Go2Wed.com Blog for Brides Planning a Wedding!

As we mentioned there are very valid reasons for children not being invited to weddings and there are valid reasons parents may not be able to attend without bringing their children - they can’t afford or find babysitters, or at worst, you offend parents who think their children are darlings and should be anywhere they are!

There are many “people stress” sides of inviting children to a wedding.  If you have not made concrete plans yet it is strongly advised to figure out who among the possible guests has children - their ages, whether family of your guests live nearby to babysit, and whether some are out of towners.  Also important is whether your families have small children - this becomes very sticky because the wedding is a mini family reunion and to uninvite children means you could be creating world war three in the family since aunts, uncles, and grandparents may only see their grandchildren or the little ones at weddings. 

For my wedding I was at the beginning of the wedding trend so I only had one friend with a son (but a local mom who babysat for her a lot) and a cousin with two out of town children (I wasn’t going to not invite those children.)  I did ask my cousin if he wanted me to coordinate any babysitting onsite or offsite and he declined but said the kids were used to being in church and would behave well.  There were a few others here and there with kids but definitely not enough that I knew it would be a problem.  They were local folks and I knew they went out without their children.  I also had an evening wedding so they wouldn’t want their very small children there anyway.  (One friend didn’t bring her spouse because he was the babysitter. I hadn’t met him so it wasn’t a huge deal.)

 One of the biggest mistakes I see made and read about in wedding planning books, articles and magazines is the (false / simplistic) notion that if you do not write the names of the children on the invitation, it will signal to parents that the event is child-free.  I have many issues with this advice.  In no particular order the problems here are:

• Waiting until 6-8 weeks before a wedding to say it’s kid free when you knew 13 months ago is potentially asking for BIG feathers to be ruffled.  Parents are often aware of needing to buy their children new wedding clothes, babysitters can be hard to find, and if the parents expect the kids are invited they may be talking up the wedding and practicing good behavior for the big day.
• Expecting everyone to know wedding etiquette is a lot to ask of anyone, especially most of your guests who are long ago married or who are so used to bringing the children they wouldn’t even notice the lack of their names.
• Not confronting known-issues by this non-confrontational method is going to nothing but bite you back.  If you are well aware of hurt feelings it is much better to get it out in the open as soon as you know the event is kid free rather than letting people assume kids are invited and waiting til the very end.  Besides - if some people throw world war three and tell you they refuse to come, hey, at least you have a better sense of the guest list!
• Pregnant guests who may have small babies are going to be super sensitive to the ‘kid factor’ and if they know it is kid-free or kid-friendly, they will rest easier knowing if they will be able to make it or find a babysitter.

So what do you do it people insist on bringing their children anyway?  Number one rule is “blood talks to blood” when there is conflict.  If this is your fiance’s uncle who insists on bringing his kids, the best person to respond is your fiance’s parent who is related to this uncle.  Generation-to-generation will be much more effective and respectful than you trying to have at it with this person you barely know and have no history with.

If you have no support from anyone about this being a kid-free event I would strongly consider why you are having a wedding and not eloping.  If you are going to anger every single person in the family for “your day”, you may need to reassess the perfect wedding day and how you can make it a hospitable event for everyone.  It could be as simple as a huge family slumber party at someones house with a few nannies, or renting out a few suites in the hotel and hiring babysitters (or the older teen relatives to babysit.)  As many brides will tell you, the day is so packed and goes by so fast you won’t even notice the kids.  Some brides actually feel that kids are SO unpredictable it actually takes away any pressure for the “perfect wedding day” and they are more able to relax!

I can tell you going to my brothers out of town wedding with two small children was a complete and total disaster.  For us.  My brother and his fiancee did great with the kids but my husband and I wanted to kill ourselves!  It was extremely draining since every event started 2 hours after their bedtime.  We were in a new city and didn’t have anyone to babysit.  My baby girl was also too small to be left alone for hours (the nursing thing again!) so at best we would have had our son in a strange hotel room with a strange person - hardly the best stress reducer for him and us!  I can tell you looking back I wish we could have had the option of a babysitter to at least take the kids away.  My husband had to leave the rehearsal dinner without his food because our son was going completely loopy from lack of sleep and the restaurant was tiny and packed.  Of course being this was family we couldn’t have left the kids at home with my parents like we could have if this was just a friend. 

