Hey everyone,
I’m writing a series of posts for a more behind the scenes look at our DIY wedding, mostly to document what we did, but also to maybe inspire others!
This week it’s all about roughing out our theme
and the first details for the wedding. 
Once everything was official,
we got on the phone with my future Mother In Law.
She loves planning,
and she helped us figure out a spot for the wedding.
It was tough because most of the places were taken.
Note to people who are not married but someday may be: It takes a lot of time to plan a wedding.
Four months is usually not enough.
In the end, we ended up renting a pavilion,
which was the perfect size for everything we needed.
But, as of now, we just knew the price was perfect and we had a place.
That seemed like the first major thing we had to do.
Next we needed food.
We knew we wanted to have GREAT food,
mostly because I think that’s the best part of any wedding.
so it HAD TO BE Dinosaur BBQ.
Again Danny’s Mom worked on that.
Note to the not yet married people: planning a wedding is even harder when you live on the other coast from where the wedding will be.
We weren’t able to get servers, but we were able to get the option where the food is dropped off by Dino BBQ.
We figured that would be good enough.
The last major thing involving other people was concerning the dress and the bridal party.
I always knew that I wanted Danny’s mom to sew my dress.
She’s a seamstress and even does craft show stuff
during the fall and winter.
I had joked with her about making my dress
before we were engaged,
and she brought up the fact that she HAD made her daughter Jessica’s prom dress.
I knew I wanted something really simple,
and thought this plan could work.
So I asked her officially.
Of course she said yes, but we decided that we wouldn’t get going on it until I was there in the summer.
I would be there about a month before the wedding.
She assured me that would be enough time.
We left it at looking for patterns, which was exclusively my job since I couldn’t really articulate what it was I wanted.
(There will be a post about the dress later, promise!)
We also needed to figure out the bridal party.
This is important because you have to make sure those people will be there!
This is where things really worked out.
I have two brothers and one sister.
Danny has two sisters and one brother.
Collectively we’ve got three boys and three girls.
So it was settled.
My only sister, Debbie, was the Maid of Honor, which worked out, since I was hers.
Danny’s only brother, Scott, was the best man.
And the siblings would be in the wedding party.
They would all be there anyway, and what a great picture we’d have of the siblings up there!
For ringbearers and flower girls, we had options.
First were the obvious choices:
Danny’s nephew Colton, who was 3.5,
And my niece Lilyanna, who had just turned two.
We wanted both of them for sure.
But I also made a promise years ago to two kids,
Kaden and Cailene.
I babysat them since babies, mostly on weekends and some holdays during the school year, and often in the summers. They were like the blond haired blue eyed little brother and sister to me.
They have an older sister who is my sister Debbie’s age, Camry. She was in the picture before Kaden and Cailene’s Dad was, so in the picture of their parents getting married, you see Camry.
I think she may have been the flower girl.
Kaden was always upset as a kid looking at that picture, mostly because he was mad he hadn’t been the ring bearer. He had been a ring bearer in another wedding when he was young, maybe 4 or 5, and thought his parents should have considered him.
“But Kaden,” I would tell him all the time,
“You weren’t born yet.”
“That’s what they keep telling me,” he would say with a straight face. “But I know they’re just saying that to make me fele better.”
He was full of these pronouncements as a young kid.
He once asked me to tell him a story, but not about gravity, because it was really getting him down.
Hs said this with a completely straight face.
Another time he was convinced I was an astronaut because I had been to Tennessee.
He did not believe Tennessee was part of the United States, and when I assured him it was, he asked, “Well it must have just happened then, right?”
So he’s not the type to forget a promise to be a ring bearer.
The one snafu: Kaden had just graduated high school. He’s 18 and tall as all get out (over 6 feet.)
And Cailene is 16.
But hey, it’s my wedding and I can do what I want.
Well, it’s the wedding for Danny and I,
and we can do what we want.
He thought it would be a great idea.
So, tentatively, we had two ring bearers and two flower girls.
One of them would be unable to come when the day finally came around, but I’m not revealing who yet!
Lastly, we knew we needed some sort of theme.
I would have loved it to be books;
you know how much I love books!
But I thought long and hard about it and decided maybe it should be games.
Danny LOVES games.
Seriously. Games to Danny are like books for me.
And we had a lot more to work with there, at least things that people would know about.
Sure there are tons of books,
but there are also tons of games.
So we started with that idea.
Now that we had the date down, we had to tell everyone.
We originally did that just by texting and calling;
Danny’s family is really close, literally and figuratively.
They all knew rather quickly.
My family was the challenge.
We got the word out though, and then decided we would need to get going on the next step:
The invitations.
Those would come in two months!
(Yes, two months, it took a lot of time to plan them out!)
And in between we would figure out a lot of stuff that we wanted to make for the wedding.
Next week I’ll share the invitations, and
then the favors after that!
Thanks for reading along!
KE
