Wedding Planning – the process

There are so many aspects of a wedding that anyone could ever write about. I had been meaning to do so over the last few months, more to keep in blogging practice, as opposed to sharing any real information and insight, although if I did manage to do so in the process, then, of course, that would be a happy bonus.

With less than two weeks to go, I am not sure what precisely to focus on:

• The list of places that we shortlisted and visited during our visit to Singapore in November?
• How we went about preparing for a Catholic wedding in Singapore from overseas? (Yes, despite the Catholic church being universal, there are some differences that neither we nor our priests grasped when we embarked on this.)
• Our vetting process for vendors – and how my fiancé’s and my thought processes differed? (I’m more research, he’s more just do.)
• The dress shops I visited?
• Budgeting?
• The things that I found really useful?
• How I found out how useless I am at making decisions about utterly inconsequential things? I spent weeks looking at bridesmaids’ gifts and am not entirely sure whether I still want to get what I thought I wanted to get. When I finished Googling for them, I went to Etsy and eBay and then finally to BrideStory. I spent months agonising over which make-up artist to go with and decided to go with the one more of my friends disliked simply because I went with my gut, rather than choosing the safe path.

Engagement photos with Jonathan Ong

We got our engagement photographs back over the weekend, two weeks earlier than expected, and they were well worth the money we spent on them.

We were a little nervous when we had our session in early July; after all, we are not natural theatrical people who can strike up a pose when the moment calls for it. The boy points out that my whole demeanour changes when I notice a camera trained on me, and I just freeze up. But I was adamant I wanted some photos of us in London so that we could show them at our wedding in Singapore. After all, this is where we live. I also wanted photos of us when we would be relaxed and just free to be ourselves, instead of being under a fair amount of stress and having to deal with multitudes of people.

Wedmin

Less than seven months to our big day!

Achievements unlocked

• Venues for wedding ceremony and wedding reception - Check!
• Officiant - Check!
• Marriage preparation course - Checked!
• Wedding dress - Check!
• Wedding reception dress - Check!
• Wedding photographer - Check!
• Beauty regime - Check!
• E-mail addresses - Check!
• Guest list - Check!
• Save the date design - Check!
• Sending out save the dates - Partial check!
• Wedding day itinerary - Partial check!

Spoke too soon (aka wedding admin is never over)

So, it would appear I spoke way too soon of "free weekends" in this post. While I had half of the big items done, there were still other things to deal with, such as (1) registering for marriage preparation, (2) booking a Catholic church and priest to officiate at our wedding, and, what I'm finding is the toughest of them all, (3) getting a wedding photographer. To top things off, I had an incredibly intense start to the work year, for reasons I'll talk about another time.  For now, I'd like to talk about what we got up to in January in relation to our wedding.

New year, new start

So, here we are. The first full proper weekend of 2015 after the first full proper week of work and yoga. It's been such a busy week that it's hard to think that we've only just had Christmas and New Year. Still, I suppose that's a good sign, particularly in this economy.

I'm still on a bit of a high from having purchased my wedding dress and booked the wedding banquet venue, which must mean that I have made the right choices on both fronts.

On track

Here we are, almost at the end of 2014, a year which has, quite frankly, whizzed by so fast that I am not entirely sure what's happened. That's a good thing, I suppose. A year that goes by so quickly because I'm doing so many different things, that I have no time to rest, other than the magical Christmas period when my office decides to close.

It's been a nice few days of doing nothing much (though, thankfully, not over-eating as is our tendency during this time), and, with just three days left to this year, I'm incredibly pleased to report that, bam, just like that, we are now back on track with our wedding planning. A week or so ago, we were behind on deciding on a wedding venue because it was just so hard finding a place which met our key requisites. Now, having spoken to the venue manager, and having adjusted our expectations in what we can and cannot do, I'm delighted to say that we have our venue on our desired date.

Wedding dresses

I seem to have been struck by the worst cold I have ever suffered in my entire life. This, of course, means that I am spending far too much time on the Internets, and most of that has been spent ooh-ing and ahh-ing over pretty white dresses which are completely unaffordable, which has only added to their desirability.

I went to a bridal shop two weeks ago for a designer's trunk show. Silly me thought that that would mean that there would be more dresses from that particular designer for me to try on. Instead, it just seemed like the usual lot of dresses - at least, judging from the sales assistant's befuddled look - and I ended up trying on two dresses from that designer, and a couple of others from others in the shop.

I didn't really know what to expect. I didn't think I would come across a dress and go, "Yes, this is the one, and I must get this!" In fact, there was only one dress I tried on and went, "WOW!" Despite that, it wasn't my favourite dress. My favourite dress was this one, and it's just so simple and elegant and... pretty much the kind of dress I'd love to wear to a posh party. But, that's just it. It's an incredibly nice dress for an upscale function, but I guess it's not wedding-y enough. 

The dress which elicited the "wow" from me though? I didn't like it as much. I knew I looked good in it, and it showed off my figure to a fantastic extent, but I just didn't feel it. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because whenever I wear anything figure-hugging, my eyes are inevitably drawn to my ginormous hips, and, no matter what anyone says, all I see are the hips and how huge they are. 

Engagement

Right, as the more eagle-eyed among you may have spotted, there’s a ring around my ring finger in the picture of me holding the Regent Tweet cards. That’s because I’m engaged!

It happened a few weeks ago, and my lovely fiancé caught me completely by surprise. I’m now in semi-panicky bride planning mode, trying to figure out when, where, whom and how to finance this. I supposed that’s normal, right?

Anyway, I digress. I know I’ll be a little ball of stress because there’s so much to do in terms of organising this… and there was a lot to do even before the proposal, and I’m just not sure whether I can work on achieving the big goals I had before this!

But, thankfully, I’ve done yoga for three months now and I’m much better at relaxing, so I’m just going to do my best to enjoy this as much as anyone engaged person can.



Wish us luck.