Beginning to plan the wedding

L. and I are starting the wedding planning. It's a lot of work, but L. is such a great help. It's nice to have him want to be involved.

Since this is my second wedding, there are a lot of things that I know from experience and want to do differently. There are also things that you don't traditionally do the second time around. For instance, you don't have to wear the white dress. The problem is that I kind of do want to wear a white dress. I don't want it to be all traditional the way my first wedding dress was; I definitely want something different, but you never know how people are going to think of that. I mean, I'm clearly not the young virginal bride or anything. My mom suggested a black dress that we saw online and that was really stunning. I love that dress, but I'm not sure whether I'd be on board with walking down the aisle in black. But, who knows?

The other thing is how many people you invite and how detailed you get with everything. Originally, I thought it would just be really small with the people who are closest to us. But, now I kinda want to just do the whole big gala because it's fun and you only do it once. It's a memory that L. and I will have forever. And people can always chose not to come if they don't want to attend.

I'm also not sure about bridesmaids. I had seven bridesmaids for my first wedding, and it was really great. But, you always have to leave people out, and whatnot. I hate that feeling of having to chose, because you never want to hurt anyone's feelings and if it were truly up to me, I'd probably have like ten of my female friends and family up there with me. But that's far too many, and I just don't have the heart to move people off of that list. And to be honest, I wonder if my sisters would be ticked off if I didn't ask them but had friends instead. I dunno. It seems like it might just be easier to forgo the whole bridesmaid thing altogether, but I'm still not sure. Ideally I could figure out three people that I'd want to be there with me, so I'll just have to think about it some more.

Right now, we're going through a whole huge list of locations and doing online research about them. We already decided not to do an outside wedding, because we'd just be worried about weather all the time. We're narrowing things down to a manageable list of indoor locations that we can easily visit. Then we'll narrow it down even further, and compile a list of information from each of our visits. In the end we'll chose the place, and then figure out what kinds of dates are available. As things are now, we're looking for a September or October date for next year. We both love the fall around here and think that would be really great. It will also be easy to wait until after this fall, and then hit all of the sales to get decorations for things like the tables, etc. So, it's a good time to be thinking about all of this.

For colors, I'm thinking that I'll do a deep plum or amethyst color, with accents in fall colors such as oranges, greens, reds, and yellows. The accents will be found in things like little pumpkins and gourds for centerpieces, etc.

That's all I can think of for now. I'm sure that there will be plenty more updates coming in the future, so stay tuned!