I hope things go smoothly for each of you!  It makes it easier when your friends all marry at the same life stage!  I joked that my brother (older than me) should have gotten married years ago to prevent all the child maddness. 

Phew, the holidays are over and it’s back to the grind!  For those of you newly engaged after the holidays - congratulations on your Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa or Wisconsin wedding plans!  We have added a few new states and are delighted to have everyone on board.

The kid issue is a very sticky one in wedding planning but let’s review the parents perspective for those who might not appreciate all that goes into it from a parent/guest perspective. 

First of all, many parents have to both work to pay the bills, leaving weekends as the only time to really see their children.  Weddings without kids means…well, you lose a chunk of time with your children!

Then add that many of us parents don’t have reliable babysitters, or perhaps just family (and the “flexibility” of whether the parent is free on a given night.)  Even if you do have reliable babysitters, the average babysitting cost is about $10/hour, give or take $5/hour.  But let’s take the $10 average, and the 6 hour average wedding plus reception, then 30 minutes on either end to get there and back (check in with babysitter and see how the night went before babysitter leaves) and you have 7 hours, times $10/hour, so we’re already up to $70 for the guest to attend your wedding without kids.  Of course it’s more - it’s the clothing if they don’t have something to wear to your wedding and the wedding gift which averages about $75.  So, don’t see your kids, spend $150+ to be without them, if you can actually afford or find a babysitter.

 I am not saying that kids have to be at weddings but I would think twice if most of your guests are parents.  It could be a lot cheaper to hire a few nannies, let the parents have fun and the kids play in another room.  This is especially true for out of town guests where leaving kids at home can be an impossibility or extremely challenging.  My friend went to a Colorado Wedding and the location had a huge glass gazebo area where the kids could play and parents could see them. The kids were free to come and go and everyone had a great time.

 I was unable to attend a close friends Iowa wedding because of the 5 hour drive with a new baby who screamed bloody murder in the car seat.  He wouldn’t just scream but shriek, nonstop, til he was out of the car seat - up to 1.5 hours when we had no choice.  I was nursing him so there was no option to leave him behind.  It was sad especially since my friend was very welcoming of children and even had a friends house set up as “baby central”, so we wouldn’t be stuck in a hotel room outside the wedding festivities.

What do you do when your vision of the wedding doesn’t include little ones crying, fussying, breaking things and generally throwing fits at your Perfect Day?

The problem can be biggest on either extreme - those who only have a small handful of children (you are young, your friends aren’t having babies yet or your family is small and there aren’t currently pint-size kids yet) or those with massive children in the family or among friends.  My brother got married this past summer at age 34 so there were lots of kids from their friends (and me!)  I joked that he should have gotten married a lot earlier because it was a total pain to fly with a two year old and 3 month old cross country!

I am of several minds about this topic and ultimately there is no flat answer for what you should do.  But as a parent now I have a new take on the matter which I will discuss later.  These are my quick impressions of the discussions people have on whether to invite children or not.  I invite YOU to share your thoughts by registering at www.thefirstdance.com and “talk with us/share your story” which will help keep your answers organized.  

Here are some of the top stressors around kids, in no particular order:

Time of the wedding

Let’s be realistic.  If most kids are in bed no later than 8:30 (mine go to bed at 7pm) it can be challenging to have an evening wedding where a percentage of your guests will be staying up well past their bedtime.  Then again, should you really alter your entire wedding to accomodate little ones who may not even remember they were at your wedding and certaintly wouldn’t care if they weren’t there?

Money, money, money

While most kids under 5 eat free with most caterers, you are still having to fill seats which are on tables which are decorated, plated, “wedding favored”, in a reception space that costs a lot per square foot to rent.  If you’re nice you may actually provide more goodies just for the kids which cost money.  And if money is tight it can be very hard to justify inviting toddlers who don’t know they exist over, say, your really good friends from college. 

