our wedding adventure: finding our way

the boy and i were married on september 10, 2011, in a beautiful saturday morning outdoor ceremony. it was low-key, casual, and a little outside "traditional" (read: absolutely perfect). almost every part of it was handmade or homemade, or created with the help of some talented friends (i must mention that none of them are professionals, but they produced some truly beautiful results). while the day-of was fun and relaxed, the path we took to get there was anything but.

i'll admit, when we first got engaged in february 2010 i went on a bit of a wedding bender. i quickly found any number of wedding blogs with inumerable inspiration photos and stories. i created a file devoted to wedding images, and filled it with hundreds within weeks. we had agreed not to talk about weddings for the first little bit, as we simply wanted to enjoy being engaged, but i was bursting to discuss it at length. when we finally did start talking about it, i had a pretty solid idea of what our wedding could be like, and since the boy is incredibly easy-going, he hopped on board with what i wanted. when we found a venue we both liked a few weeks later, we were ecstatic, and barely hesitated signing to reserve our date.

and that is when we hit a wall. hard.

you see, we knew we would need to be on a budget. we're a young couple, the boy was going back to school, and our families didn't have the means to throw us a lavish affair. but i don't think we really thought about how much money $7,000 actually was. it wasn't until we'd reserved our date and received an official quote for what we wanted that the cost finally hit home. and i lost it.

we were lucky enough to be able to cancel our reservation without penalty (as it had only been a few weeks since we'd signed), and then wedding planning took a giant step back in our lives. when we did talk about it, the conversation became very emotional, as we had no idea how to have the wedding we (thought we) wanted without the sky-high (for us) cost. over the next several months we continued to debate and discuss what we could do. we looked at a number of smaller, cheaper venues, but none of them suited. we debated just getting married at city hall, and for a while that option stuck. but then we started thinking about the family and friends we couldn't have in attendance, and how the boy really wanted the whole "walk down the aisle" experience for me. each time, we ended up back at square one.

and then something happened. we dropped the idea of the wedding we thought we needed to have, and started picking up the pieces of the wedding we actually wanted. i can't remember for the life of me how the idea of a morning wedding came up, but we both liked it pretty much immediately.  by this time we were already a couple of months into 2011, and with roughly 6 months to go (we wanted to keep the date in september 2011), we knew we had to get a move on.

i landed on our venue completely by chance, but knew it was perfect. we visited, loved, and reserved our date. we contacted a catering company my mom had worked with before to score some breakfast and snack trays. friends started helping with small projects. we printed our invites and mailed them out. we went shopping for the boy's suit. i found an off-the-rack dress that made my heart melt.

and just like that, piece by small piece, we put together a wedding we loved. all of those inspiration photos i had diligently saved early on in our engagement went into the digital garbage. only the few that really struck a chord stayed. mostly, we went with whatever felt right to us. in the end, we had the perfect wedding for us: a beautiful outdoor ceremony, followed by snacks and games, an afternoon barbecue at my mother-in-law's, and a night out on the town.

when i look back on it, i realize i let myself get overwhelmed by the whole "wedding" aspect of it. i failed to see the "dave and yael" that needed to be considered. as a couple, we're fairly laid-back and relaxed. we don't enjoy being the centre of attention. a big affair just didn't fit. luckily, we managed to find a wedding path that screamed our names, and we followed it.