Hello again friends! The last time I wrote about this, I thought I had totally gone through the grieving period and was doing A-OKAY! Surprise, the grieving stages do not make a neat little path that you walk down and don’t go back through. And GUESS WHAT the pandemic has virtually stayed the same. cool cool cool.

First off – click here to read the first part of this if you haven’t already. Ya know, the first time we decided to postpone our wedding?

Let me catch you up on the timeline of things! 🙂

• May 2018 – AJ proposes to me (storytime here)
• [May 16th 2020 – our 9 year anniversary and intended wedding day]
• May 2019 – I start Let’s Cut the Cake – my blog series on wedding planning
• April 2020 – we postpone our wedding to August 2020
• May 2020 – we get legally married at our Lil Wedding
• August 2020 – absolutely nothing has changed so we postpone our wedding yet again

Now that you’re all caught up

Let’s jump back to April of this year.

We got to work planning our Lil Wedding (aka small minimony). Every part of me did not want to plan this ceremony. Looking back, I wish I had stopped and looked deeper and figured out what we really wanted. It was a beautiful day, and I’m happy with how it turned out. Obviously I am completely over the moon to call AJ my husband now! And being legally married has made the total blow of postponement less severe.

But honestly, I wish it had been different. I wish we had known more about COVID and how it spread. And I wish I had already started bubbling with my family so we could have been physically closer. I wish we had made every bit of it really intentional. 

I wish I had pushed through the disappointment in what was supposed to be, and focus on what things could be. Does that make sense? 

If you’re in this boat right now, planning your Lil Wedding or whatever it may be. Take my advice and please slow down. Even though this is supposed to be much smaller than your big wedding day, it deserves just as much time, thoughtful planning, and attention.

My best piece of advice to you is to involve as many of your original vendors as you can. And I swear to you I’m not saying that as a vendor. Your vendors aren’t a frivolous expense, they’re helping hands. They’re there for you, so that you can just experience your wedding and not focus on the backend details.

To read about our elopement planning, you can read this post here. Keep in mind, I wrote it pre Lil Wedding. So it may contradict my current thoughts a bit.

Then August came and went.

So now we’re here. The decision to postpone again was not even a decision to be made. When our August wedding would come up in conversation, I was saying “If it even happens!” My subconscious knew better than to get attached to this date. Honestly I don’t think my little heart could handle it!

There was a struggle in between, where I fought really hard for some kind of wedding to happen. I forced AJ and I to figure out our bare-bones must haves. And we did. We could come up with some sort of plan for right now but it wouldn’t make us happy. Honestly, having all of our family and friends with us was the number one priority.

We were in talks with Ashley in July and as August came around, we didn’t even wait a beat to call it. Nothing has changed. My out of state family, those would were able, would still be risking it to come. So many of them of them are at risk too. It just wasn’t happening.

The last time we talked with Ashley, we all agreed it didn’t really make sense to start thinking about the future until there was a clearer picture of it.

So as of right now, everything is totally up in the air.

We still have almost all of our vendors (who are patient, understanding angels that we are blessed to know). The only vendor we had to part ways with was our venue. There were a million little reasons, but a big one was that it was in Fredericksburg. We figured our chances of having our wedding sooner would be higher with the least amount of travel.

The last few months have been a total blur. Sweet, well intentioned people asking us what our plans are and how the Lil Wedding was. It is a very confusing and heartbreaking thing to receive an official marriage license in the mail, and have a wedding dress up in the closet that has never been worn.

To be totally candid with you, I have to kind of block out the thoughts that come after we leave ever wedding this fall. I’ve blocked out so much that I can’t picture what our wedding day will be like. Partly because we are venue-less, and who knows what season it’ll be in.

So here we are!

Everything right now is like a huge, blurry question mark. I have absolutely no idea what the future holds (does anybody??) but I’m trying to not totally lose hope. It’s hard, but I’m also trying to be okay with not having any plans right now. I am like the least patient person on the planet, but I’m learning how to be.

Is it a great idea to post an update like this without a real update?? Probably not. The least I can do, and my hope for this update is that it gives you the permission to do whatever the hell is right for you. If that means having your wedding now, whatever restrictions may be in place, do it. If it means choosing a date that’s a year away, do it. Want to just throw your hands up and say f it til we have some sort of plan for the future? Hi, my hands are up too. There are basically no rules right now, so put yourself, your plans with your fiancé, and your mental health first.

Here is my best advice to my fellow brides who are having to postpone:

– Give yourself full permission to grieve. Don’t let yourself feel guilty or think that it’s just minor and not worth the brain space. You can feel compassion for the rest of the world and all that is happening, and still grieve for yourself. These are not mutually exclusive.

– Lean on your fiancé and vise versa as much as you need to. At first I think AJ and I were letting it get between us and not trying hard enough to be a team. But the best thing we can do right now is to figure out how to grieve and process together. 

– Take it day by day. That is the only way that we have been getting through this. Each day is different, and with time it gets easier and easier. 

If you’re going through any of this right now please feel free to reach out to me! I feel like we first started dealing with all this, I was searching for resources to help me sort through everything I was feeling and I couldn’t find much. So my hope is that if you’re reading this now that you feel seen and heard and that you’re not alone! If you’re feeling alone, you’re not. We all might be a little lost right now, but you are definitely not alone.