Distruption or attention - detracting

Even the least bridezilla among us certaintly want to be the focus of attention on the big day.  There is nothing worse than imaging “You may kiss the bride” being said as baby cousin Charlie screams like a wild hyena!  It not only detracts from the moment you’re in, the feeling your guests are experiencing in that moment,  the video you’re capturing of this moment, but it also can be very embarassing for the parents of the kid who will forever remember being “the ones who ruined your day.”

Location of the reception

Even if you love kids, some of us get married in really unusual places - along cliffs, in art museums, in small historic mansions.  Basically we get married or have wedding receptions in places that are about as unkid friendly as you can get!  Again it can be really hard to forgo that perfect spot just because you have a few rugrats who “should” be part of the day.

So before I share my thoughts I invite you to share what your decision process was, or what your current dilemas are around this topic.  All answers will be held in confidence and no identifying information will be shared.

I just celebrated my four year wedding anniversary the other day.  My wedding feels like yesterday and a world away.  In four short years wedding planning in Minnesota has grown, changed, and yet, has stayed the same.  One of the realizations I’ve come to in starting The First Dance is how expensive wedding advertising is for Minnesota wedding endors!  The national sites are overpriced or just plain inaccessible for many smaller Minnesota wedding vendors and the Minnesota print advertising is also tremendously expensive.  Couples complain how expensive their wedding is but you can EASILY spent as much as a couple does for their wedding on simply trying to advertise to the Minnesota wedding planning world.  This isn’t a good thing, folks.  More choices for you are a good thing, particularly for the Minnesota wedding vendors that have a low profit margin so that a $2,000 add is actually hundreds of sales to reclaim the ad cost.

So this brings me to www.go2wed.com and why I’m thrilled to be blogging and helping out.  One thing we have that nobody else has is affordable rates for vendors to advertise which…. drum roll…. means BRIDES AND GROOMS IN MINNESOTA have more options for more wedding vendors than anywhere else.  Particularly in Southern Minnesota , Minnesota wedding vendors finally have a place to share their goods and services to you, the engaged couple wanting as many options as possible.

Because we’re local in Minnesota (and Colorado!) we’re working on very exciting ways to come together, literally, to hang out.  I know how important and fun it is to compare wedding planning notes with other engaged Minnesota couples.  The large websites out there are just not helpful when it comes to regional issues.  For example, I put in my actual wedding budget and number of guests in a national website and the results of what I should spend and in what category had me laughing out loud!!  I had exactly $60 for my hair AND makeup, but had $75 for parents gifts?  If I had a budget that gave me almost no money for hair/makeup I don’t see why I’d be spending more on my parents than my own bridal appearance.  And when I was in New York City getting the Modern Bride Trendsetter award, we spent $60 for 3 deli sandwhiches - so the budgeting out of the east coast based national websites aren’t real useful for us midwestern Minnesotans.

Things are moving fast and furious here on go2wed.com so please check back often.  We’re literally working hourly, daily here making fun updates, coming up with great ideas and wanting to get your feedback.  We have “Fun stuff” on the site now - please check us out and give us your ideas… who knows, you may win free stuff for your ideas or meet potential friends in this transition to married life.

Yours in Minnesota blog land,

Elizabeth

So while I’m in the world of Minnesota wedding planning (since I live here, not Colorado) I have been delighted by the high traffic my site as received for couples seeking out premarital counseling.  Did you know only 44% of engaged couples report going through any form of premarital counseling (the couple could call one meeting with an officiant as premarital counseling)?  And we have research out the wazoo on how it can actually reduce the likelihood of divorce!

But I don’t blame anyone.  My father, a big marriage education, marriage therapist, and a family friend, the owner of PREPARE-Enrich, one of the largest premarital inventories offered around the planet, was someone I knew since I was 10.  And yet when I got engaged I had no idea where to find premarital counseling!  Duh!

I’m working on ways to connect with local Minnesota churches to offer our 2 hour premarital class.  My website is national so I’ll be working with Colorado churches too.  Our First Dance class is all about the family and couple dynamics of wedding planning and the response we’ve had is great!  Even grooms, one who did not even want to be there, got a lot out of what we say in the class.

 So folks - Minnesota couples - check out www.thefirstdance.com for Minnesota premarital counseling options (including the inventory, now available online for only $30), and Colorado couples - also check out the site.  We just have one counselor listed but we also have a telephone option.  There are more Minnesota therapists - including one in Rochester.

