Wedding Wednesday: 10 Things I Wish I'd Done Differently

Inspired by this post on one of my favorite new blogs, I thought I would do a little post about the things I think I would have done differently with our wedding.

1. My dress. I loved my dress, I did. It's the dress I wanted, it's the dress I couldn't live without. But dresses have so many other issues compacted in them: weight, body image, trends, what's available to try on, what flatters your body shape, etc. At the time, I wasn't in the mood to try a million dresses on my fat, overweight body. And the other thing is that no one talks about how you feel this pressure to wear a long, traditional gown. My legs are my best features! Seriously! In hindsight, it might have been an awesome idea to rock a short dress. At the very least, I should have bitten the bullet and tried on some dresses. Oh well. Live and learn.

2. Why didn't I just buy a damn veil?? Seriously. I fell in love with this Jennifer Behr double poppy veil, but couldn't bring myself to spend that much money on a veil. I mean, really? I looked around a little, but never found a good substitute. But let's face it. I didn't look hard enough. I figured I could make it myself. I tried to make it, but ran out of time. The Half-breed Swede tried to finish it for me, but ran out of time. Needless to say, I ended up with no veil. What a bummer! Your wedding is, like, your ONE time to wear a veil!

3. Okay, for someone who was the ultimate control freak with everything else, I really let A.P. handle his own stuff. I just wish I had made sure he had all his stuff. Oh, do I wish I had made sure he had all his stuff, namely HIS PANTS.

4. The Guestbook. At the wedding I just attended, I loved that the mom went around and reminded people to sign the guestbook. Then, at the end of the night, as people were leaving, she reminded them to take a favor and sign the guestbook if they hadn't. We hadn't. We did. Lovely set up our wedding beautifully, but they didn't put our guestbook in a great place. A lot of people thought we didn't have one. Many didn't sign at all. We ended up sending a ton of people postcards in their thank you cards and asked them to mail them back to us. Many did, but many didn't. It's a huge bummer that many of our guests didn't sign our guestbook. And in hindsight, a simple announcement or asking a friend to make sure people signed would have been a good idea and an easy solution.

5. We should have totally danced more. A.P. and I both danced a lot, but we both wish we'd danced until we were wiped from dancing. Instead, we'd dance a while, then visit a while. We should have made that party come to us. Yes. Awesomeness.

6. We should have taken more photobooth pictures. We managed to get two together and I got a bunch with friends. But I wish we'd taken more together (why didn't we just take a bunch in a row??), and I wish I'd taken more with my family. Poor A.P. was only in like three or four pictures total, including the two of us. So yeah, budge the line, cut, and take five in a row. It's YOUR wedding. We were way too polite about that shit.

7. Visited with more people. This one is so hard. It's so hard. I felt like I did a good job of at least talking to everyone, but there are some people, some out of towners I wish I had made a point to hang out with even more than I did. They paid a lot of money to be there and I didn't talk to them very much. This is one of those things, though, that I don't feel like you can ever win with. I think we did a good job, but there's always room for improvement.

8. I wish I'd made our post-wedding brunch later so we could have seen more people. We were so beat from partying until 4am that we made it to our brunch late. We connected with some people, but A.P.'s family had come and gone. I wish they would have waited for us, but I also wish that we had just made the damn thing later. Then we wouldn't have had to worry about being late.

9. I should have pushed my family to step up more. And A.P.'s, too. I feel like our families, in some ways, left us in the dust a bit. Don't get me wrong, they helped out. But my mom didn't come to the hotel to see me get ready. Neither did A.P.'s father. Nobody threw me a shower and I was too embarrassed to ask for one. I didn't tell my sister how I really felt about her not coming. All those things have left me, even a year and a half later, sad and sometimes resentful. If I had just spoken up, even to A.P.'s dad, I think we might have solved at least half of those problems.

10. Two words: dessert buffet. This is something A.P. and I have talked about extensively. We were dying for that dessert buffet. We dreamed about it before the wedding. Talked about it leading up to the wedding. And in the end, neither of us felt like we got to partake in any of it. Other than the bite of wedding cake we got after the cutting, and half of the filling of a lemon meringue pie I ate later, I got zero of that beautiful, awesome dessert buffet that everyone raved about. So, so lame. Lovely packed up a box for us, and we got zero of that, too. We weren't home the whole next day and then that night, we packed for our honeymoon. I think we split one or two cupcakes, but my brother who house sat for us got the whole box of goodies and a ton of wedding cake. When I came home, I ate wedding cake for like two weeks until I finally got sick one night. But it wasn't the same. If I were to do it all over again, I'd plop my fat ass down at that counter and devour as many desserts as I wanted. : )


To read about the 10 Things I Did Right, click here.

Do you subscribe to Not the Marrying Kind? If not, you should! It's free and fun and it means you automatically get new posts when the blog is updated. No having to check back! Click here for more details.