Continue reading Wedding Graduate: Madeline’s Lazy (and possibly cheap) Blog-Chic Wedding Posts Tagged ‘Maddie’s Thoughts’
So I wrote Friday's post in a fit of being unable to keep it inside any longer. Because the secret is, throwing a wedding, even a stylish wedding, is easy. (Wedding planning is not, because it involves facing up to tradition, emotion, faith, aesthetics, family, money, and EXPECTATIONS, just to name a few.) But actually throwing a wedding? S-I-M-P-L-E. But there is so much cash involved (even in the blogging world) in making you think it's hard and involves, you know, signs hand painted onto old plywood and letterpress and monogrammed chocolate and fancy lights and hand-knit whatevers...because if weddings are hard, it keeps you hooked on figuring them out. So. It was time for the real scoop. And, because Team Practical never ceases to amaze me, I came home to this email from Madeline, and oh-my-god she and her husband actually threw the wedding I described, exactly. I love you guys.
Continue reading Wedding Graduate: Madeline’s Lazy (and possibly cheap) Blog-Chic Wedding
Continue reading Wedding Graduate: Madeline’s Lazy (and possibly cheap) Blog-Chic Wedding
14
How To: Plan a Beach Wedding
Mar
2011
So one of my dear friends recently got engaged (and y’all, my friends almost never get engaged), and told me she wanted to do a beach wedding, and did I have any advice. And I was like, “Um, well, I think you probably get some permits, and holy cr*p, I have no effing idea how you plan a beach wedding.” And then it hit me like a thunderbolt. For all that we talk about simple weddings on APW: picnic weddings, city hall weddings, at home weddings, beach weddings, and elopements we’ve never broken down, lazy-girl style, exactly how you plan these things. And not only have we not broken it down, I’ve seen precious few online tutorials on this kind of thing. So a new era of the how-to post has dawned. If you’ve thrown one of these weddings, and would be willing to write us a tutorial, pretty please send it to Lauren at Lauren at apracticalwedding dot com (with some pictures). But right now, we have Maddie of the original Lazy Girl’s Wedding and Hart + Sol Photography, telling it how it’s done, hilariously:
Disclaimer: This is obviously optimized for throwing a beach wedding in Maine. Specifically Old Orchard Beach (woot woot).
So I always envisioned getting married on the beach in a big hippie love fest, complete with a lobster bake and galvanized bins filled with beer and cheap champagne. (It would have looked almost exactly like this recent photo shoot on Snippet and Ink, actually. If you asked me in high school what I would have worn, I would have told you jeans and flip flops.
But the reality of getting married on the beach is that beaches very rarely offer the same freedoms as private property. Also some people have serious aversions to sand, and consider it a glorified form of dirt. But beach weddings are possible, and not all of them require you to throw a large chunk of cash at an all-in-one beach resort type place. I guess this is the DIY beach wedding in that way.
The following tips won’t guarantee you the best beach wedding ever. They are my tips for getting you the most bang for your buck, in terms of both finances and the amount of effort you have to put in to pull it off.
Enough rambling. Here are the meat and potatoes:
1.) This may seem like a no-brainer, but pick a date in the off-season. I’m not sure what that means to the West Coast, but for us New Englanders that means any time before Memorial Day and after Labor Day. The weather will still be stunning, but you’ll hear a lot more “yes” if you’re not trying to pull off a huge event in the middle of local business’ bread-and-butter season. Also, they’ll probably be more flexible in pricing than if you were trying to get married over 4th of July weekend or something.
2.) Once you pick a date, you’ll need to decide if you’re going public beach or private beach. We searched high and low for someone with a private beach property who would rent us their house for a wedding and most people very kindly laughed at the proposition. This might not be an issue if your wedding is less than 50 people, but if you are going to have any sizable guest list, you might want to consider a public beach.
3.) If you choose a public beach, literally memorize the city ordinances governing that beach. By studying up on the Town Of Old Orchard home page, we learned that bonfires require burn permits, special events only really require permits if you’re going to block off an area of the beach or require sound amplification, and most importantly THERE IS NO WAY TO AVOID OPEN CONTAINER LAWS. I put this in caps because I spent hours trying to figure out a way around the open container laws on the beach. Not. Gonna. Happen. If your goal is to have booze at your wedding, then the next thing I suggest is to have your ceremony on the beach and a separate location for the reception.
