I've been keeping myself pretty busy the past couple of months with wedding planning, freelance work, looking for a new job, everyday errands, meal-prepping, working out, and to be honest... with a little bit of freaking out! I’ve been having trouble balancing everything I have to do, and I have to admit that I’ve begun feeling a tremendous amount of Anxiety. Like, wake up at 3:00 am and can’t fall back asleep because your daily schedule pops into your head kind of anxiety.
Even though Henrik and I have had more time to make decisions than most couples for their weddings since we began planning a year and a half out, the workload keeps increasing the closer we get towards the date. I feel like having extra time for planning has possibly even complicated things further for us. We’ve done tons of research and seen numerous options for everything possible (maybe me a little more than Henrik), making every decision much more difficult. I thought I was good at decision making but now second guessing all of our choices has become second nature. Embarrassingly, every stupid little decision for anything in the wedding has now become this strange eternal reflection of us as a couple in my head and has put me into full-blown perfectionism mode. I have to keep reminding myself and getting reminders from others that i’m being totally RIDICULOUS!
We are currently now stuck working on a million little things. For instance, this weekend we spent a whole day looking at what to do for welcome gifts for guests that are staying overnight at our wedding hotel. It was insane how much time and money you can spend on crap like this. We were like "do we go with boxes, bags or baskets?" Then it got me wondering if people can fit a basket in their suitcase. Or, if anyone even really f’ing cares about any of this and would we be spending a crapload on fancy baskets for no reason? Well, needless to say, we went with a nice gift bag (that I will probably tie a big luxurious looking tag and ribbon on).
Then, of course, the second half of the day, we had to decide what the heck to put in our newly purchased bags. At this rate, we will be done in a millennium. We bulk purchased still and sparkling water that we hope to put custom labels on. We’ve also started to make cute little custom trail mix bags, with stuff from the Costco of Sweden, called Martin & Servera, but we still don't really know what else to pair with it yet. (side note: Martin & Servera just recently renovated their stores. They are so refreshingly clean and nice inside now!) Maybe we could also get something sweet that is iconically Swedish to put inside our gift bags too? Any ideas? Comment below! Though all of this sounds like a lot of fun, there are so many silly details like this left to do and I feel like we have like negative time to get it all done, so i’ve gotten super stressed out. Why didn’t anyone really sit me down and tell me that weddings can get this crazy? Maybe they did and I just didn’t hear it.
Our bag full of bags from Office Depot in Sweden and the endless amount of finishing stuff I am just starting to collect and test. These current finds are from Panduro, and the cute danish store in our local mall at Liljeholmen called Søstrene grene.
One of the many cute little confetti pops my mother sent me in the mail from the US. And, our wedding ribbon styles for testing on gifts and decor.
Not sure if I'm going to use this for anything, but I liked the idea of trying to tie the place cards to the napkins with little leather ties. Even better, I found imitation suede which is a little more animal friendly. We are having a table decor workshop with the wedding planner and florist soon, so I've been collecting random things like this to test that day.
The velvet ribbon we bought off of Ebay.co.uk from China, to use on our invitations from Minted.com. I had my heart set on velvet ribbon for the invitations and that was the only place we could find it. I think they turned out quite nice!
Our new homemade (well... home assembled) trail mix!
Balancing all these little choices for everything imaginable, within our set budget, has also been quite a task. Turns out everything I decide that I like best is, of freaking course, the most expensive option! Go figure! I’ve turned to DIY’ing a few different things to help on cost. Which, I think has definitely added to my stress and time issues. I have to keep reminding myself that I am not a long lost Kardashian and no one expects to see custom over-the-top everything. I was in so deep I was looking into getting embroidered napkins, personally engraved wine glasses for all the guests, and a private castle museum tour with actors in costume (our wedding is at a castle with a museum inside part of it). Yep, true story! I actually almost made all of that happen until my mom called me and legit said “No, Heather. You are not the activities director on a cruise ship. This is a wedding.” Which, brought me back down to planet earth a bit. I can’t help it, I’m American. As we say, go big or go home, right?
When I was whining about all the idiotic things going wrong with the wedding planning yesterday to a friend, she asked me a clever question that really made me pause and regain my sanity. She said “what do you really remember from all the other weddings you’ve been to? Do you remember the tables? The gift bags? Do you remember any of these details?” and all I could answer her with was the word “No.” 🙃