Wedding Tactics

My wedding is over.

I have been married for eleven days.

I have honeymooned and returned to the eye-ticking, irritating pace of having to go back to work tomorrow.

My wedding was very totally awesome! All my planning was well worthwhile. I had more fun that I ever expected to have. I ate my entire dinner. I danced a hell of a lot! There were kisses and hugs and dancing and the cake was so damn good - and you know so many times wedding cakes just taste like cardboard.

I am full of positive experiences and lessons learned and assvice from an amateur-turned-pro. No seriously. I’m not going to write about how I have had a wedding therefore I KNOW weddings. I am going to spend the next few weeks writing about my wedding, my planning experiences, my lessons learned, with the hope that it helps someone else. I will tell stories and post pictures and share my emotions of the day, the days before the wedding and the honeymoon - from planning it to what to expect and how much time to allow between international connections on American Airlines when traveling through Miami Airport. GOD.

Before my wedding I used certain days of the week to write certain topics and I wasn’t so thrilled with that. I’ve been feeling too confined and there were times when I wasn’t able to write what I wanted because I couldn’t make it work with a Trend or Tradition or Question-Answer.

I will leave you now with some pictures. If you are getting married before I am able to post of all of my lessons learned, most of all … have fun. I cannot emphasize this enough. And I know you are rolling your eyes at me because! Of course you will have fun at your wedding. In the hours leading up to your wedding, there is not much you can do. The flowers will or will not show up. The cake will or will not be delivered. Most likely, your guests are in town and are getting dressed for the event or taking a much needed nap. I suppose this all works well with careful pre-wedding planning.

I will also talk a lot about what people told me, especially the bold-lettered articles in all the seventeen pound magazines that consist of five hundred pages of advertisements and three articles that say: Make your wedding reflect your personal style and taste. What if you don’t know your personal style? I thought I did, but as time went on I learned a lot more about myself. I will share the details of what worked for me. Scheduling, vendor relationships, travel, timetables, family issues, ohmyholyhell, the family issues!

I am thrilled to be married. I really am. Marc and I spent at least three days calling each other “wife” and “husband”. We were giddy with what we had just done. We still are. Each day still feels sort of new. We have lived together for two years, owned a house together for six months, gotten pregnant a month before the wedding, but, this does feel new. There is a higher level of commitment and authority and respect and a whole new awesome sense of belonging to each other, our new family, and our old respective families. Speaking of the “new” … I will make sure I spend an entire entry on the issue of name changing. I am totally in the middle of changing my name right now. My new social security card is in the mail. My bank knows me as Stacy Kravitz. But, I can still deposit checks made out to Stacy Ochsman. WTF?

Oh! My ceremony. Amazing. Beautiful.

Surprises? Nothing bad I can think of.

Good? One of our best friends made a video of our entire ceremony and reception. We haven’t seen it yet, but we had no idea he was going to do this.

I have many details to share and hopefully, many readers to re-lure.

Pictures? Anyone…?

And finally … some of the fun,