And a benefit of the therapists listed as premarital counselors on www.thefirstdance.com is they GET the family and couple stresses you’re under and will help you see how all this wedding planning madness relates directly to the stresses of married life.

Sorry for a heavy blog post! 

-Elizabeth

A simple item turns into an emotional battlefield

Wedding checklists, planners, books, and magazines are extremely useful. The ideas, creativity, and expertise of wedding vendors are amazing and hard to stop reading. Every where you turn is a new trend, a new twist, a new product to make your wedding more beautiful, more fun, more unique. 

So why are we suggesting you stop for a moment when you have so many decisions to make and not enough time as it is? 

Perhaps you’ve already learned an important rule of thumb: checklists can’t predict which wedding tasks and which people in your life have an emotion, opinion, or stake in how that task is completed. And to make matters worse sometimes the person with the emotion or opinion doesn’t even know it until a FINAL DECISION is made or it’s too late. 

An example of this in my own wedding planning was the arrival of our wedding invitations. It is a very exciting day to finally see, in print, that you are actually getting married. My father had not seen them nor expressed any interest in them up to this point. I did not think to include him in any part of the decision since we both knew he didn’t care. We were in his living room and I show him one in excitement. He takes a look at the wedding invitation and panics, moving from room to room. They are too hard for him to read no matter what lighting he is in! They are unique invitations with red ink on red paper, orange ink on orange paper and yellow ink on yellow paper. We have a ton of middle aged and older guests who will have similar eyesight to my father. This means they may not actually be able to read the wedding invitations. Disaster, anyone?

Meanwhile I’m looking at getting these invitations out within the next couple weeks and they were expensive! I can read them just fine and have my heart set on this style and look. It sets the tone of the entire wedding. I can’t back down now. It would be a huge waste of money, a huge stress to find new invitations and have them ordered and back in time to send out and ultimately isn’t this MY DAY, MY DECISION? 

Rational thinking flew out the window – dad isn’t a man who exaggerates things. Of course he can’t read them and of course others might have problems too. But that wasn’t the point, in my mind. My mom and groom thought they were fine so he was outnumbered, even if he was right. Welcome to emotional bridal land where many different perspectives collide and a solution has to be found. In this case my mom made a similar version to send to the grandmothers and a few other elderly people so they would for sure be able to read them.

Just ask any bride a week, month or 12 months into wedding planning what they are experiencing and underneath the “it’s my day, my way” mentality is the desire to have a joyous wedding planning experience. Nobody enjoys making their mom angry, their dad stressed out, upsetting their friends or frustrating their groom. Some brides even get so stressed out trying to maintain their ground that they just give up and let someone else have the final say in everything (the opposite extreme of the bridezilla.)

So why don’t all those people just shut up and let you plan your Cinderella day? Why don’t the checklists warn you about the landmines of emotions that can erupt at any point up to and including on the wedding day itself? How on earth could I have known dad would have an opinion on my wedding invitation style, of all things?!

Regular event planning is generally a linear process with a logical checklist. Ultimately a wedding is a huge event, but there is a reason for wedding planning specialists – it is not your every day event. You could hire a wedding coordinator for a non-wedding event but you would be unwise to hire an event planner who had never planned a wedding before. 

Let’s take a normal event example and play out the checklist. The guest list emerges out of the events purpose (annual holiday parties, for example, are going to include all employees.) A date and location are quickly arranged (often the date and location don’t change year after year.) Then you have budget (set in an accounting spreadsheet without room for negotiation), theme, invitations, entertainment, etc. There was a party last year so you have an easy template for this year and can crank this event out with minimal stress.

So why don’t wedding checklists work as easily as an annual holiday party? Here are a few of many reasons:

You are bringing two distinct people, with distinct families and friends together for the very first (and probably only) time.

Unlike other events, births, weddings and funerals celebrate a high-emotion, high-stakes change of life. 

Most of us will never plan another event for 100, 200, or more people in our lives. Our inexperience mixed with the event “guests” being our loved ones with their own notions of how the wedding should go is a potential recipe for disaster.

