Map out your wedding week – Lesson Learned #1

After a long, long hiatus, I’m back. In the interim, I launched another wedding planning Web site (this one a wedding planning software site for wedding consultants), did tons of marketing projects for clients, drove to Dallas and back for Thanksgiving and, oh yeah, GOT MARRIED.

So I figured before I start throwing lots of pictures up on the site from our big day and telling the whole story, I’d start off with a series of lessons learned from our wedding so that all you grooms and brides in-planning can benefit from our slip-ups.

And lesson #1 is … plan out the entire week prior to your wedding.

We got married in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico at the wonderful Las Caletas resort area (which is operated by Vallarta Adventures … great people and a fantastic place to get married, but more on that in another post). And although our entire day went off wonderfully, the entire week could have gone a tad bit better and with a little less stress, IMHO.

See, we arrived in Mexico on Sunday, but our wedding wasn’t until the following Saturday, so we had the whole week to play and relax … until we realized that we had a packed schedule trying to hang out with our family and friends. Moreover, because we didn’t want anyone to feel slighted and wanted to include everyone, we ended up being the Julie McCoy (for any of you who still remember the Love Boat) for the entire group.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because I love my family and friends, and I really did want to hang out with as many of them as I could. The issue was that we bent over backwards so far to accommodate everyone else that we weren’t really able to relax as much as we wanted until our wedding day. This was totally our fault, and I think maybe if we had planned more “quiet time” for ourselves during the week we would have been able to relax a bit more.

I believe the rule of “planning out your entire week” applies whether you’re having a destination wedding or a wedding in your hometown or even in your backyard, because in either scenario your time is in demand by family, friends, out-of-town guests, your photographer, your officiant … lots and lots of people. And this isn’t a bad thing, but it can make you pretty stressed out if you feel like things aren’t in your control, and the best way to put them in your control is to have a plan.

With that said, we still had a really wonderful time and were able to enjoy ourselves thoroughly … however, we had to take like a 4-day nap when we got back. Lesson #2 to come this weekend.