Choosing a Date

Well, as everyone knows, in order to plan a wedding you must first choose the date you want to get married on. Sounds like a simple task right? Just pull out the calendar, look at the different dates, and pick one that sounds good to you both. Easy peasy... yeah not so much. There is so much more that goes into picking a date than I ever thought.

The first thing we had to consider was my occupation. As a teacher (or at least someone trying to be a teacher, as I currently am), it really limits the times of year you can get married. From August to May, school is a teacher's life. The only real times where you have a break are Fall Break (I'll explain later why this isn't an option), Winter Break and Spring Break. I'll be honest. Winter Break sounded really appealing to me. A part of me began to fantasize a bit about what it could possibly look like.

(source)

 These fantasies led me to think about other considerations we need to make.  

 

We had to get down to brass tax... also known as money. We had to take into consideration how much money we will feasibly be able to save.  That also cut a lot of our options down.  Teachers in Oklahoma aren't exactly paid a fortune, so we had to be honest about what extra money we would have to spend.  We decided it was best to give ourselves at least a year to plan and to save.  We have figured that by summer/fall 2012, we will be able to save enough money to pay for the wedding we both want.  That pretty much cut out all winter and spring weddings because we wouldn't be able to have one until late 2012 to 2013 and to be honest, being engaged a year and a half to 2 years just didn't sound too appealing.  Too much time to plan and change my mind about every single element of the wedding.  Not a good idea!

A fall wedding was something we both entertained for a bit.  I always dreamed of a fall wedding.  Beautiful oranges, red, and golds, with candles on all of the tables, much like this

source

The weather is usually gorgeous here in Oklahoma in October, and its one of the only months in the year where you can potentially have an outdoor wedding without panicking about rain or some other type of awful weather.  We could get married around Fall Break, and take a couple of extras days off for our honeymoon.  Sounds absolutely perfect, right?  There's only 1 small problem with having a fall wedding...... our friends are huge football fans and so are we.  Sure we could schedule our wedding around an off weekend for our Alma Mater

but I'm pretty sure most of our friends are fans of that other team that shall remain nameless, and would not be happy campers if we were to schedule our wedding the same weekend as one of their big games.   With two teams to take into consideration, we decided it was safer to just choose a time of year when football was not played. 

After ruling out anything before next summer, and canceling out a fall wedding in favor of keeping our football loving friends happy, it was time to consider when in the summer we wanted to have our wedding.  We figured that June would be the most expensive and busiest month of the year to get married.  We didn't want to risk having to settle on vendors we were only lukewarm about because we were competing with so many other couples.  That left.... 

After looking over our calendars, we decided on July 14, 2012.  No conflicts between birthdays, other people's anniversary, or holidays.  Its just our own little day.  Its going to be hot, but luckily we are planing a wedding entirely indoors (more on venue later!), so we aren't too worried about the heat. 

With the first of many big decisions made, it was time to start contacting venues to figure out where this summer wedding of ours was going to take place and figuring out what we wanted it to look like!