5 Things We Did After our Engagement
If you’ve been following along on the blog, or on Instagram, you know that almost two months ago, I got engaged to the most amazing man that I know! It has been a very busy and exciting last two months. In my post, I shared our engagement story, and I also announced a new blog series to share my own personal wedding planning process and decisions along the way. It's one thing to be a wedding planner planning other people's weddings, but when it comes to my own wedding, people have had so many questions. “Is it more stressful,” yes. “Is it going to be a huge wedding,” not really. “I bet it's already planned and finished, right?”, not even close.” But the question I get asked the most is, “What have you done since getting engaged?” To answer all of your questions and help you know what to do when you get engaged, here are the first 5 things we did after getting engaged:
Photography by Lisa Joy Photography.
This post may include affiliate links. Disclaimer.
1. Announce Our Engagement
When Nick and I got engaged, we were out of the state on our Spring Break trip in Colorado. None of our families were there, and we wouldn’t be seeing them for almost a whole week. Our first priority was making sure we got in contact with all of our closest family members to tell them the big news. These were all the people we wanted to tell the news to and not over social media. We spent the afternoon Facetiming and calling each of them and telling them how we got engaged. Despite the poor internet connection and buffering Facetime calls, we had an exciting time talking with them together.
After our families knew about our engagement, we waited a few days to share the news on social media. Nick, the best fiancé ever, hired a professional photographer, Lisa Joy Photography, to capture our proposal. Waiting before posting allowed us to enjoy being engaged without being overwhelmed with all of the comments and questions on social media, and allowed time for our photographer to get our images back to us. The pictures turned out to be fantastic. Once we had our photos we each picked our favorites and made our announcement on our social media. We got to spend the whole ride back from Colorado reading our friends' congratulations and well wishes.
2. Pick Our Wedding Date
As a wedding planner, my first instinct when we got engaged was to start planning immediately, but there's not much real planning you can do till you’ve picked the right date. When picking the ideal date for our wedding, there were a few factors: season, school and sports calendars, and day of the week. I have always dreamed of having a fall wedding, so when we got engaged in March, naturally I was set on having the perfect October wedding. Nick and I are former members of the University of Arkansas Marching Band and a lot of our friends will still be in the band this fall. This meant that if we were planning a fall wedding, we had to pick a weekend that did not have a Razorback football game. I recommend everyone avoid big sporting event days for their wedding if you don’t want people watching the game on their phone at your wedding. At this point in the year, most venues were completely booked for all the Saturdays in October. This meant that we needed to start planning for a Friday wedding date. With all of those requirements in place, and including venue availability, October 7th came out on top as the perfect wedding date for our big day.
3. Talk About Our Dream Wedding
I don’t know about y’all, but I have been dreaming about my wedding since the moment I was born. I have multiple Pinterest boards of all of my dream weddings: the beach wedding, the mountain wedding, the outdoor wedding, and the destination wedding. When we got engaged, I had so many ideas that it became hard to narrow down which were my favorite. The best thing about being engaged is that I now have someone else to help me narrow down my options. I've always thought that the guy I would marry would have very little opinions, but Nick has surprised me with a lot of opinions, whether I wanted them or not. Don’t get me wrong, he has had lots of great ideas for unique things for our wedding that we will be incorporating. He even picked the wedding colors and decided on an outdoor wedding.
4. Spend Time with Family
A week after we got engaged, we were finally able to get together with our families and start discussing wedding planning details. We discussed budgets, who was paying for what, and bounced some of our ideas off our families. We answered so many questions about our wedding like who the bridal party would be and if there would be alcohol at our wedding. We also got a lot of advice on who to invite, and what time the ceremony should start. It was nice to be surrounded by our loved ones and celebrate with them, but it also made it feel very real. We had so many questions to find answers to and so much advice to accept… or ignore.
5. Enjoy Our Engagement Party
While scrolling through wedding Pinterest is fun, my favorite thing we have done since getting engaged was our engagement party. If you are on the fence about having an engagement party, I highly encourage you to do it. My mother planned our engagement party and it was fantastic. We had lots of food and an open bar. This was the first time a lot of our friends and family have ever been able to meet. We had a blast mingling with our guests, making introductions, and left even more excited for all of us to be in the same place again at our wedding in a few months.
This has been a very exciting time of our lives full of family, friends, and anticipation for the next phase of our lives to start together. There are still so many decisions for us to make before the big day comes. Subscribe below to get a reminder for next week’s post about what else we’ve been up to. If you have any questions about wedding planning and how I’m planning my own wedding, leave a comment below.
Cheers!