4.) Once we decided to have the ceremony on the beach and the reception at a local restaurant, our wedding planning became a cake walk. Because our little beach restaurant was a very popular spot for music and dining during the summer, they already had a setup for sound amplification (yes, you NEED this if you’re going to have more than 20 people trying to hear your ceremony) and they knew how to feed 200+ people. Done and done.
Last week we kicked off a discussion of wedding planning with divorced parents, with a lovely and emotional post from Rachelle. Today, Maddie (she of the original lazy girl wedding, and these days half of APW photography sponsor extraordinaire Hart + Sol) is here with a helpful, logistical advice post. This post is a Must Read people, even if you have nary a divorce in your family. Because the thing is, both David and I have happily married parents, but I found myself welling up and nodding as I read this post. Because the thing is? Families be crazy. Lovely, messy, loving, and slightly nuts… particularly at wedding time. And all of this advice is wise, and will make you feel a lot less alone. Because you know what? You’ve got Maddie on your side (and me).
{Maddie’s Family Rainbow: she tried to make a family tree but it didn’t really… work}
Sometimes I look at the Pottery Barn catalogue and wonder what it must be like to be the kind of person who can order a kitchen table and have it delivered to their door in one piece, ready to transform a dining space, seemingly without effort, into something that looks like it belongs in Martha Stewart Magazine.
But frankly, I have no idea what that’s like. I own Ikea furniture. When I bought a new kitchen table, it came in two different boxes and the pieces for each component were split apart between the packaging, so I had to take all of the parts out of both boxes, lay them out on the floor, and then begin the puzzle-like assembly from instructions written in Swedish.
When I put my furniture together, it seldom looks like the picture in the catalogue, and there are always extra pieces that don’t seem to have any purpose but to confuse me. But at the end of the process, I have a kitchen table that I can eat off of, so I suppose that’s all that really matters. But still, I can’t help but wonder if the lives of the Pottery Barn elite aren’t just that much simpler.
My family is not so different. While other kids grew up with two parents who arrived at parties together and stayed in the same hotel room for out-of-town competitions, mine was the kind that came in separate cars, maybe didn’t speak to each other at the party, and yet still would be introduced as “My family (exclamation point, pause, jazz hands)” to inquiring parents of friends.
I could explain the detailed intricacies of my little unit, but Meg made me promise this post would be shorter than War and Peace, so suffice to say through a complicated mess of babies out of wedlock, marriages and divorces, I have a mom, a biological father that I call “Dad”, a step-father (who is no longer married to my mom) who I also call “Dad”, a woman who has been dating my biological father for twenty years who I call “Pam” to her face, but refer to as my stepmom behind her back, and a man named John who married my mom about a year ago and is very nice but might not ever earn a fatherly title. They all live within a mile of each other, are cordial in the presence of one another, and have been involved in raising me for most of my life. We aren’t a catalogue family, but we function nonetheless. And thankfully, it’s never seemed like work. I’ve always just been thankful to have a big support system made up of lots of different, complimentary personalities. Why would I pass up the opportunity for big love like that?
{Maddie’s Family Map: for reference purposes}
However, it wasn’t until planning our wedding that I realized why this complicated family of mine works so (seemingly) effortlessly. It’s because I put in a lot of effort into making it work. I’ve never blinked at my double birthday parties, or complained when I shuffled from my mother’s house to father’s house to stepfather’s house for Christmas dinner. I was always quick to ask my father for my mom’s child support check or defend my mom when my father’s sister questioned her parenting skills. Throughout my childhood I juggled personalities, relationships, and priorities like a well-trained circus clown. And I was happy to do so.
But the problem with weddings, you see, is that the bride isn’t supposed to play that role. There are surprise showers to throw! And celebrations to plan! And it’s your special day, so we’ll just take care of it!
And that’s when things go to shit. Kind of. Continue reading Planning A Wedding With Divorced Parents (Part II)
27
Wedding Graduates Return: Maddie
Oct
2011
This morning, we introduced the newest member of the APW staff, Submissions Editor Maddie. Now that you guys are through your whirlwind of excitement (Who am I kidding? You’re still excited!), Maddie is here with her first post as a staff member. Long time readers will remember her lazy girl wedding two years ago, and now she’s back, writing about what she learned. She’s writing about how sometimes we do need to sacrifice dreams for our relationships and how instead of that being anti-feminist, it can end up being the most empowering thing we ever do.
