As I’ve mentioned, I have been waiting to get engaged for about 2 years now. Given that, I had quite a bit of time to think about what kind of wedding I wanted, who I would invite, etc. I had a date (January 2, 2021) picked out about a year ago so every day I wasn’t engaged was less time I had to ultimately plan. I knew once that ring was on my finger I’d have to hit the ground running. So here’s what I’d planned before we even got engaged.

Pick a date

I’ve always known I wanted to get married when it was cool out since we live in Florida. Since I wanted to avoid the holidays, I decided on January or February. I wanted to wait until I graduated with my master’s degree so I didn’t have to balance school and a wedding, which led me to the wedding being in the beginning of 2021. When I looked at the calendar to see if there were any good dates, I saw January 2, 2021. First of all, it’s an easy anniversary to remember – 1/2/21. It’s also a long weekend and winter break so people flying in wouldn’t have to take off work/school Friday and I’ll have off the 2 weeks prior to really focus on the wedding. It’ll also be our 9 year and one month dating anniversary.

Make a preliminary guest list

With my mom’s side of the family being so large, I knew it would be a large wedding. I also knew before looking for venues, I needed to have an idea just how large it could possibly be. My preliminary guest list put us at about 250 people so I kept that in mind as I started looking for wedding venues.

Looking at venues

In January of this year, I was sick and tired of putting off wedding planning just because Jared hadn’t proposed yet. So I took matters into my own hands and scheduled some venue tours for us after doing some preliminary online research. We looked at Laurel Oak Country Club, GROVE on Lakewood Ranch Main Street, and Longboat Key Club. None of the people ever asked about our engagement or the proposal, which was a relief. We agreed on a made up story, but didn’t want to have to actually use it. After touring all the venues it was clear Laurel Oak was the venue for us. Obviously we weren’t going to put a deposit down to hold the date until we were actually engaged and I had so much anxiety that the date we wanted would be gone by then!

The day we actually got engaged, one of my parents’ neighbors said, “Oh now Sammy can start planning!” and my dad responded, “No, now she can start executing the plans she’s already made.” He couldn’t have been more right!

Stay tuned for what all April had in store!