First comes love, then comes wedding planning

So after getting engaged, there are certain steps to be made. I guess the obvious would be to tell everyone, get really excited, fantasize about your big day... but at some point it's time to start getting down to business.

First order of business: When should we get married?

The fiance and I got engaged January 1st 2011. We knew a couple things right off the bat. We did not want to get married this year. The thought of planning a wedding in less than one year really stressed me out. We also wanted to take our time and enjoy our engagement. We knew that we would be getting married in California, not New York where we live. All of our family is in California, it is the state in which we fell in love and you don't have to worry about the weather too much.

So the next big thing we needed to figure out; when should we get married? We narrowed it down to spring or summer of 2012. Originally we were leaning toward summer. Jeff's Mom and sister are teachers so we thought it would be better for them if they were already out of school. We were thinking semi seriously about July 16, because that is both my grandparents, Mom's parents and Dad's parents, anniversary. I thought that might be nice to get married the same day! It would definitely honor both my grandparents, without whom I would not be here. But the more we thought about it and the more research we did I discovered 2 things: I didn't want to wait that long to get married, and I didn't want to get married during the so called "wedding season."

So back to the drawing board. And that's when we realized something. Our anniversary happens to fall on a Saturday in 2012... So we thought, that could be cool... The venue we ended up loving told us they only had one Saturday left in April... our date!

We figured it was fate and booked out day. We are getting married 5 years after we first expressed our fondness of each other. We got REALLY lucky that is all worked out.While it would have been nice to honor my grandparents by getting married on their special day, this is our special day and I am happy with our decision to pick a day that is meaningful to us :)