When people realised Iain and I are an actual married couple, one of the first questions we’re asked is “what you would change about your wedding day?”
My answer: pretty much everything – except the groom!
In our defence, back in 2006 Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or blogs were not really around and being in our mid-20s we’d only been to a handful of weddings so I didn’t even know what I didn’t know! Add to that a tight budget and the whole process was very stressful.
Don’t get me wrong, it was still a wonderful day. But now with the benefit of hindsight (and attending 100+ weddings since), there’s definitely a few of things I would have done differently:
1. Bust a move: We provided our own music on an iRiver (not even an ipod!) instead of hiring a DJ or band. Iain took great pride in creating the perfect playlist, but our mistake was not allocating a guest to man the music. Bottom line: pay a professional so your first dance song doesn’t get played at the wrong time :)
2. Flower power: Roses, lilies, peonies when it came to flowers I had no idea so I decided to just go with a similar style to my recently-married bridesmaid. Only problems they were heavy, like really heavy! So we’ve got lots of photos of our groomsman holding them for me.
3. Dress to impress: I’ll happily admit I’m not a perfect 10 so I struggled to find a wedding dress that fit me properly within my budget. So I ended up buying a second hand dress, which was altered to fit me. The dress itself was beautiful but I didn’t spend enough time to ensure it fit me like a glove. As a result, I spent a good part of the day hitching up the dress and tugging at the places where it felt uncomfortable.
4. Snap happy: I’m not going to name names, but sadly, I wasn’t completely happy with our wedding photos and I think it was as much our fault as hers. Looking back through the images I can see we didn’t allow our photographer enough time to capture all the key moments so our set of images is incomplete. To fit in with the tight schedule we even decided to do a mock first dance which is just a bad idea!
What would you change about your wedding day? Let us know on our Facebook page
