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Friday, May 6, 2011

Wedding Shows-Anxiety Sets In!

I want to briefly jump back for a moment to mention that after our initial engagement in Sept, planning started to move along nicely! We had explored a few possible venues in Florida, and even attended a wedding show with my Mom.

Our first wedding show we went to (way back in Sept) was a lot of fun because we had plenty of planning time and were just starting wedding exploration. I loved that Gary fully embraced these type of events with me, from buying me my pink "BRIDE" tee to participating on stage in a "groom" contest in front of the entire crowd! Besides that, there were so many fun things to try and choose from, including these awesome flip books.  Checkout the one we made, complete with a fishing pole prop (quite appropriate to our "engagement story").



And the caricature we had done....



But as you can see, we sort of took a hiatus from wedding planning during the holidays. After the New Year, reality set in that we were still venueless and hadn't set our date. Eek. We had an initial idea of the date we wanted, which would possibly be over an upcoming holiday weekend. This put more pressure on to BOOK as quickly as possible because we'd been told holidays fill up quickly and guests need as much time as possible to plan. Still, we knew our venue would determine if our tentative date was available, so we had to decide on that first. Anxiety was definitely setting in!

As I mentioned earlier, we had explored a few possible venues right after the engagement. The locations varied from Orlando to Sarasota to St. Augustine. The venue is definitely one of the hardest decisions to make because it sets the tone/direction for the entire event, and can also be a good portion of the budget. We had one place in the back of our head that we first visited and had kept comparing other possible venues to, but we weren't sure if it was "the one." We didn't really give Orlando a thorough exploration, and at this point there were some other places we wanted to checkout before committing...and we needed to do so asap before I had a major stress meltdown!

We heard of a "Bridal Crawl" going on in Orlando, which was basically another bridal show but held at several different locations you could bounce around to, all possible venues also containing a variety of vendors (florists, caterers, DJs, etc). This was a perfect way for us to explore our hometown, so Danielle, Gary, and I embarked on the crawl. We all left with a sugar high from too many cake samples but a lot of great information.

Our crawl badges- "I Asked" (his), "I Said Yes" (mine)

The crawl was successful in the sense of helping us narrow locations down (plus acquire more vendor contacts), but we decided to make one last weekend trip to St. Augustine before picking our winner. We had been there already and really liked one specific location, but there were a few others we wanted to checkout too. Plus there was still one other possible location we were weighing everything against, each with different pros/cons making things more difficult.

All I'm going to say at this point is with less than 9 months away from our tentative wedding date, this is what we actually had:

1.) My dress (go figure)
2.) The bridal party selected

As you can imagine, the pressure was (and still is) on! Stay tuned for the outcome of our venue selection! :)


XoXo

Krissy

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