How my budget app just altered the way I view my wedding
I have been checking and re-checking my wedding budget spreadsheet weekly — especially the estimates vs actual money spent. I am not the first, nor will I be the last that spends a good deal of valid energy on a wedding. But something happened yesterday, thanks to an app, that helped remind me of the fun of wedding planning.
“How can a dress make you fat?”: Judging my value by more than my clothes
Recently, I overheard a (rather curmudgeonly) acquaintance complaining, “These days, no one cares about who you are inside or what you do anymore: you can behave as hatefully as you want, as long as you wear the right shirt.” At the time, I rolled my eyes, and he backed down from such an extreme example; but when I returned home and was fretting about wedding things again, his remarks came back to me, and gave me a wee epiphany about wedding planning
How life and a terminal illness inspired us to elope
The topic of elopement came and went several times, but we both decided that a big, beautiful wedding was the way to go for us. Then life decided to get involved. I was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Neither of us could ignore the incessant ticking of the clock the doctors had set for me, though. So the topic came again: to elope or not to elope?
Reality check: wedding planning isn’t SO bad
We have a tag archive here on Offbeat Bride called overcoming adversity, and it’s all about couples who’ve dealt with significant, serious challenges on the path to the altar. Now, I don’t mean challenges like, “My divorced parents don’t get along; how will I do the seating chart?” or “What if it rains?” Not to diminish the reality of these challenges, but they’re just on a different level than, say, “My mother is dying so we threw the wedding together in a month” or “my partner was attacked by a shark.”
In the name of perspective shifting and reality checks, let’s take a wander through some of our overcoming adversity posts… because there’s nothing like cancer, premature babies, peg legs, and tornadoes to help you get your seating chart woes in perspective.