Alright, alright. If you’ve been following along, I am attempting to humanize weddings through sharing my personal experiences here on this blog of mine. You see, our wedding was perfect – just in the most imperfect of ways… which is pretty much my life. In case you missed it, I talked about the ideal of a perfect wedding and what our wedding actually looked like here. I want brides to know that these perfectly set tables with hundreds of candles and personalized scripted name tags filled with gold confetti are few and far in between. The world puts out this perfection vibe that forces brides to focus too much on the little things that really don’t matter and forget about the fun, joy, and bliss of a wedding day. Yes, we all wish our weddings looked like a perfect Pinterest board but the truth of the matter is, you will remember moments more than you will remember things.
I had these visions of myself toasting with a bubbly glass of champagne on my wedding night but the truth of the matter was: I was exhausted. Sure, I was in a state of bliss and focused my efforts on remembering every fleeting moment but I was also drinking coffee and toasting with Red Bull in efforts to keep my energy alive. If you know me personally, you know that I am a relatively cheerful person who generally doesn’t lack in energy… but the events leading up to our big day left little room for afternoon naps or full nights of rest. (We all know Jenna needs her afternoon naps, let’s be serious!) Please, if you get anything from this, take my advice: sleep.
I work with a lot of brides who live out of state, we bond over the fact that planning a wedding from afar is a challenge. The issue at hand was that I was stockpiling every ounce of vacation that I could from my corporate job in hopes of having two honeymoons, therefore we made the trek home before the wedding on a Wednesday night after work just days before the big event. We piled everything into our car including the dress, suit, centerpieces, and seating charts, and hit the road to Minnesota. The next few days were a blur of our marriage counseling with our pastor, decorating the reception site, family meals, a rehearsal dinner, time with my bridesmaids and a restless night of sleep before the wedding where I woke up every hour wondering if was time to get up and get ready! (Can you tell I was excited to get hitched? I was like a little girl on Christmas morning, bed head and all)
Needless to say, it hit me like a ton of bricks on the night of our wedding reception and when I finally sat down for dinner, I realized that I was running on fumes. I always tell my brides, if you can ensure that you get a good night of sleep the night before your wedding do it – whether your drink tea and wear an eye mask or take a Tylenol PM. Sleep – it’s a long and blessed day that you want to be awake, alive, alert, and enthusiastic for. You see, I think I was just so excited for it all that I couldn’t sleep. The night before the wedding I slept in bed with my sister next to me and my best friend on the floor by me. We talked and reminisced late into the night and when I finally decided that 6:30 AM was an acceptable time to wake up I rolled out of bed to get the wedding day started… well, that all led to me drinking coffee (no surprise there!) and relying on Red Bull to fuel my crazy amazing dance moves until I was ready to collapse at the end of the night.
Our wedding wasn’t perfect but even through the exhaustion I had the best day ever. Now I giggle when I look at our photos of our head table: laughing, crying, eating, and toasting with a silver can of Red Bull. That was our reality and trust me, I slept for days on our northwoods honeymoon…. for real.
Images by the awesome: on3design
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