What was way easier than you thought? What was harder?

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Oh it's totally wild how many people suddenly think they have a say! I have one friend who said she has family that still don't speak to her because they wanted a child free wedding and these family members thought that didn't apply to them - and they were some rando distant cousin. Like, no. Respect what the host and hostess have chosen!

View Quoted Comment Oh wow that’s crazy! It’s sooooo common here in the US to do a registry! Money’s great too!

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I feel the same way! Our vendors haven't really reached out to us much, especially our DOC, who we're supposed to have a meeting with to discuss logistics, design, etc. I do believe it's just my FH and I being too efficient and having a 'go get em' attitude towards planning because we reached out to our DOC in January and she replied: "We can meet if you want, but we're in no rush seeing that you're wedding is a year away". lol!! It's def. been a learning experience because I'm just ready for everything to be set up and done with, but my vendors obviously know what they're doing and know we have plenty of time left.

Thank you!!

Guest list. The guest list. Oh in case I did not mention it, the guest list. We were held to fifty people and I have a thousand relatives and friends, my hubs had like, ten on his list and he WOULD NOT budge on the equality issue, lol. Finally I was like, dude you gotta give a little, and of course he did. Then....I had a cousin badgering my to bring her adult son and DIL - like asking many times. "Can he come to the ceremony and not the lunch? Can he come to the lunch and pay for his meal?" Then she tried to guilt me with "He misses his grandma." His gramma was my aunt and why the heck does that matter, lol? We were 52 when we wed, LOTS of people had passed away!

Finding a venue was way easier than I thought it would be. Escort cards, favors, and centerpieces proved to be a little bit more difficult. The registry and seating has been a little rough too but honestly, I'm not sure what I expected or didn't expect so I haven't been too surprised about things. You are right though - there are so many moving parts! I think that has been my biggest shocker.

View Quoted Comment I’m fortunate that I have a very close family that I don’t have to separate. The problem was trying to keep as many households together as I can because of Covid. But every family is about 12-16 people so I have to separate some.

Right now (because we're not at the RSVP/table chart part yet), booking the freaking shuttle to take people from the hotel to our venue and vice versa has been a nightmare. First, their information was wrong on their website (sorry to the random dude I called, emailed, and texted multiple times before he finally reponded that he no longer worked there...), and when I did finally get in touch with the correct person, it took him over a month to let me know if they even had availability. And then, 3 more months to send me a contract that is missing the cost information (which is pretty dang important to know before signing a contract). When I texted him (because he doesn't answer his email or phone calls) asking what the cost was, his response was sending me a picture of a pricing sheet from our venue--but the information for timing doesn't match what we agreed on/what is on the contract. The worst part? He is our venue Coordinator's brother. *facepalm*

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What is an escort card?!?

View Quoted Comment It is the little cards where you list the person's name and what table they should sit at.

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Oh wow. I hope you stood firm and invited who you wanted! We've been very lucky and no one has really pushed extra guests on us.

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Agreed. Even if you plan big events (and most people don't) the sheer volume of vendors that have to jigsaw together is a little crazy. I'm actually glad that we had a fair idea of what to expect, because I'd be freaking out if now, with less than 3 months to go, all our vendors were like 'sooo. give us every single detail' - all at the same time! It's not so bad if you take it slow, think it through, plan a bit, think some more, etc. You have to be able to get some distance from it to consider all the angles, for sure!

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Eek that is a struggle. Long tables have been our friends, honestly. I can't even begin to imagine trying to do groups of 10, especially when you factor in what you just mentioned!

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Oh lord. Do you have to use him? I'd have bailed before even signing a contract if he was as useless as that!

View Quoted Comment I wish I had said no from the first time he failed to call me back for a month. But I felt like I had to use him since he's related to our coordinator, and they have a special price with our venue (curse of being a people-pleaser). And it really was every time I hit that wall of "ugh I'm done", it was like he had a 6th sense and would reach out right then. At least I can rest assured that they'll have to get their crap together for our wedding or his sister will kill him. 😆

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Yes we did. I did, actually, lol!

