Bride-to-be Blogger Alyse: We’ve Got Time

Alyse and Kevin enjoying crabs—not cake—much to Alyse's dismay.

I’ve mentioned before that I love lists. To help me keep my sanity, the wedding planning to-do list is broken down by month. Fortunately (and just in time to fully enjoy the last few weeks of summer), there’s nothing really pressing on my August list right now. It feels great to have most of the big vendors booked: We have the church, the reception site, the hotel, the band and the photographer (for a later post!). I have dress-shopping appointments set up for late September and we are signed up for Pre Cana, which starts after Labor Day. I guess I am in a 10-to-11 month to-go lull when it is too soon to actually start working on the details, but too hard not to think about them.

I was reminded of this a few nights ago. Kevin and I were sitting on the couch, he was watching TV, and I was looking through wedding magazines when an article caught my eye. “Hey,” I said, clearly interrupting his TV-watching, “did you know that there’s, like, a right way to cut the cake?” I didn’t wait for his response, as his blank stare said it all. “So I put my hands on the knife like this and then you put your hands on top of mine like this and then we …”

“Alyse,” Kevin said, stopping me and grabbing my hands. He looked into my eyes and said, “We’ve got time. We’ve got time.” And then he went back to watching ESPN like nothing happened.

At first I was shocked. How could he not be interested in learning how to cut the cake? Sure, we had plenty of time for wedding-related details, but didn’t he want learn new things? What if this wasn’t wedding-related, would he not want to know how to do something new? And what made it so bad that it was wedding-related?

I let these thoughts brew for a bit, but then just went back to magazine reading. I decided to put this issue behind me for good and got out my Wedding To Do List notebook. Now, somewhere under “May” there is a line that says, “Practice cutting the cake … together.” We’ll get there, eventually.

Brides, do you have any similar experiences where you realized you were jumping the gun a bit? Does your fiancé help you slow down?

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