Unlike other events, the outcome of the planning and wedding day itself will stay with you and your loved ones forever. It can change your relationships for better or worse and set the stage for how you go through life in the future.

Weddings are now an anything-goes event with few cultural norms and expectations. This may easily rub up against notions of etiquette and wedding propriety from prior generations. Few other events have such emotion tied to how things go (birthday parties, for example, are open for complete freedom.) 
So how do you manage the wedding checklists knowing there is a lot more going on then just planning an event? Through hundreds of real life wedding stories, we have culled the wisdom on how to work together as a couple and how to work with your own, and your fiancé’s family. These principles have been filtered through a marriage and family therapy model of thinking based on how people actually behave, not on how we wish they would behave (those with divorced parents or other difficult relatives can appreciate this distinction.) Our perspective is filled with empathy and compassion for everyone involved in the wedding process so you can have a wedding you want but don’t steamroll over your loved ones in the process.

We’ve presented these principles to many engaged couples and the feedback has been heart-warming. Weddings are not about right and wrong, do this and don’t do that. Planning your wedding is more of a dance between all the people in your lives as you and your spouse-to-be figure out your visions and dreams for the wedding day and how those fit into your values around family, friends, and your community. Getting to the first dance is a huge task as a young couple. We wish you all the best and are here to help you on the journey.

I need to figure out how to save this email as a link but until then, email us your people stress questions!  blog@go2wed.com

I was reading recently that it takes an average of 700 hours to plan a wedding.  Not surprising, 48% of brides would like to take time off work to plan their wedding, if they could.

 Now wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing for your sanity and relationship!  Your groom might even be willing to go shopping and make decisions if he could get a day off work.  But instead you scramble, use work time and the work computer to get wedding tasks done and then run around in the evenings and weekends - with EVERY OTHER engaged couple, to get things completed.

Let’s all take a moment to imagine having a few days off to do nothing but get wedding tasks done.  No work, no household errands.  Pure wedding planning.

A girl can dream!

-Elizabeth

I ran across a website that lets you register for your honeymoon.  I have heard of this but never saw an actual registry.  You can actually register for detailed items like “dinner for two”, “flowers in the room” or excursions for the day.

I am of two minds on this.  My immediate reaction is “yuck!” because it just strikes me as odd that someone else should pay for your vacation.  But rationally why not pay for a fun, memorable dinner over, say, buying someone a few wine glasses or place mats?  I have very fond memories of my honeymoon meals and they would have been even more fun if we knew we didn’t have to pay for them ourselves!  Hah!

A little factoid on honeymoons.  Most of American history weddings were a tiny affair in the “parlour” room with just parents.  Any actual honeymoon was the couple going “around the country” (probably the state) to visit relatives since they were not part of the wedding.  Brides wore their best dress for the occassion and family helped gather essentials (now called the Registry.)

The first Registry was established around 1920 by a man who realized if he wrote down what the bride wanted on a notecard, her guests could get her part of her set.  Before then, you would buy the couple a random place setting and she’d spent a lot of time straightening everything out to get matching place settings.

But back to registering for the honeymoon.  What do you think?  What would your guests think - particularly older guests?  Would you / are you registering for your honeymoon?  Would you buy a honeymoon item over a regular item from a friends registry? 

 I knew someone where a couple only wanted honeymoon registry items and the guest was extremely offended and upset.  The couple had everything they needed already and didn’t want extra clutter.  A parent made them register for a few things to appease some guests.

Thank you for visiting our blog!  We at The First Dance are thrilled to be part of this wedding and event directory for Minnesota and Colorado.  We live in Minnesota and Bill, my father and co-founder, spent his entire engagement in Colorado with my mom so it holds a special place for our family.

Weddings are endlessly fascinating and the purpose of this blog will grow and change as we hear from you - CO and MN brides, parents and wedding party members.  Think of us as your resident experts on all things related to relationships (we leave the event planning and logistic questions to wedding event planning experts.)  My father in particular has always been amazing at helping me respond to a difficult situation with the right words, right level of assertiveness, and with grace.  These are wonderful skills to have around the wedding stresses you are facing today.

Welcome aboard the journey of a lifetime - wedding planning!

Elizabeth & Bill
Modern Bride Top 25 Trendsetters 2007