Wedding woes

The pressure of planning a wedding is starting to get to me I think. My initial plan was to do as much as possible last semester because I knew this semester would be busier once I was starting to narrow down my area of interest for my (eventual) thesis work. All in all I thought I did a good job in getting ahead, but there are really a lot more smaller details that I didn't have time to think about before. What about wedding favors? How do I lay out a program? Where would I get these printed? What passages should be read and who do we want to read them for us? What songs do we want played? Where do guests sit in the church? When should we register for gifts? Should we even do a gift registry? Do we want people to sit at specific tables at the reception? How informal is informal? Should we throw rice/birdseed/bubbles? What sort of champagne should we use for the toast? How long should the running slideshow be? Should we put other cute little stories about us somewhere? How should I wear my hair and how should my bridesmaids wear their hair? Same goes for makeup? What else (other than flowers) should be on the tables at the reception- candles? Which of my colors should I use where? How exactly do I want the flower arrangements? I have a florist and certain flowers picked out, but that's not enough, I need to know how I want things arranged and where I want them placed... gaah!

We had pretty intense wedding prep meetings the past few days; back in September when we attended the marriage prep forum, we also filled out this FOCCUS survey that asks about 180 questions related to various aspects of married life (finances, religious goals, children and family life, in-laws, sex, etc). The tests were scored based on the similarity of our answers and then whether or not those answers were in agreement with the way the church feels they should be answered. For example, the test asked a question like "My future spouse and I have agreed to not having children"; we both disagreed with that statement (since we both want kids) and the church's stance was that we should also disagree with it, since that's one of the goals of marriage in the eyes of the church. So yay, we agreed with each other and with the church. It turns out that each section had 2 -3 key questions and we agreed with each other and the church's answer for all of them, but we disagreed about 25% of the time. Many of those were because I answered "Undecided" for a lot of questions regarding religious practices of the Catholic church because I'm not familiar with them. And we also had ones we had talked about since then, such as questions pertaining to finances, so in September our answers were different than what they are now. Like we've talked about joint checking accounts and stuff, but at that time we hadn't. Plus where would the fun be if we agreed on 100% of all life matters? That sounds pretty dull truthfully. I think there needs to be some disagreement, otherwise how would we grow as people? How would we learn the benefits of compromise and to think differently from how we typically think? Mind you, not serious disagreement, but enough to make life interesting :-)

We met again with Father John last night; he's a really nice guy and I'm glad he's going to be the witness at the wedding. I learned some interesting things about the process of a Catholic wedding though; we're not doing a full mass obviously, since I'm not Catholic and neither is anyone in my family, but the ceremony will still take about 45 minutes. Apparently the bride and groom actually sit down for part of the ceremony, during the scripture readings, so they're not just standing up there for 20 minutes listening to someone talk. And the members of the wedding party actually sit down in the front pew and family sits in the second row. When it gets past the readings and into the vows, we stand up again, as do the members of the wedding party, but the priest stands away from the altar; it is to symbolize that the priest is just a witness to the event, and that Keegan and I are marrying each other, not being married by a priest. I think that's interesting because the typical scene is the bride and groom facing each other with the church representative facing their joined hands. I've never been to a Catholic wedding and I've only attended 2 or 3 other weddings that I can remember (I don't think being a flower girl to 4 or 5 couples really counts, especially when twice of those times it was to my parents when they remarried), so it will definitely be a learning experience for me. I'm glad there's a rehearsal! I'm pretty positive I wouldn't know what to do otherwise. Oh, also, there is no "Who gives this woman to this man" phrase, and the groomsmen and bridesmaids walk in on their own, instead of together. And apparently the mother of the groom and then the mother of the bride are the last to enter before me. But I guess other people probably knew that already...

Well, time to get to this huge stack of reading I'm working steadily through. Only one class today, but lots of reading and writing for the review paper. Maybe I'll start some of my homework in there too...

One more thing, I can't believe it's February! And according to our theknot website there are only 137 days until the wedding. March will be here before I know it, and since spring break is in March, that will really fly by. We go to break on March 6th or whatever, but then we don't go back to class until the 16th and by then the month is practically over. Or at least halfway over. Then April comes with exams and suddenly it's summer and I have no idea how I got there or what I'm supposed to be doing in lab. Oh goodness.