It's Wedding Season? - Amuse Bouche #14

Hello and welcome back. This is Amose Boosh and I'm Bridget. Hello, thanks for being here. Here you're getting just a little bit of Bridget before our weekly release of Dinner Plus Drinks on Sunday. Today we are wedding planning, or at least I'm sharing a few tips and tricks that I've learned along the way, so stay tuned. For those of you that do not know me personally, I used to plan weddings in a previous life. It was like my only goal when I graduated college. I wanted to plan weddings. So to spare you all of the details, I ultimately achieved that goal. And it was fun while it lasted, and it was time to end when it was time to end. Many, many, many years later, I still find myself involved in weddings in one way or another. And I love helping family and friends plan weddings. It's like the best gift I can give someone, so I'm happy to do it. But through the years of helping people plan their weddings, watching people's ups and downs of weddings, learning everything through my own wedding, my sister's weddings, I've learned a couple things, and I think I have narrowed down at least what worked for us and have a three, my top three tips of how to start, like where to start if you're newly engaged or if you have kids that are engaged, three little tips that were really helpful for us, and they're not the things that you're gonna find when you Google, like, where do I start when wedding planning? So, are you wondering like why the heck I'm talking about wedding planning right now? Um, I'm well pla well past my wedding. I don't um have my kids aren't getting married yet, thank God. Um, but I am lucky enough to have two brother-in-laws that are currently engaged in planning weddings, and one of them um lives, both of them do not live in the state, but one of them, he and his fiance, are visiting this week because their wedding is going to be happening near where I in the town where I live. So yay! Um they're out of town and I'm in town, which means I get to help them and be really involved in the planning, which I always love doing. I try to step back and not insert myself unless they ask, and they were so um kind to ask. So they think I'm doing them a huge favor, which is great, and I'm happy to help, but I secretly love it. Um, so I've been doing various meetings throughout the week with them, I've set up some appointments for them, etc. etc. And I was reminded of my wedding planning, of course, um, when you're going through all of this, and I was helping, you know, they they've never planned a wedding, um, neither of them, right? And I I forget that some people have no idea where to start. This is not a thing, you know, they're not event people. Um, so I remember when I was the first of my three sisters to get married, and like, gosh, what do you do? Like, you get engaged, right? People are so excited, hooray! And almost immediately I feel like people are like, cool, when are you getting married? Cool, where? What are you doing? Tell me everything. Whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't have any of that information. So no one wants to like make those decisions right away. But my tip number one, and I'll put the tips in order in the show notes. Tip number one, sorry, but you gotta make a guess list. And I know you might not want to do that as soon as you uh get engaged and the first thing when you're wedding planning, but you have to make a guess list. And no, you don't have to pick every little detail, but you have to know if your wedding is going to be 50 or 200 people. But even more than that, you really need to know if your wedding is going to exceed 200 people because I have found in two different cities that I've done wedding planning in, once you cross the 200 threshold, your venues drastically change. Um, there are a lot of venues that can fit up to, you know, 150, 175. But as soon as you get up past 200, you're you're limited on the places that you can do that. We had a wedding that was large, um, so we had more than 200 people, so we had to get creative with a venue. Um, so I'm sorry to say you do have to make a guest list very early on because it's really hard to make any decisions about your wedding planning unless you have a guest list. That affects your budget, that affects your venue, that affects a whole bunch of things. So get on that guest list as tip number one, okay? I know that is one you're gonna Google. I just share it because I don't feel like that's one that people necessarily do right away because it's kind of obnoxious. No one wants to make the hard decision of cutting people or not. Which leads me perfectly into my very favorite wedding planning tip of all. This may sound obvious to people, but maybe not. It by far was the most helpful thing to Tyler and I when we were planning our wedding. Pick a priority. Wedding planning is so overwhelming, and if you're listening and you're like, cool, I don't care. I've I don't have anyone planning a wedding, I've already planned a wedding, then use this for any kind of event you're planning, even if it's a baby shower, a bridal shower, a Super Bowl party, I don't care. Pick your priority. Is your priority that you get to include every guest you want? Is your priority that you have the best music of anyone's wedding ever? Is it that you have the best food, the best whatever? Or is your priority that you don't really care what any of these people