Growing up with my ill-paired parents, I got used to hearing conflicting messages as a kid. My mom and dad (separated well before I was born) disapproved of most of each others’ parenting lessons, but there was one they could agree on: Getting married one day would be a perfectly fine option for me, so long as it didn’t compromise my bright, shiny future.
It’s not that getting married was a bad thing exactly—it’s just not something I was ever supposed to aspire to. I had much bigger fish to fry. And if fate would have it that I should get married, I was not to let it hinder my bright, shiny plans for success (to become Jodie Foster if my dad had it his way; Oprah Winfrey if my mom had hers). Furthermore, it was made very clear that if I were to get married, my success would have to be despite that relationship, and most certainly not because of it.
I’d be like that surfer girl who kept surfing even after she got bitten by a shark; marriage could set me back temporarily, but it would never prevent me from realizing my greatness. (Holy swollen ego, Batman.)
So when I married Michael two years ago, that was very much where I stood with regards to marriage. Sure, I was in favor of being with Michael forever—that was an easy promise. But committing to another person and committing to a lifelong partnership are two very different beasts. Still, armed with my parents ideologies, I trudged onward in my dedication to have my cake and eat it too. (Oh and I was going to eat lots of cake. I might even eat all the cake. Watch out world!)
And for the first year of our marriage, I did just that. Michael and I built up a casual existence in Connecticut, eventually adopting a dog, settling into a cute downtown apartment close to the commuter rail, and sometimes doing things together on the weekends. On the flip side, I had a completely independent life in New York City, where I commuted two hours each morning to a Soho office to work 10-hour days at my, ahem, dream job in the entertainment industry for $14 an hour. It was perfect. I wasn’t compromising my goals for domesticity. I wasn’t sacrificing my dreams for a man. And I most certainly wasn’t letting my marriage prevent me from becoming Tina Fey (eat that, parents). Sisters, I was doing it for myself.
But.
I also wasn’t sleeping. Or making any money. Or seeing my husband. Ever.
Around our one-year anniversary, I broke. Continue reading Wedding Graduates Return: Maddie
06
Maddie’s APW Book Review
Dec
2011
As a long-time reader of APW who has been married for over two years, I’ll admit, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to get from the APW book (don’t buy it till tomorrow!). I mean, hello, I’m a seasoned veteran here, folks. I already got married, I work for APW, and I photograph weddings for a living. What do you think you’re going to tell me about weddings, Meg, that I don’t already know?
And then I read the book. And I was blown away.
Within the first ten pages of the book I was crying in the waiting room of a Subaru Service Center mourning the wedding-planning experience I can never have because this book wasn’t around during my engagement. Oh the easily avoidable family drama! The DIY projects that never should-have-been! The time I cried in the car about sparklers!
What the APW book does differently from every other wedding book, blog, or magazine out there is it actually removes things from your to-do list rather than adding to it. Meg isn’t trying to convince you to buy more, do more, spend more. She just wants to make sure that the things you’re buying, doing, and spending on mean something to you. Did you just read that? It’s wedding literature that gives a shit that you’re a person. Novel.
But, back to why this book matters to you. The part that is going to blow you away. Are you ready? The APW book is the only wedding literature you’ll ever read that actually saves you money (and not in a “follow these tips to get 10% off a bunch of crap we just convinced you that you need,” kind of way). Trying to figure out how to cut costs but are tired of people telling you to eliminate guests? Go buy the book. Can’t figure out why your totally reasonable budget is suddenly too small for the wedding world? Seriously, go buy the book. Still fighting with your mom because she thinks you need chair covers? Yeah, just go buy the book. And then buy another copy for your mom.
It’s hard to put into words, but what the APW book provides for weddings (and if I’m being honest here, life) is that it gives a freedom to care about the things that matter, to cross off things that don’t, and the WIC-free wisdom to know the damn difference.
