We’re so excited to introduce our newest Guest Blogger, Anne, who is right where many of you are – smack dab in the middle of wedding planning. She’ll take us along as she learns to navigate through the world of weddings and finds her way to “I do.”

Planning a wedding is, at its best, organized chaos. At its worst, it’s just chaos. I seem to be somewhere in the middle – sometimes organized and sometimes forgetting everything except for the fact that I’m sitting on the floor surrounded by the uneven towers of a bridal magazine collection that would make its publishers proud and thinking that while I like hydrangeas, maybe I like gerbera daisies more. Occasionally I’m able to recover and remember the bigger picture – I’m planning a wedding and someday soon I’ll have to buckle down and actually find a dress. Other times my fiancé finds text messages on his phone that say things like “eloping = yes.”

I recently read somewhere that this is exactly why it is called being “engaged” (Webster’s Dictionary defines the word as meaning “busy or occupied; involved”) and although I’m sure the factual history of the word does not include wedding planning, I couldn’t agree more.

I am, as you may have at this point guessed, recently engaged and just plunging off into the very exciting and sometimes awfully complicated world of wedding planning. We (my fiancé, Shayne, and I) have known each other for three years, been madly in love for most of that time, and are now proceeding accordingly to the section of life titled “happily ever after”. That is, of course, if we don’t kill each other over our guest list.

Seriously though, it’s been one happy month of staring at this sparkly thing on my finger that I swear almost glows in the dark; I’ve already spent countless days poring over wedding magazines (and websites) and lost too many hours of my life to making phone calls and sending out email after email trying to pin down the basics (I’m calling them the “big three”: where, when, who).

We, foolish people that we are, also decided to up the excitement level by choosing to get married this summer (five months to plan? summer wedding? People keep telling me I’m not crazy, but that’s usually only after they give me a look that plainly says that they’re just trying to be nice) and make a pact that we would simply enjoy being engaged for at least a week before planning truly commenced (my idea, I’ll admit. Stupid, stupid idea). The direct translation of this pact was that I only brought up wedding-related topics every fifteen minutes instead of all the time. It was a very rough week.

Still, the chaos is slowly organizing itself and we are making progress. In fact, this week we managed to not only make but also send out in the mail our save-the-dates. And honestly, I love them. I’m almost ready to stop now before I mess something up. They’re simple, they’re casual (postcards!) and they probably have absolutely nothing to do thematically with a wedding that is shaping up to be rustic/romantic in nature. But we (both of us – don’t let him tell you otherwise) like them and they happen to feature an “incriminating” photo of the two of us being (in my possibly hormone-driven mind) very adorable.

All I can say is that by the end of this, I’m either going to be the most well-organized person I’ve ever met, or slightly crazy. Did I mention that wedding planning is chaos?