Weddings are expensive

I've been getting a little frustrated at the cost of weddings. I know. I know. This should not be unexpected. But I think you can still be annoyed about it. It's just that I feel like we are making a lot of economic choices and cutting out a lot of wedding frill, but it doesn't seem to actually save us any money. What's the point? I may not spend hundreds of dollars on this one thing, but this other thing will cost thousands of dollars. Boo.

Recently we have been on a quest to find a decent and affordable photographer. The complication for us is that we are having two weddings, but our budget for photography will probably barely cover one wedding. So maybe we should rely on the cameras of friends and family for one and get the professionals for the other. But we don't really want to do this. Both weddings have a lot of meaning for both our families, and it feels a little like we'd be making one less important if we didn't hire a photographer for both. I don't know. We might revisit our budget on this. Grrr. I know cameras and equipment must be expensive, but I am surprised at the prices of many uninteresting wedding photographers. We would be willing (to a point) to pay for a good photographer, but the prices are inflated so that the bad photographers are barely affordable and the good ones seem out of our league. We would be open to using a student photographer, but they'd have to come with high praise from someone we know personally and whose opinion we respected--not an expensive photographer trying to get work for one of their interns.
Anyway I'm trying not to stress out too much over this. But time keeps ticking away and the best photographers (in terms of quality and price) get booked early. Boo.

I've been thinking about our wedding?!?!?!

Well, mostly, I've been avoiding my homework. I'm starting to think that being in school and working full-time will really kick this wedding planning into high gear. So here are a couple of things that I think about while I read through page 265 of my cell bio book for the fifth time:

1. Shoes. I don't really want to wear white. Mostly because it's boring to wear white and I will get them dirty. Better to get something in fuschia or turquoise or both. Anyway I've been lurking a bit at zappos and bluefly and at DSW. Nothing has caught my fancy. I found a store this weekend in Soho that may be promising, if they stop using suede. I mean, I would love to that bride that wears suede at her June wedding, but then I'd be that bride with sweat-stained suede shoes. Fail.

Also, $600 shoes. Fail.

2. Music. Mostly our first dance song. We have a few possibilities. A friend of ours is getting married soon, and we were talking about the difficulty of figuring this seemingly simple task out. How does one find a song with just the right blend of cheese and fun without the wierd? We are not indie people, and we are not too snobby for a song that may or may not have used in a car commercial, but still it's been hard to find something we agree on. Anyway this conversation brought up the topic of wedding traditions gone awry. Apparently, according to Miss Manners, the first dance was not supposed to be a mini-show that the bride and groom put on for their guests (Youtube evidence to the contrary). The bride and groom start the party with their dance, but at some point during the song, the wedding party is supposed to bring people onto the dancefloor to join them. I like this tradition. The same is somewhat true for the father-daughter, mother-son dances. They have songs that are dedicated for those dances, but they're not really supposed to halt the action of everyone else. I mean, since when did getting married become synonomous with attention-hog and party-pooper?

4. That being said, I'm getting intrigued by choregraphed dances. What? I never claimed to not be a wedding hypocrite. Anyway most of the youtubed wedding dances are lame to the naked eye, but I wonder if it might be a lot of fun for the people involved. One of the bridesmaids is a choregrapher. I feel almost like it's wasting a resource to not come up with something. Definitely not the "let's start out slow--screech--what happened--cue rap song" routine. That has been overdone. But maybe a song that plays randomly during the reception and all of a sudden, dance party. . . with choreographed steps. Anyway I'm not saying I want to do it. I'm just saying let's consider the possibilities.

5. Centerpieces. So really we're doing an Anthropologie-themed wedding. We're collecting interestingly-pattern square scarves from flea markets and thrift stores to place on the table as base layers for the centerpieces. We're also collecting inexpensive vases and containers--both from those same places as well as ones I'm making myself. We're going to fill them with random flowers from the grocery store. Use little tealights and some other little knick-knacks that we find. Like the picture below, but less fancy. The eclectic pack-rat look is so hot for weddings right now.

(image from oncewed.com)

6. Veil. Yes? No? With lace? With Swarvoski crystals? Fingertip-length? Bird-cage? Blusher? What? I think veils are pretty. They're sooo wedding. I'd like one that is simple and whimsical. I'm thinking about getting a plain ivory one and then embellishing it with fabric flowers/feathers at the crown. For an organic bohemian bling look.

7. Hair. Definitely an updo as it will be mid-June and I will be dancing up a storm (choreographed or no). So a style that will keep my hair out of my way is important. Been looking at the knot and things for ideas. Nothing too severe as my forehead looks both alien and child-like and I have a blockhead (for real, ask any of my recent hairdressers), but it has to stay in place. The challenge with my hair is that it will do what you want it to do and then go beyond to realms you never dreamed it could go. Yeah, the challenge will be how to keep it from going back to the 1980's or 19th-century. Fun stuff.

Oh man, that's a lot of wedding thinking. I need a nap. Tata for now.