never seen a button based one before so im intrigued. I hope you have a great wedding, just relax and it will all be fantastic on the day.
I’m in LOVE with you’re bouquet!