From Miss Adventure:

So often society makes a wedding seem like the most romantic memorable day of your life.  While this may be true, weddings are also a lot of work. Here are five things I’ve learned from other brides that have made me feel a little less crazy, and little more grateful for the opportunity to celebrate something as awesome as marrying Mr. Adventure.

5. Something will go wrong. Plan all you want, some part of your grand design will fall short of expectations. Knowing ahead of time how you plan to react can help contain the damage. Have a mantra, have your MOH give you a reality check, whatever it is allow yourself to be disappointed, but don’t allow a single mishap derail your entire day. Don’t be this bride:

4. You will feel like you’re doing all the work. Mr. Adventure is a good groom, but he still needs reminders from time to time about what’s on the checklist that he needs to own. I’ve certainly felt overwhelmed, and like I needed him to step it up. So I just ask. My sister said something wise, “Don’t forget that women have been planning their wedding since childhood, and he started planning the wedding sometime after he put the ring on your finger.” A coworker had great advice. She just asked what parts her husband was most interested in, and asked him to take those on. She let him pick the flowers. You may have to let go of part of your vision, to make room for his.

3.  You will probably fight with someone you love. Weddings combine all the things that cause the most conflict: money, high expectations, and values. Since starting my journey, my wedding has caused friction with no fewer than four important people in my life. I read somewhere in my wedding research that the key is to not get too upset. The fights may seem really huge and important, but remember they exist under the microscope of your wedding.  Take a deep breathe, apologize, and move on. Chances are that once your wedding is in the rearview mirror, so will most of the conflict.

2.  Don’t forget to talk about things other than your wedding. The best thing I did for my sanity this week was forward a newsletter from work highlightening some recent successes I had to my parents. I can’t tell you how good it felt to have them recognize a part of me that didn’t involve the “W” word. Finding ways to connect to yourself B.W. (before wedding) is essential to maintaining a positive outlook.

1. Keep it simple. My wedding, while at times overwhelming has been mostly pretty easy. I credit it to our commitment to keeping it simple. We are trying not to over plan every aspect. It’s amazing how much time we have to just be together when we let go of details that probably won’t be remembered anyway.  Planning our wedding has brought us even closer together. It facilitated tough conversations, like how to compromise our families’ viewpoints, and what pieces are most deserving of our time, money, and energy. I wouldn’t trade that for the world.

From Miss Adventure:

Sites like Ruffledblog.com have a “Recycle your wedding” section where brides seek to recoup some of the money they dropped on things like Chalkboard table numbers and Mint Julep cups by selling them to next seasons crop of bridal beauties.

My sister is a genius at discovering good deals. She found a woman in Omaha who was selling 70 milk glass vases from her September wedding. I was able to pick up 56 of them for $100. That’s a $1.80 a piece! Centerpieces are done.

The best part—she told me it took her and her fiancé a year to collect all of them, and that she was still hunting them down right up until the week before the wedding.

From Miss Adventure:

Last fall I was obsessively pinning ideas for my wedding dress on Pinterest. I was convinced I needed something in swiss dot, so when I stumbled upon the Ivy and Aster Sweet Pea dress (above left), I was certain I had found THE dress.

Imagine my elation when I discovered that there was an Ivy and Aster truck show in town, the same weekend my mother planned a visit to start dress shopping. It was a sign.

I am not exactly sample size, but plenty of the other dresses looked perfectly fine on my figure. But when I tried on the Sweet Pea, I just looked plain silly. It was sort of humiliating to have “pinned” all my hopes on something that wasn’t even a little bit flattering.

I was defeated and confused. I had no idea what I wanted in a dress after that. A few weeks later I remembered people telling me about Nebraska Bridal Outlet in Wahoo. I didn’t expect to find anything, there was no way a “bridal outlet” in Wahoo, Nebraska would have something that fit my taste, I thought.

At David’s Bridal two weeks prior,  I had proclaimed that I would not be caught dead in anything “sparkly.” But there I was, in a small storefront bridal shop in small town Nebraska with an ear-to-ear smile  in a dress twinkling from the hundreds of sequins and glass beads on the bodice of the wedding dress.  I was able to find a dresses similar to my vision that looked good in reality too (photo above right).

The best part is, because my dress was way under what I had budgeted, it’s left Mr. Adventure and I with tons of wiggle room in our budget. With the money we’ve saved, we are thinking about hiring a live band, or serving a fancy sit down meal.

Lesson: Try on as many styles of dresses as possible.

Left: Ivy and Aster Sweet Pea gown Right: Miss Adventure in a similar dress.  (THE dress is not pictured in order to keep it a surprise for Miss Adventure’s wedding)

Age: 30
Occupation: Director of Community Partnerships
Engaged: August 27, 2011
Wedding date: May 12, 2012
Reception and wedding venue: Scottlynn Yards Blair, NE
Read her full bio here.

This time last year, any thoughts of my dream wedding were fleeting. Mr. Adventure and I had only been dating a few months, so when I imagined the big day I mainly imagined a few humorous elements that I had been telling all my friends about for years.  All I knew was I wanted a taco truck and swirl margaritas—a magical mixture of frozen marg and cheap sangria.

Fast forward to present day.  Between the 174 pins on my Wedding Board on Pinterest, and an insatiable need to have my wedding day look like it was designed by an Anthropologie merchandiser–let’s just say my imaginary wedding has a little more flesh on what was up until a few months ago, made up of taco truck and margarita bones.

As helpful as the abundance of Internet based wedding planning tools can be, I can’t help but wonder what my wedding would look like if I didn’t feel like the day also had to double as a perfectly curated museum exhibit of all things whimsical and vintage. I’m looking at YOU mason jars and moustaches!

The hard part is taking all this influence disguised as inspiration and creating a vision for your wedding that is based in reality. Taking stock of who you and your fiancé really are, versus who you wished you were is essential to creating a day that will be filled with meaning, rather than disappointment.  You may love the mismatched vintage plates, but are you and your Mr. committed to spending every Saturday up until the wedding at a flea market?

And before you convince yourself that you’re going to save tons of money doing “DIY”, do you already own a glue gun and pinking shears? Because I’m here to tell you, all these crafty brides, they were crafty before they were brides—not the other way around.
I’ve learned to strike a balance between what I imagine our perfect day to be, and what I can actually pull off given the time/money/talent I have.

A friend of mind suggested road-tripping to Paper Source in Kansas City to gather supplies for making my own invitations. As frugal as I am, the idea of glue sticking and stuffing 130 invitations sounds like a form of torture. So instead I’m looking into options that allow professional designers and printers to create and assemble the invitations. Local vendors are nice because you can meet them in person, which helps them create a product that best captures who you are as a couple. These people are artists, and they can often surprise you by creating something even more “you” than you ever imagined.

A year ago getting married wasn’t even on the radar. And a year from now, our wedding will be a memory of a single day in time.  Mr. Adventure makes me feel like the most beautiful, smartest woman in the world—that’s why I’m marrying him! No sense in letting my imaginary wedding overshadow the awesomeness that is going to be our marriage.