think and you just want to have five people there? You know what it what is your priority? Is it um the atmosphere? Is it the weather? Is it the time of year you get married? There are a thousand things that are gonna overwhelm when wedding planning. The picking the priority was so important, and I'm gonna give you an example because it allows me to talk about my wedding. Um, Tyler and I, it was important to us to not have to make the decision of cutting people from our guest list. We did not want to have to split hairs about, like, oh, well, we've only known this friend for five years and we've known this one for six, so sorry, they get the axe. We didn't want to have to do that and and have that kind of hanging over our head. And so we, our kind of guiding principle when we were planning our wedding was we didn't want to have to cut, we wanted to be able to invite everyone we wanted to invite. So that meant we had to get creative with a whole bunch of other things because also we aren't millionaires and we didn't want to spend fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars on a wedding day. So, gosh, how can we do this? Um, a very high priority next for Tyler, actually, I think, um, brought this one up, was the way that we were doing our food, and that was um food trucks. So, food trucks were going to be the main food for our wedding. This was, mind you, in 2014, before food trucks, like they were just coming on the scene as late-night snack for weddings. We had them cater the whole wedding. So think of stations at a wedding, but instead of walking up to a station, you go up to like one of five food trucks. So the way we were able to keep our guest list as large as we wanted and still afford a wedding was a number of things. I I did work in the industry at the time, so I knew where to go to the vendors that I have done favors with for over the years and and vice versa, but also having something like food trucks at your wedding allowed us to be creative with like the number of plates. So instead of saying, hey, your wedding costs $40 a plate, it costs us, we could say, hey, food truck number one, you prepare 150 things. Food truck number two, you're preparing 200, whatever. We got to be a little bit creative with the food costs. So that was really great and really important to us. But every decision we made was based on the fact that we agreed that we did not want to cut our guest list, so we are going to have a big wedding. So from there, we were able to build everything else around that. So pick your priority. Um, you know, is great food your priority? Yes. Well, then find your dream caterer and figure it out from there. So pick something that's gonna make you super happy. Um, this is obviously, I feel like I just need to put a caveat in here. Obviously, the priority is that you're marrying the person you love. We know that. We know the ceremony is important, we know all of those things. I I am being realistic that people care about a wedding reception, and um a lot of people enjoy hosting a uh gathering that means something to them. Um, so this is just the reception. I know that the ceremony and the actual act of being married is the most important thing. Just a caveat for I feel like uh just wanted to make sure no one got angry. So, tip number three that you may not find when you Google, and it may seem very obvious, but ask a friend. So probably the likelihood of you knowing someone that's married is high. So ask a friend. What did you forget? What do you regret? Is there a decision you would have done differently? Because a lot of people are getting married for the first time when they're planning their wedding, and you have no idea. Uh so start asking your friends, and your friends hopefully will be honest with you. Instead of saying everything was perfect, I would say, I wish I would have changed it into my dancing dress much earlier, and on that note, have a dancing dress. Uh, that was because dancing was important to me. You know, uh, I would have I would have given a few tips like that. So um make sure you have chapstick nearby if that's important to you. Whatever it is little may seem little to you, could be really important to the next wedding that you're planning. So ask around, ask your friends, take notes. So make a guest list early on in your wedding planning, pick a priority, and ask a friend. Those are the three easiest things I think that you could set your foot off right when you're starting your wedding planning journey. And then I could go on and on and on about this, but of course, you want to take a look at your day, see like how do you how do you want your day to feel, and make sure you design your day around that. But I'm not gonna go into the like have fun, it's about you. We know that it is. But do a couple of those quick three tips, and I think I hope you can find yourself having some fun wedding planning, even though it can be overwhelming and stressful. And this was just a fun quick amouse boosh about wedding planning because I've been doing it all week and I've been having fun with it, and I hope I've made it fun for my brother-in-law and his fiance as well. And I hope you can have some fun planning your weddings of the loved ones around you. Yay! Alright, guys, weddings are on the brain. I hope you have an awesome weekend. Stay safe, have fun, and tune in to Dinner Plus Drinks this weekend for more fun on Sunday. Bye bye.