This is your brain on wedding anxiety.

Planning a low-key wedding is nearly impossible. Our daughter really, seriously wants a casual wedding that doesn't feed into the capitalist wedding machine. But she doesn't want a small wedding. She's an extrovert and she loves a whole lot of people, and she wants as many of them as possible to be there. 

If you ask me, the key to having a low-key wedding is to set the date no more than a year out. (Well, and also to have a small wedding, but that was out for us.) The more time you have, the more complicated things get. The date they picked was nine months away. 

But the problem is that a) we live in a destination wedding area, and b) most people plan their wedding for a year and a half or even two years out, so that venues, caterers, florists, wedding coordinators, and photographers are booked up way in advance. When you call them to ask about a date in nine months, they all but laugh. They're not even polite about it (possibly because they field calls like this all the time.)

And then there's the problem of people's expectations. I know any of you reading this would not be in this category (right?), but there are a whole lot of people who walk into a big social occasion and start to judge. How did you do the flowers? Is the bride's hair professionally styled? Did the bride's parents choose a decent wine? and on and on and on. 

And she (and I) just aren't that interested in those things. We've ordered flowers (*cough* many, many dollars of flowers *cough*), but not that many compared to other weddings this size. Mel doesn't want a professional stylist there doing her hair and makeup (and lord knows I don't). We're going to do the so-called tablescapes for the reception ourselves (we have the venue all day). Which is fine. It's the way we want to do it. 

But while I know that some people will look at our efforts and think how nice it is to go to a wedding that's not so overdone and overplanned, there are others will think, did they just go to Walmart yesterday and buy whatever they saw? because it's not going to look like Pinterest. It will look to some like we don't care. We absolutely do care, as you can tell because I've been losing sleep over it for months, but we care that it's casual and low-key and not overdone and overpriced. (although trust me, it's still plenty expensive.)

You know what? Probably not that many people. I'm obsessing. Welcome to my paranoia (again). It will be fine. Thank you for listening to me rant because it helps. It helps me see how ridiculous I'm being.