Babydoll Weddings is excited to introduce Alan and Adrian. We are delighted to provide hair and makeup services for their entire wedding party this coming January, 2018. We fell in love with them instantly and were beyond thrilled when they agreed to let us share their love story with you. Alan will be taking over our blog for a special series “Alan & Adrian Get Married” sharing their wedding planning experiences as a newly engaged couple planning a same-sex wedding. We hope you love them as much as we do!
Hiring a Wedding Planner?
Weddings can be an overwhelming experience with a lot of details being thrown at you from left and right. So what do you do? Some couples decide to hire a wedding planner to help wrangle all the numerous details and vendors for the day of, while others decide to plan their wedding themselves.
Wedding Planner Pros
If you decide to go with a wedding venue that isn’t all-inclusive then I highly recommend hiring a wedding planner. The wedding planner becomes the main point of contact for all your vendors. She/he will manage every detail for you which frees you up to simply enjoy being engaged. We learned early on that planning a wedding and coordinating with the many vendors is time consuming. For these reasons and more, hiring a wedding coordinator is worth the money.
All-Inclusive Venues
Because Adrian and I chose an all-inclusive wedding venue, we decided to forego a wedding planner. We chose a travel themed wedding and we’re so thankful that our venue has a lot of decorations already on hand (and very tasteful too) so we don’t need to worry about setting up or taking down any of the decorations, which gives us one less detail to worry about. We do still need to work with the vendors in terms of selecting the meal options, cake details, and other customized requests, but the venue will handle the same details a wedding planner would (arrival times, liaising with vendors, etc).
One of the things we love about Aldea is that they will schedule various meetings to keep us on track including a decor meeting to review decor options for the ceremony, cocktail hour, the reception, and a final meeting before the wedding to go over what you need to bring the day before so they can set it up ahead of time. What’s also nice about Aldea is that you can go into your decoration meetings knowing exactly what decorations you want where, or you can completely leave it up to their discretion. They let the couple be in control which certainly alleviates a lot of stress.
Planning Websites
There are many websites out there that are helping plan the other details of our wedding, but the two main ones that I’ve focused on are theknot.com and pinterest.com. While we all know Pinterest can store visual details, but I took it one step further. I use Pinterest to pin all my ideas that I need to narrow down, and then I unpin the ideas that I don’t want there anymore and keep that one idea that I’m going to go with. For example, if I’m trying to decide on dresses for my girls, I’ll pick all the different styles I like and then I’ll start to remove all the dresses I’m not a fan of until I finally find a style that I like and then I leave it there in it’s own Pinterest board so it’s sectioned off and kept away from my other ideas.
The Knot has been the other great asset when planning. Not only does it create your wedding website, but it keeps track of the budget, the guest list and the RSVPs, and also has it’s own set of design ideas. Need a countdown calendar and checklist to help you keep track of your to-do list? It’s here! I can honestly say we’d be all over the place and very confused if it wasn’t for this website.
The Decision is Yours
No matter if you decide to leave everything in the hands of a wedding planner, or decide to take the bull by the horns and plan it all yourself, do what you think will cause you the least amount of stress because it’s your special day and the only thing you need to worry about is proclaiming your love to your spouse to be.