Stress!

I swore I would not get stressed out over this wedding! After we booked the hotel last year, we spoke to the priest. He thought we were mad discussing the wedding so early but I told him that time flies! I didn’t realise how right I was. I can’t believe it is now only 16 months to our wedding. It all seemed so easy a year ago, “We’ll start planning now and we’ll have loads of time,” I said. And so the planning began.

I have a very good friend who is an excellent photographer so I asked him to work on our day and he agreed. I have always loved classical music so we booked a string quartet for the church. My Dad is organising the DJ and the car so we seemed to be streets ahead as far as planning goes. Then we hit our first glitch. The band. Because we are getting married on the Saturday of the June bank holiday weekend we knew we would have to book the band early if we wanted a good one. Well, we got in over our heads! We decided on a quite famous Irish singer who now plays the English club circuit. We rang his agent, were told the date was available and then waited for the contracts, and waited, and waited! Six weeks later I was fit to be tied! Eventually after many, many phone calls the contracts arrived and the price had gone up by €1000! I thought I was going to cry. That night we rang our second choice band and thankfully they were still available. I say thankfully because they usually book up very quickly. Now a lot of you will be reading this thinking “Are you mad! You have ages yet!” but I am the type of person who likes to be organised, in fact I have lately acquired a lovely nickname from Alan-Monica (as in Monica from friends). Let me assure you I am not as bad as her (or so I think!)

So that had been my most stressful point so far, then four weeks ago we decide to buy a house. You think you know stress until you start getting caught up in contracts, PC allowances, solicitors, auctioneers…and we still have a wedding to plan on top of that! I am trying to lose two stone before I try on dresses (who isn’t!) and this is doing nothing for my chocolate addiction. Saying that though I think I have found THE dress! I haven’t even tried it on (I tried on something similar about 6 months ago) but I love it. It’s exactly what I am looking for. Then again, I think I have gone through about 6 phases of “this is THE dress” in the last year. I really think this is it though! I can’t go into too much detail as Alan reads this too but I will tell you if it is ‘The One’ at a later stage. I also think I may have picked my bridesmaid dresses. My sister, who is my chief bridesmaid, is quite fussy so it is fantastic to find one that we agree on. It’s not that I don’t want her to wear a dress she likes but some of the dresses she has been picking out look like pink/blue/green wedding dresses! I’m sorry but the only one wearing a wedding dress that day will be me!

So we’re in full swing now, my head is full of furniture and flowers, if I don’t calm down soon I’ll end up wearing a curtain down the aisle an wallpapering our house with mass booklets!