From our wedding:

Easier: getting RSVPs. Everyone responded by the deadline with no issues whatsoever.
Harder: the cake. Not only was my husband a GROOMZILLA over the cake, the bakers were just insufferable. Every time I go to type this on another topic I feel like it's off-topic, but not here, so here we go.
I absolutely hate raspberry filling. I hate everything raspberry that isn't actual raspberry fruit. That includes buttercream, jam, preserves, you name it. I loathe it. Well, what is the most popular wedding cake filling ever? Raspberry.
I also absolutely hate lemon in sweet confections. Lemon bars, lemon cake, lemon anything. I HATE it. I don't care how well it's made. I. Hate. It.
So when I was calling setting up cake tastings with bakers, they all asked, is there any flavor you aren't interested in or can't have due to allergies? I told them explicitly, no raspberry, and no lemon.
I had three bakers I set up tastings with. I am not kidding when I tell you, every single one included a raspberry filling sample in their tasting. And one literally presented lemon cake with raspberry filling! And when I said, "why are you even presenting this when I specifically said I don't like these flavors?" she replied "well, it's my most popular flavor."
I told you EXPLICITLY that I would not even TRY a lemon or raspberry flavored anything. I don't care if everyone else on my guest list would love it - I hate it, and you not listening to my very direct taste statement tells me exactly how valued I am as a prospective customer.
I actually walked out of the lemon-raspberry one. I straight up left. And I'm still not sorry about it.

Planning overall has been easy…. even planning a wedding in another state was smoother than expected but I also know what I want and it’s easy for me to make decisions that are in line with my “vision”.


The only “hard“ part was contacting our vendors to cancel their services when we decided to have the wedding locally. We had those vendors booked since summer 2019 (2years). But last month we changed everything. So saying goodbye to them kind of sucked because I liked all of our vendors. I especially loved our officiant and DJ. So I inquired whether they could travel from Las Vegas to San Diego. But our DJ isn’t traveling for events right now since the industry Took a big hit during Covid, so he can’t give up any days where he could be working.. Our officiant is only licensed in Nevada. But she also said that October is busy wedding season in Vegas, so she also couldn’t take the extra time to come to San Diego and miss out on working.
However, we found wonderful replacement vendors and I’m so excited!

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Oh my, haha! I think it really is a sign though, when the vendor doesn't listen on the first 'date' as it were, so good on you! We struggled with cake too. I really, really wanted a hummingbird cake, since my fiance loves pineapple, and I love carrot cake so it seemed like a good blend of us both, but we could not get that anywhere. One place made one for us, but it wasn't even close to her best cake, so we picked what was - which ended up being a banana cake!

And maybe I've read too many issues of wedding vogue where people have like, bougie cakes like elderflower with tangerine cream or whatever... but banana cake sounds like something you quickly pick up from the grocery store to have for afternoon tea when you have the neighbor kids over for a play date. It doesn't sound sophisticated, you know?

But it was so good! So we got it anyway, haha!

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That must have been SO disappointing I'm so glad you found new vendors that you love though!

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I, personally, love banana everything. My favorite cupcake from Sprinkles (they're a big cupcake company, famous for their "cupcake ATMs") is banana cake with dark chocolate buttercream. I would absolutely have a whole banana cake just like it. So I would have been stealing people's slices when they weren't looking at your wedding!

I get what you mean on the bougie wedding cake flavors. While I think it's fun, and I'm all for people getting what they want, I'm firmly in the camp of "get stuff your guests are actually going to want to eat." I know maybe two or three people who would actually like an Earl Grey tea cake with lavender filling. Everyone else... yellow cake with chocolate filling, red velvet with cream cheese, etc. (And banana! Banana is great, who doesn't like banana bread, for example?) I think if you want a fancy bougie flavor, you should make it just one tier, and then make the other tiers more "standard" flavors for everyone else. Tahini cake with white chocolate champagne ganache might sound sophisticated and fancy, but most guests won't enjoy it or won't even try it, so you're spending a bunch of money for nothing.