Love and Lobster Coastal New England Weddings

We continue following the wedding plans of Maine transplant Jen Pepper.

With the excitement of planning our wedding dancing around in our heads, Matt and I realized that the first step was to find out, what exactly is the first step? We’ve been to our fair share of rehearsal dinners, ceremonies and receptions, but how do we even begin to tackle turning our wedding day into a reality?

Whenever I’m unsure about something I either find myself calling my dad, or Googling it. In this particular case I decided to turn to the Google search bar. Immediately, I felt overwhelmed! So many suggestions, lists and ideas, I felt like there was already a weight on my shoulder and I hadn’t even left the couch. Every decision seemed to depend on some other decision we hadn’t thought about yet.  We can’t choose a venue without knowing how many people we are inviting. We can’t choose a date without knowing if our dream venue is booked already. We can’t choose… well, you get the picture. It felt as though we were building a house of cards, but we just didn’t know which card to stack first.

We decided to just start with the obvious decision and work backwards. Let’s pick the date! We knew that we wanted our family with us when we finally say “I Do,” and since they will be traveling from out of state, what works well for them? With my parents and Matt’s brother being teachers, and my sisters in college we decided that the summer really is the best time of year to get married. We had suddenly managed to narrow it down to three months out of the year. We were finally getting somewhere! I have never been a fan of August- too hot for my liking- and July to me just sounds like a really busy summer month. Well that was easy, June it is.

We quickly took out the calendar to look at June 2012, the month we would tie the knot. But which weekend to pick? I remembered the Weather Channel had a site where you can check historical data for your wedding date and location. We plugged in every Saturday in June and after careful calculation, we flipped a coin, we decided on June 16. We did it, we made our first wedding planning decision! It felt good to have a date. A date that was all ours. Something that felt just right, and could now be the answer to, “So when is the big day?”

Now that we had something to start with everything else seems a little more conquerable. We can move on to picking our guest list, our venue and maybe even our color palette. If you are just starting to plan your wedding and are feeling overwhelmed, my advice is make one decision. Just one and everything else will start to take shape.