Planning A Wedding As A Parent

Planning a wedding is exciting, you're marrying the love of your life (well I hope you are), you get to wear a pretty dress and everyone makes a fuss of you. You hear of people taking years to plan their dream wedding, complete with castle, white doves, designer wedding dresses and fancy canapes that no one eats (seriously does anyone actually like them?). Wedding magazines and social media accounts are full of 'dream weddings' with beautiful young brides wearing sleek designer dresses and enjoying lavish wedding days with the average UK wedding costing a whopping £30,335! 

The wedding industry is full of these 'Dream Weddings' they start with cute engagement stories and huge sparkly rings. Followed by non-stop wedding planning, visiting designer boutiques to find the dream designer gown, having a whole 'bride squad' and a hen party abroad with everyone posing in white swimming costumes and posing on a bed with bride-to-balloons. 

It's an Instagrammers dream. 

April 2019

Life has been busy lately (isn't it always?) and I keep forgetting to write these monthly updates on the month gone by, which is a shame as I love looking back on them. I feel like I have so much going on lately that this blog is majorly neglected which is a bit frustrating as I had worked so hard to build it up over the years. But with a wedding to organise - I had no idea it would be so time-consuming the closer it got, plus the eldest doing her GCSE's and taking the little two to after-school activities I just have no free time.  Anyway, I am going to try and post on here more often again, famous last words! So here is a little look back on what April 2019 was like for us. 

Planning A Wedding Without A Mam

In just seven weeks time I will be getting married, the closer the wedding gets the more real it is starting to feel. We are busy arranging meetings with our suppliers and paying them off, sorting seating plans and all the little finishing touches to our day. After two years of planning, things are finally starting to come together and it won't be long before I am a Mrs.  Everyone keeps asking if I am excited and truthfully I am not yet as I am missing my mam a lot at the moment.

Tomorrow is the 14th anniversary of my Mams death, she died in a freak accident when I was 21 so she never got the chance to meet my future husband or my younger children. Every day for the past fourteen years I have missed her but I have learnt to live without her and I rarely get upset anymore and can remember her with a smile. But planning a wedding without your mam sucks big time!

As a bride-to-be everything is geared up towards your mam helping you organise your big day, to look at venues, go dress shopping, pick flowers and help you get ready on the big day. However I can't do that, I have no one other than my partner to help me plan the wedding, I have no one to ask advice too or help me pick things or help me get ready on the big day and it is hard. 

A Family Day Out At The Gate Newcastle With Young Kids

Advertisement feature.

Now that all three children are in full-time school and the other half has weekends off work we make sure that weekends are family time. We like to have a day out somewhere but we find that we normally end up visiting the same places all of the time. So when we were recently invited along to The Gate complex in Newcastle city centre for an afternoon of family fun we knew this would be a nice change for the children. We visited with our 4 and 5-year-old on Saturday afternoon after Jacob had finished football, as the teen was out with her friends. 

The Gate is somewhere that I have such fond memories of, I partied there with my friends in my 20s, I visited for first dates with my soon to be husband, I met up with friends for a cheeky Nando's and catch-up and it is also somewhere I regularly visited with my teen when she was younger for cinema trips in the school holidays. However it is not somewhere we have visited much with our younger two children (aged 4 and 5 years old), we have taken them for a few meals at Pizza Hut over the years but until recently they were too young to take to the cinema or to enjoy a relaxed family meal with. 

Things I Loved April 2019

Just like that, another month is over, April was a month full of illness (again), lots of wedding planning and a few nice family days out. Now that the weather is getting a bit nicer I am hoping that we get a break from illness and we can crack on with getting everything sorted for the wedding and enjoy some family time in the sunshine. May is always a good month for us as it is Sophia's birthday and she will be six soon, which is crazy as in my head she is still about three. So here is a look at some of the things that I loved in April 2019.

1.) School Holidays

I love when it is the school holidays and I have all three children at home, it is lush having lazy mornings at home and a break from the school run. We did not do a lot during the school holidays as Sophia had a really bad sickness bug which lasted almost a week and which she passed onto Jacob. We had a few days out, spent some time with family and the children enjoyed playing out in the garden most days. 

Two Months Until I Say I Do

Time really is flying by as it is now just two months until I get married, having booked our wedding two years in advance it feels a bit surreal to now think it is just a matter of weeks away. This month has been a bit stressful, we haven't heard back from some of our suppliers and we still have quite a lot to pay off as I booked loads of little extras we don't really need but which I like. I was feeling really overwhelmed by it all but I am feeling much more positive about everything now. The closer we get to the wedding the more things are happening, it feels like every day we have something wedding related to sort out at the moment. 

Creating A Candy Buffet For Our Wedding With Swizzels

AD

In just two months time I will be getting married and I am really looking forward to spending time with all of my friends and family and I really want to create a nice day not only for us but also for our guests too. We have picked food that hopefully everyone will like, we have a DJ and entertainment booked to entertain our guests, we have an amazing photographer to capture the big day and we have a brilliant wedding coordinator who I trust will make our big day run smoothly. So now I am busy planning lots of little finishing touches that our guests will enjoy. 

One thing that I knew I wanted as soon as we started planning a wedding was a candy buffet, so the children (and adults) could enjoy some yummy treats as they danced the night away. Candy buffets are so popular at weddings these days that I think it is kind of expected of us to have a one, originally we were going to have a sweet cart but they can be rather pricey and I have already blown our wedding budget - oops! So I decided to create a sweet table instead as they are much more affordable.