A Pre-Pinterest Wedding

Hi! I’m Sarah, Jessica’s sister, and I blog over at The Adventures of Ernie Bufflo. I’m thrilled to be sharing a post here with you at Here & Now while she’s off on her honeymoon! We are absolutely joyful to be welcoming Tyler into our family, and I was particularly proud to contribute the two cutest two-year-old flower girls there ever were to the big day.

Watching Jessica plan her wedding over the last year has made me think a lot about the time I spent planning my own wedding, almost 8 years ago. For one, I can’t believe it’s been that long ago already! For another, I can’t believe I planned a whole wedding without one of my favorite things in the world: Pinterest. I’m kind of a Pinterest addict, and find it not only a super happy piece of the internet, full of pretty outfits and tasty recipes and all sorts of inspiration for my crafty side, but also a super useful tool for everything from keeping track of sewing patterns to meal planning to throwing birthday parties for my twins. And somehow I planned the biggest party of my life without Pinterest? With only a pile of bridal magazines and a lifetime reading my mom’s Martha Stewart magazines to inspire me?

And yet, in a way I’m thankful. While it has been so helpful to coordinate bridesmaids dresses from afar with Jessica and all her maids, and while I love browsing hand-lettered cocktail menus and handmade photo backdrops and cute, crafty signs for ring bearers to carry, I can also see there being a lot of pressure to create a Pin-spiring, Instagrammable affair. Back when I got married, it was still not unheard of for people to put disposable cameras on tables for guests to snap photos of the festivities for the bride and groom to develop and look at later. Now you just decide on a hashtag and snag everyone’s photos from social media!

I also think Pinterest could have been a distraction in what was a rather hastily-planned affair. We had 4 months total between our engagement and ceremony, because while we had planned to get engaged and get married a year later, as I graduated college and my husband graduated med school, after talking to our parents, we decided it might be a less-stressful beginning to our marriage to have a year of just being relatively carefree students together, instead of starting a marriage as my husband started a grueling medical residency and we moved halfway across the country, away from everyone we knew and loved. I am absolutely grateful for the wise counsel that led us to our moved-up wedding date, but it certainly didn’t leave much time to plan a Pin-worthy wedding!

My bridesmaids’ dresses weren’t chosen after an exhaustive search but after one visit to one store that was available in each state where my bridesmaids’ lived, after finding out what could be fitted and ordered and altered in time for the ceremony. “What can you get us in 3 months?” was my biggest consideration, although in retrospect, Tiffany Blue taffeta is certainly not something any of my maids will be wearing again. (Sorry, guys.) Even my wedding dress was a $99 off the rack special, though I’d love to go back in time and make an NYC shopping weekend out of that one-- totally jealous of my sister, there.

In the end, what made our wedding great was that we couldn’t have done it on our own. We did it without Pinterest, but we had the help of amazing family, friends, and church family who made my 21-year-old-self’s vision of “Audrey Hepburn throws a garden party” a beautiful reality. Who needs Pinterest when you have people who, for example, when your flowers don’t arrive at the ceremony, can in five minutes’ time, whip together bouquets and boutonnières from leftover reception décor and get you walking down the aisle toward the man you love most in the whole wide world?

But…can I use Pinterest to plan a totally Instagrammable 10^th anniversary vow renewal? Please? I’d just love to get to dress shop again. But I’m keeping my groom.

Jessica here, reminding you that I actually DID wear part of my bridesmaid dress again (as seen here)! Also, if you are looking for a mommy blogger that breaks the mommy blogging mold & has the two cutest two year olds ever (totally NOT biased), you should definitely be following along with The Adventures of Ernie Bufflo, my sister is quite the writer!