The 20th of March was the best day of our lives. It was the day of our wedding and it was absolutely wonderful. It felt magical... like a true fairy tale with the entire " and they lived happily ever after" included. Before I start writing about the beautiful day... I would like to tell the tale of all the beautiful and wonderful events that happened before the big day.
On the 4th of October 2018 I said yes to my prince. It was magical, on the island of Phi Phi in Thailand. Picture white sand beach, calm soothing water and unlimited cocktails. That vacation is also a whole different adventure that I will write about. However, not today.
After the big yes, the plane landed at Johannesburg and the wedding planning took off. With a high dose of jet lag, I went to the supermarket and bought every wedding magazine that was available. I might add that they were quite expensive. I also need to add that they were utterly useless. I paged through them, and got absolutely no idea, vendor or venue inspiration. I still took the "planning the wedding" picture for Instagram. That was the only thing those magazines supplied me.
So I started a Pinterest board, adding all the ideas that I would like to use for the wedding. My prince made me french toast for breakfast and his planning for the day was done. His words were "It's your wedding..." Que the fight! Ding! Ding! Ding! A few minutes later he said his words came out wrong and that he meant that the day is supposed to be all my dreams come true. I still felt itchy about that fight until a few weeks before our wedding. Nevertheless.. I started planning on Pinterest.
I bought a binder and some really cute color pens with a nice bag. I added some postnote strips and highlighters. Pink ones for me and blue ones for him. Ps. We never used the postnotes or the highlighters. Or the binder. In the stationary shop I saw some ink and got my first two color pallets for the wedding. A strange green and old gold. Ps. Five weeks before the wedding, I scraped the old gold and changed it for rose gold. My mom said I needed five colors for the wedding. Cue the eye rolling. I think this was the moment I started disliking the whole wedding planning adventure. I chose a protea flower pink and white. That's four colors mom, take it or leave it.
As ideas in my head goes... I have a lot of them. I knew our engagement had to be at least one year long... why? I don't know. I like my ideas, whether it makes sense or not. So we delayed setting the date until we were 5 months engaged. In between we bought a big house - but that is also a separate adventure that I will write about.
I also insisted that we get married in the African bush veld, picture a dam with giraffes drinking from it and behind them elephants walking past and somewhere in between a very peaceful male lion and we saying "I do" with the picture as the background. We did get married in the bush veld, but there were no animals in the photos... I absolutely did not count on the bugs that would grace their presence during the ceremony. They were present.
So with a date set and ideas I started looking for the perfect venue. To tell the truth, we had to kiss a lot of frogs, before saying I do to the venue. Also not reckoning the dirt road my prince had to drive with his very sleek Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio Verde Mito ( I can't pronounce that name without sounding like a drunk mumbler). Just thinking about it cause my spine to stiffen. Many months later and kissing a lot of frogs, we said I do to our venue: Shammah Game Lodge. Every time I said their name, it sounded like gold. If gold had a heavenly sound.
The real planning started. Also, it felt like I did half of the wedding planning. I took a few months vacation of planning, because I did not like doing it. Felt like I put my overly large sunglasses on(now eaten by one of my dogs), champagne in my hand and feet up. Cheers! I am halfway there, aren't I? Joke was on me!
