Welcome to my blog. I started this when my journey as a Mother of the Bride began. I was lost on where to begin, so after hours of searching for blogs or websites, I decided to start my own. My goal is to provide mothers with a journal through my experience as a mother of the bride in order to provide some insight that will help them through this journey. Come along with me as I explore making this spectacular day all that it can be!!

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

SHE'S ALREADY PLANNING!

If you have a daughter that is a planner, then you know that the second the engagement passes that she is going to start planning.  Well, that's exactly what happened.  I'm not upset/annoyed/angry at all.  In fact, quite the opposite.  I wanted to start planning the second we hung up the phone from hearing, "I'm getting married!!"  I'm not going to lie, I did start planning, but I didn't tell her that.  After all, the Mother of the Bride books say to not overwhelm her.  So, I didn't!!  I simply started pinning goodies on Pinterest and making notes in a notebook and sat back to wait for her to catch up!  LOL  I'm not lying!  It's sad, I know, but that's who I am.  I had to have a serious talk with  myself to remind my inner me that I could absolutely, positively, not overwhelm our daughter with ideas.  My inner self said she understood, but did she really?

Within days, three to be exact, my daughter was texting me from Greece, with a list of things she was thinking.  Our thoughts were literally all over the place.  It was amazing!!!  I made a point to screen shot all of our messages, because maybe one day I'll create a book or something for her and our son-in-law that shows the emotions that were raging through her that day.  Regardless, I plan on keeping those messages, because my future grandchildren might find them interesting to read.

The first thought I had, after I put my phone down, was how do we decide how much money to set aside for a wedding?  How would any average person know that?  Costofwedding.com states that The average wedding cost in the United States for 2017 was $25,764. Couples, on average, spend between $19,323 and $32,205 but, 50% of couples spend less than $15,000.  So, where do we begin?  Here is where I would love to say that my husband and I concocted some elaborate formula to decide this, but we did not.  We talked about an amount that we both thought was reasonable, $20,000 and then decided we would leave another $5,000 for overflow, since we were guessing we had to leave some extra in case.  We also knew that we wanted to throw Ashley and Cam an engagement party.  Since that traditionally rested on the parents of the bride, we set aside another $2,500-$3,000.  The one thing my husband and I were certain of is that we did not want the engagement party funds coming out of the big wedding fund.  Weddings are expensive, so we knew we needed to set a different pot of money for each event.  It's better to have too much money, then not enough.  So, now we have 2 pots and are working on planning the engagement party.

I will end this post by saying that I really had to prioritize events before we moved forward.  My daughter and I were both very excited about so many things, so our conversations moved from venues to dresses to reception and then back to the engagement party and wedding party gifts.  It was a constant circle of conversations and eventually my daughter and I decided that we had to prioritize things so that we could keep it straight.  That's the best decision we've made so far.  Trying to figure out too many things at once is very stressful.

Oh, did I mention they are getting married in Portugal?

Multitasking at its best!!  Talking to the wedding
planner in Lisbon, Portugal while traveling to 
Oklahoma to see her brothers (June, 2018)