My daughter is having a wedding!

Well not yet she isn't but that time will be coming soon. We married off our first daughter almost 5 years ago now and I have to tell you, no matter how much your think you know what your are doing, there is always something else that you needed to learn about planning weddings and honeymoons. And you know what they say about best laid plans. Well when it comes to weddings and wedding plans, if it can go wrong it will, and even if it can't go wrong, it does so anyway.

What we learned from that first experience with planning a wedding is that you can never learn enough about how to properly plan a wedding so when the big day finally arrives, everyone won't be scrambling around trying to make sure everything is taken of and everyone can just enjoy the wedding. If you can afford a wedding planner, great but on our limited budget for weddings, it wasn't in the cards to go that route the first time and won't be for our second daughter either. That means that from start to finish, all the way to the honeymoon, the more you can learn, plan and budget ahead of time, the better off the whole event will end up to be when it the special day. The bride and groom deserve the best day you can possibly give them within your means.

When you are working on a smaller budget, they are many things you can do to save money up front, but you need to be aware of all the choices you have if you are going to that. For example, when getting your invitations, you can instead of having them printed, can be purchased or made, or you can go with a combination of both by purchasing the blank invitations and printing them yourself using one of the many programs available on computers today.

The same thing is true with the flowers and other decorations. You can go with real or imitation flowers, but you need to plan ahead on how you want to do that, and you also need to know what's available to work with. If you want to go with imitations, which often are more practical in the long run, you can make all of your bouquets up well ahead of the wedding date. This will save a lot of stress and hassle when it's time to do the decorating. If you want to go with real flowers, often depending on the time of year, discount flower warehouses are a great source of savings. The only thing that can be an issue is that you will be limited to the types of flowers available at that time of year in your area.

No matter what you want to do, you need to plan the wedding. You won't regret it and it will make the day very special for all of those involved. I don't want my daughters special day ruined because we didn't plan properly.

Technorati Tags: Wedding Plans, Bride, Groom