Now, I’m sure that some of you probably don’t believe me. Of course, it’s so easy to say these things now that I’m married and the wedding itself is far behind me. But as I read the book, I steadily ticked off a mental checklist of all the money and stress I could have saved if I’d had Meg’s book while planning my wedding. And let me tell you, it is worth the investment. Allow me to demonstrate:
Wedding Costs I Could Have Avoided:
Gocco Printer – $400
DIY Invitation Supplies – $100
First Wedding Dress – $100
DIY Flowers (that died) – $300
Total: $900
Cost of Meg’s Book:
A Practical Wedding (Book) – $10.88 on Amazon (Don’t buy it till tomorrow! Seriously people!)
Total: $10.88
Savings: $889.12
More importantly, I was able to make a list of all the emotional headaches that were completely unnecessary but somehow seemed so unavoidable at the time, such as:
The fight we had about sparklers and their relative safety to our guests
The time my mom and I fought about earrings
The time my mom and I fought about my ever-growing DIY projects
The week I spent not sleeping because I had to make my own invitations
The midnight photoshoot for our save-the-dates that I insisted must be done immediately, or else
The time I spent feeling bad about these things when I should have just let myself off the hook and moved on
etc.
And if that’s not enough to convince you, maybe we can talk about something else that’s important—the fact that the wedding world is kind of out to get us. Between the reality TV shows, the magazines, and the blogs, the wedding industry makes us out to be both the victims and the villains of our own wedding stories. We’re either doing Too Much or Not Enough and we can never win. And the industry is making boatloads of money off our insecurity. But this book, this monumental labor of love, it doesn’t want that for you. It gives you the power to own your wedding, to make it something that is meaningful, joyful, respectful—and that’s powerful. In fact, I’m surprised the wedding industry even allows this book to exist, that’s how much it challenges the commonly-held notions about what weddings are supposed to be. And that, my friends, is something worth celebrating.
Which is why, even though I’ve already read it, I’m going to buy a few copies for my clients and my newly or soon-to-be engaged friends tomorrow. It’s time we reclaim the word “wedding,” and I can’t think of a better way to do it than by taking this book to the top.
Photo by One Love Photo. Read all the posts on writing the APW book here. The APW Book Buy is tomorrow!
15
Reclaiming Wife: On The Traditions That Matter
Dec
2011
As this year at APW winds to a close, we wanted to take a little more time to ponder the holidays, building traditions, and growing with the brand new families we create on our wedding day. I could not think of a single more beautiful way to do that than APW editor Maddie‘s post this morning about incorporating her partner into her most personal and emotional of family traditions. But, better still, later today Michael will be here, telling the story from his perspective. Happy Holidays you guys. May you spend it with the people that matter most to you (no matter how tricky it is to navigate those waters).
It is Christmas Eve and I am in my car on the phone with Michael, pleading with him to please, just this once, stop being so stubborn and spend some damn time with my family. This is not the first time we’ve had this conversation. But I can’t really blame him. I’m calling him from where I’m parked, in the local cemetery, and I’m asking him to come down here.
But this is my tradition. So this is what I need.
Since my sister passed away more than a decade ago, it has been our family tradition to spend Christmas Eve at McDonald’s (for breakfast, obvs) and then the cemetery. Gathering like this is the only way that my whole family can come together anymore, and as a result, this tradition has become something sacred to me. More than the holiday itself, our time at the cemetery is what Christmas means to me. And I need Michael there.
Still, I understood his hesitation. We’d been together a few years by this point (Three years, four? I don’t remember. He’ll tell you it was sooner.), but somehow, despite what we shared, it still felt too personal for him. While we were looking forward to a future together, my family was commemorating a history that precluded him, and therefore (maybe?) excluded him (or so he felt). How could he intrude on something so intimate? Moreover, how could he join in?
But still, the shrill pleading of my voice can be persuasive, and Michael buckled, driving the handful of miles from his mother’s house to the cemetery in our town and joining in on the festivities.
Together we tossed the football (ok, he tossed and I dropped), decorated the two small trees flanking my sister’s site, and fed the ducks with my grandmother (I think she just throws a loaf of bread in their direction and has them do the rest of the work).
I don’t remember if he enjoyed himself that day. But what I do remember is that the difference for me was palpable.
It wasn’t so much that I needed him there for the support. I needed him there because this tradition says, without words, so much about who I am that I didn’t think he could possibly understand the whole me without it. The same way that Christmas at his grandmother’s house speaks volumes about the man I’ve married. (They open their presents one at a time, in assembly line fashion. What is that?) Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: On The Traditions That Matter
