Covid-19 Wedding Planning - Where We're At In The Process

 "Being a 2020 bride is fun" - said no one ever.

No, but really. Although I'm still a bride in 2020, I'm very fortunate enough to not have my wedding completely affected by Covid so far. My heart truly goes out to all the brides that were planning on getting married this year, or have already gotten married this year. 

I can't imagine what you're going through, or the hoops you had to go through to completely change everything you've been dreaming of. This should be the happiest most magical time of your life, and instead it's full of confusion, heartbreak, and uncertainty. While it is extremely hard to hold onto optimism, and positive thoughts, regardless, I like to remember that everything will work itself out in the end, and you're marrying the love of your life. Covid won't last forever, but your marriage will. 

Please know that I am sending out so much love to all of you. Hold your fiance's hand, and make every kiss count. This too shall pass, and your wonderful day will be here before you know it. I ask that you stay positive, stay healthy, and keep on dreaming for better days to come <3

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I asked on Instagram stories last week what type of Wedding Wednesday post you guys would like to see, and the majority voted to see wedding updates. (We just took these photos on our mini getaway to Wildwood a few weeks ago. Thanks Erin for capturing them!

Within the first 2-3 months of being engaged we pretty much had most of our vendors and venue figured out, but not officially booked yet.

We first toured our venue in October of 2019, and were still deciding between the beach, and semi-local rustic golf course. The day we toured the Women's Civic Club, we knew this was the choice we wanted to make. 

We originally planned to have our ceremony on the sand in front of the water, and have the reception in the parking lot at the sand, but we are now moving away from both of those plans. We recently toured the venue back in May for the 2nd time with our day of coordinator, and decided to move the ceremony over one block to a gorgeous beach front pergola. We think this move will be a unique feature of the wedding, and also think the guests will love it more!

We are also no longer having the reception outside in tents, due to tents being too far out of budget for us. Our venue has an inside which comes included. I would have loved to have an entire outdoor wedding, but weather can also be so unpredictable on the coast. It was hard to make that choice, but we think it will be better in end especially for weather and temperature purposes. 

After booking our venue, we booked everything else shortly after. So far we have booked our 

• photographer
• florist
• caterer
• officiant
• day of coordinator
• DJ

We still haven't booked the cake vendor (we already know we will be booking Shady Maple cupcakes), linens/chairs, hairstylist, and makeup artist yet. For the most part, we are basically finished with all of the vendors! We opted out of using a videographer, due to budget restrictions right now.

With booking the DJ, we've also picked out most of the music that will be playing at the reception such as the first dance song, cake song, entrance song, etc :) 

So far we've sent out our save the date cards from Zola, and will be sending out our invitations in January or February from Stylish Wedd! Check out my blog post here about how easy and affordable it was to order from them! We are going for a very rustic, greenery, vibe on the beach, hence the eucalyptus invitations. Our save the dates are also in the colors we chose for the theme as well. 

Starting in October of last year, I started proposing to my bridesmaids. Since I wasn't giving most of my girls their proposals until Christmas time, I wanted to take photos of their boxes with a Christmas theme. So in the middle of October 2019, I set up part of our Christmas tree just for photos of all the girls boxes.

I knew I was going to post them around December, but unfortunately my camera card ended up being corrupted with the files on them, and lost them. Luckily, I was able to recently retrieve them, so you can expect a bridesmaids proposals blog post THIS Christmas lol.

In February of this year, I said Yes to the dress at Jennifer's Bridal! You can read more about my entire experience at Jennifer's Bridal here! It took about 5 months for my dress to come in, and I was able to pick it up last month in July. It feels so good to know I have the dress, and that it's completely mine! The only thing left to do is to get it fitted and altered. I should have about 2 more fittings before the big day in June.

Back in January of this year, I went to David's Bridal to get a feel for styles of dresses before my big appointment at Jennifer's to try on my dream dresses. Although I found some pretty dresses, they just weren't the ones. I am planning on going back to David's Bridal at some point soon in order to pick out some accessories/jewelry and some pretty sandals for the day of. 

Right now we are pretty much in limbo with planning. I'm just working on the nitty gritty details of how I want tables to look, and detail decor all around! In May we worked on some mock set ups, and venue floor plans with the coordinator. I highly suggest doing this! It enables you to envision everything better, and work on kinks in your plans. So far below is our set up.

I've also been working a lot on planning our guestbook table, gathering decor from Facebook marketplace and wedding flea markets. Highly recommend as you can save so much money with flea markets and Facebook groups! Plus it's really fun.

Other than that, as of last week we have officially booked our beach house that we will be staying in for wedding week with my family! I am so excited to rent an entire house with my family as it was always a tradition doing it in Stone Harbor every year my entire life. We haven't been able to do something like that now for about 7 years now. I feel like this wedding has brought those sweet and precious memories back for me. 

Lastly, let's talk honeymoon! Nick and I had originally planned to go to Paris after wedding weekend was over, but we have had a slight change of plans. We are still deciding if we will be going to just Paris for 6 days, or if we will be doing a split trip between Paris and Amsterdam for 3 days each. Still undecided, but excited to think about going to my dream city.

We have also changed our plans from leaving 2 days after the wedding until holding off for about a month or two before heading on our honeymoon. We felt as though everything would seem to rushed, and we wanted to real take everything in to also spend time with many of our guests who will be traveling 7-10 hours to see us. Instead, we will be staying at the beach for the week, and going on our real honey moon hopefully in July or August. 

I'm pretty sure that's covered the majority of our planning process so far. It's been nice to not have anything to worry about for awhile, which I partially why I am liking the little bit of a longer engagement. 

With 2021 quickly approaching we still have no idea what is in store for our wedding plans come June. At this point in time we have started to think about back up plans just incase things don't slow down with Covid. Worst comes to worst, we plan to still get married on our date of June 11th, on the beach, but intimately with very close friends and family only. Then, when the time is right, we would reschedule a reception with everyone we originally planned to invite for a later date. 

I am praying we will not be affected by this, but it's always good to start thinking of Plan B! I really hope this post covered everything you were hoping for and our wedding updates so far. If you've made it to this point in the post, I just want to thank you so much for reading! I appreciate you :)