Whew. The WEDDING is over. Many times you thought, “What about eloping?”. Not because you didn’t want to do the wedding, but simply because you were TIRED of discussing EVERYTHING. I almost feel like planning a wedding is a great test for marriage. Because once you are married, you’re going to have to do a whole bunch of “joint” decision-making, and what better way to do it than to make you spend six months doing it UNDER PRESSURE? 🙂

Okay, I exaggerate of course. Partly as there were very few times in the six months where we were exasperated with each other, because we were doing it “together”. In fact, I almost feel like the planners and trackers helped ensure it WAS being done together. At this point, you basically have six things left to do, and the first two are often related.

1. Relax

After six months of having just about every free moment tied up with this big project, it’s time to relax. If you remember how.

2. Honeymoon

If you’re lucky enough to have the time, energy and money left to do a honeymoon, maybe the relaxing part will go together with the honeymoon. I know some people who wanted really aggressive active things to do on their honeymoon. For me, I wanted to do some things off the bucket list, sure, but mostly that was solved by going somewhere neither of us had ever been before — Hawaii.

Snorkeling, submarine, helicopter rides, volcano visits…all stuff on my bucket list and great things to do while we were there. But mostly? I wanted us not to be completely over-scheduled where we were booked all day every day with a timetable. We were busy, but in my view at least, not over-busy. You can see some of the activities (and photos) on some of my posts about our honeymoon (Honeymoon recap – Hawaii – Day 1).

Honeymoons are incredibly individualized activities, so there really isn’t that much to say that will help you. My only advice is NOT to try and leave the day after the wedding. We took a couple of days at home just to decompress, and I am so glad we did. It gave us time to pack, organize our travel stuff, charge batteries, water the plants, etc. I know lots of people who flew out the next day, and were dead tired for the first three days of their trip.

Sure, in order to get to this point, you had to:

• Book time off work;
• Book airline, hotels;
• Pay for trip;
• Pick up tickets;
• Get travel insurance;
• Arrange for house-sitting.
• Etc.

3. Thank yous

Once you get back from the honeymoon, it is time to write out all those thank yous. Fortunately, you already have their addresses from the invitation period, and a tracker that lists all the gifts you got. Now you’re trying to write 50 or more thank yous with some personalized anecdote to thank them for their gift and for attending the wedding (assuming of course you actually BOUGHT thank you cards somewhere around the time you did your invitations and guest book arrangements).

4. Preservation

Guys, you might think I’m talking about basic drycleaning here for your suit. Nope, I’m talking about special cleaning / preservation of the wedding gown. You can take the gown to a special drycleaner who specializes (theoretically) in wedding gown treatments and your wife is going to research the crap out of the place and ask for referrals before entrusting them with her dress. It’ll be either draped and placed in a full-size garment bag, or more likely, placed in a special box designed to keep moisture out. And it will cost more than you think it should, but they have you over a barrel, so you’re going to pay it and move on. Think of it as part of the original cost of the dress. Why is she saving it like this? I HAVE NO IDEA. She’s not going to wear it again, hopefully, with her next husband. And over time, it’s probably not going to fit as well as it did when she starved herself into it the first time. Nor is it likely to be the style that her daughter will want in 25+ years, assuming she even has a daughter at some point. But it will be saved. Trust me.

Equally, she will save her bouquet. It will be dried in silica gel, and preserved. Again, as a souvenir.

Since we had a couple of days between wedding and departure for our honeymoon, we could worry about this during that time, rather than waiting two weeks when the flowers would have been clearly dead.

5. Announce

If you live in a smaller town, there likely is a tradition of putting a wedding photo and an announcement in the local newspaper. One of the sets of parents usually does this. Some of them used to be quite lengthy; most are quite brief now.

6. Store your documents

You got a bunch of docs when you were doing this whole wedding thing. Some were ones you generated — like programs and invitations, all of which you’ll want to save as souvenirs.

But you also got a wedding certificate, which you may need from time to time for legal purposes. Know what? We have no idea where ours is. Well, sure, we know it’s in our office, but we haven’t seen it in probably 8 or more years. We’re not sure if it is with our lawyer stuff, or real estate stuff, but we know it’s not with our “important government documents” stuff. It’ll turn up. If it doesn’t, I can get a copy from the city where it’s filed. But if we had saved it in the proper place to begin with, we would already have it. Just saying…

And with this post, I wrap up almost all the stuff from our wedding. There is one item left to discuss, but it’s optional for some people, so I’ve saved it to last.