Wedding planning, "Yellow Alert!"

With less than a month and a half until the wedding, yellow alert has been called. The rise in stress has stepped up a notch, especially last week. The joys of planning, arranging and holding a wedding with many of the more traditional elements, would seem to hold the potential to provide a taste of married life, before it’s even upon us.

The 'yellow alert' we've called, is seemingly due to a culmination of a few factors. The first admittedly, is that of me as of the end of last week not getting involved enough - my bad.

The other more substantial issues causing us headaches in our wedding organisation are as follows:

- Lots and lots of little things that snuck under the radar which all raise their little heads from the ground like attention seeking zombie leprechauns. Just little to-do's all asking for attention and needing a resolution.

- Work and other commitments eating time. It’s hard to relax when your wedding is on the horizon. Sadly and probably short sighted of us; the main victim of this, apart from our sanity, has been our gym time. This fell by the wayside some time ago.

- Other people. Please don't get me wrong, we really want everyone who's invited to show up to our big day (especially given all the planning involved with the day itself) but our original plan didn't include the complex web of wedding planning that we're still working on today. We didn't plan to be antisocial, but our initial ‘Plan A’ was to travel somewhere else, ideally Scandinavia. To head there with just our immediate families and in a beautiful setting, to have an intimate ceremony. The up side would have been that along with our families, we would have had a trip to remember. We wanted to then just hold a wee gathering back home for everyone else to not be left without a party.

Sadly, because of the cost of the travel, those plans didn't fit into our budget, even when cutting corners and after saving for the best part of 2 years. Now we're dedicated to Plan B. Plan B happened to provide us with some great venues here in N.I - a castle and a hotel no less. The problem with being here is that so many other people will also be there because its close, and as we've come to find, now more than ever, even some people you know well can be very unpredictable. It seems almost surreal the unnecessary problems we've had thrown our way.

It's not that we don't like helping, if anything we've a habit of never being able to say no when asked to help. However, if its not people wanting us to resolve their travel arrangements its being asked to confirm details that they have already been given the means to the information for and just not looking. As well as that its people asking for plus ones. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just asking - in fact we've not turned anyone down and now have people coming to the reception who we will be meeting for the first time. Come to mention it, we must ask for full names for the seating plan. The annoyance has come in the way we've been confronted with the requests. Whether intended or not, the enquiries we've had, have basically insinuate that they won't be coming unless they can bring a plus 1.
This would be understandable if it wasn't for the fact that the people know a lot of other people who will be there anyway. After all, we planned and planned and planned the guest list, it might not be perfect but everyone will be near someone that we know they know and actually like - or at least we hope they still do, eeek.

We've tried our best to cover every base and the majority of people have been great and many RSVP's have come back with Yes I will attend proudly ticked so it’s not as bad as I might have made the situation out to be. Its just a little disheartening when your best efforts are thrown back at you by people who you would have thought would appreciate those best efforts, even if they obviously fell short of their expectations.

Ah well, I'm sure there will be plenty more ups and downs yet as the time draws closer.

A big list in a calendar format was a creation on Sunday. A countdown, as well as a reminder of all we still need to do. A list I'm already behind with, oops.

Despite the stresses and what seem to me to be overly complicated arrangements. I still can’t wait to be married to the girl I fell for 7 years ago. I might be dreading the speech and we're both unnerved about the fact that so many eyes will be staring at us all day, but I'm defiantly looking forward to saying "I do". I just can't fathom why its so damn hard to set the scene to do so, and to throw a party afterwards. We were never going to be able to afford a wedding planner to take the stress away, so there was always going to be some organising to do. Its just maybe proving to be more complicated than it might have been.

I just hope that we can ride out the storm long enough to prevent us swimming away and eloping. All being well it won't come to that but I'll keep an eye out on national express coach prices to Gretna Green just in case.