Let’s talk weddings!!!!

Planning…invite list…website…wedding party…&all that jazz. 

I am going to break down my wedding/my thoughts on planning weddings in a “Married as f***” wedding series! So let’s get started. ┇✝︎ You can view pt1 of the series here!!   ✝︎┇

PLANNING P. 2 

Hey y’all!!

I want to start off by saying I am in no way one of those girls who has dreamt of her dream wedding since she came out of the womb, would play dress up & always be the bride, etc. I will admit that I obsessively pinned wedding inspo on my pinterest to the point that I sort of overwhelmed myself and had to make a new board for my actual planning inspo that was shared with Alex.

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WEBSITE⇢

Ahhh the website. I personally thought creating this was one of the most fun aspects of the planning process, besides picking out the dress! It was a way to truly set the tone for the wedding, get yourself & your guests excited, show off engagement pictures & share a little view into our relationship, plus tons more things that made me feel so happy when putting it together. You can check out our website here, we made it through theknot because it was the easiest! {this post is not sponsored in anyway, just sharing my personal opinion on my experience using this website.}

✐ Since we were having a destination wedding, it was imperative that our website be as detailed as possible, so we tried to include everything we could. The only thing that was lacking a bit was information on things to do, where to eat, ect. around town because we both have only visited a few times & spent 99.9% of our time at the beach hahaha.

✐ “OUR WEDDING” ∾∾ I wrote a short blurb of our “story” for the front page. The front page also included wedding details such as; location, date, time, attire, & names of the wedding party.

✐ “ACCOMMODATIONS” ∾∾ This section included the resort information to reserve a room right next to where the reception was taking place, plus a few other hotels & rental options in the area for out of town guests…which just so happened to be everyone!

✐ “TRAVEL // FOOD&PLACES” ∾∾ This may seem like a weird grouping of travel, food, places, but on the actual site it flows from, +accommodations +travel +food & places to see, all on one page. As I mentioned earlier, there was not much we knew as amazing stand out places to go when in Hilton Head, so we just put down places we personally had been/enjoyed. For the travel section, we listed the two nearest airports which was extremely important because the airport on the island is e x t r e m e l y small so flying into the second airport actually was easiest.

✐ “PHOTOS” ∾∾ Here I included three tabs for pictures including the engagement session, some throwbacks, & a few pics from the proposal! I loved the few proposal pics we did get because they included Ripley & I really think he will look back one day and cherish the fact that he was included!

✐ “REGISTRY” ∾∾ The last tab on the website was for the registry link. We did not make our registry through theknot, instead we used zola & you can check out our registry here. Zola I personally thought made it a lot easier to find unique gifts + things that are actually necessary for each couple. For EX, Cristian & I just moved in together a few months before the wedding, so it was nice to be able to add the necessary things needed to furnish our apartment because we had basically nothing. Things got shipped right to us after they were purchased, which made everything so easy! & I personally am a huge huge fan of having things delivered to my house because going into stores to shop or even just pick up my items leads to hours of me being distracted & spending money I don’t have on things I absolutely do not need…one of my greatest weaknesses tbh hahaha

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INVITES⇢

The invites… hahaha just thinking about the situation makes me laugh because there was a bit of a mix up with the invites I had made…aka I didn’t realize until about uhh two weeks before the wedding that they had never shipped to any. of. our. guests…NO ONE HAD TECHNICALLY BEEN INVITED! To say I had a panic attack is an understatement, I think my brain almost exploded in that second I realized they never sent because I was thinking of every possible disaster that could come from a wedding + more… Sorry Cris & Alex for having to deal with me that day (: <3

So let me explain what we ended up doing & how we ended up finalizing our guest list!

✐ “GUEST LIST” ∾∾ I have extreme FOMO, anyone who knows me can confirm, & I have it to the point where I tend to OVER INCLUDE people because I just feel bad for my friend sallys third cousin I had a great time with 5 years ago, thinking that maybe for one second she expected an invite and will be upset not getting one. Basically I got over that preeettyyyy quickly after seeing how much it cost to feed a person. Realistically speaking it was a destination wedding, & we knew it would be very hard for the majority of people we planned on inviting to make it down to South Carolina. 

» We made a list of everyone we could think of that we would love having at our wedding, & that list was pretty long. I think that it was normal for our list to be so long because we were both fresh out of college so it was the first wedding of all of our friends & we were still in pretty constant communication with our friends so naturally they all had to be there. Not to mention I am very close to everyone on both sides of my family & just counting our families made the list add up to roughly 100 people… Y I K E S… All of these people, however, received a ~Save The Date~ incase people surprised us and were able to make it when we expected them not to.

» After our original list of everyone we wanted there, we made another list that was sort of our “more realistic list”. It included everyone that had verbally committed to attending the wedding, our wedding party, all of our relatives {but we kept in bold the few that we were 99.9% positive would not be able to make it to the wedding}. We finally got the number down under 200 which about 150 people we assumed would be there. 

✐ “ACTUAL INVITES” ∾∾ Here lies the humor in all of this…no one got a physical invite as I mentioned earlier, so we decided to use paperless post to send out the invites which truth be told worked out PERFECTLY. It was so easy to gather everyone’s emails because we had the majority anyways, the site tracked the guest count, +1s, meal options, ect. so we could just download that information into Excel and have it to use when creating the seating chart & giving the resort the final numbers & meal options. This is very nontraditional & I felt kind of embarrassed at the time, but seeing how well it worked out for us I didn’t really care anymore. The only thing I missed was not having an invitation suite to use when taking pictures, but oh well.

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WEDDING PARTY⇢

The wedding party, at least on my side, I already basically knew who would be included. Cristian was not as mentally prepared, so it was hard for us to decide on how many to include. We ended up with 20 people…yes TWENTY! It was crazy huge but honestly we could not find any other ways to narrow it down because both of us like to keep a tight knit group of friends so they all meant so much to each of us. 

Honestly, I will probably add more detail to this section in another post because there is a lot that can be said about our wedding party!

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As usual, feel free to reach out anytime if you have any questions about this post, my wedding, or just life itself!!!! 

☄︎Blasting off,

The Rocket Mama ✰✰