How I Planned Your Wedding Read Free Page B

planning what will be the most photographed day of their lives?
    However, in my humble opinion, engagement portraits serve an important purpose. Picture your home. Now picture your walls papered with photos of you in a giant white dress. Now imagine that those are the only nice photos that exist of you and your honey.
    It’s nice and all…but…wouldn’t you like to have at least a handful of gorgeous photos with you and your partner looking a little less…bridal? As beautiful as you’re going to look on your wedding day, the inherently costumey nature of weddings isn’t the easiest thing to base an interior design scheme on. I don’t know about you, but I sure as heck don’t want to feel like I live inside an issue of Modern Bride .
    There are other benefits to an engagement photo session, too. Those images will come in handy when you want to announce your engagement in your local newspapers, or when you’re designing your wedding website, or putting together your save-the-dates. And it’s also a great way to get to know your photographer so that you can feel completely comfortable around him or her on the day of your wedding.
    Then, again, maybe you don’t like displaying photos of yourself around your house. In which case, skip the engagement portrait. Skip anything you damn well please. This is your wedding.
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    “I traded up,” she said.
    The only nickname we could pin on this guy was “Canadian Dave.”
    Their courtship was a romantic roller-coaster ride that culminated in the aforementioned proposal. He called my husband to ask for her hand. I later learned he flubbed a key line, telling Jay, “I want to marry your wife. Er, daughter. I want to marry your daughter. ”
    And lo, it came to pass.
    How is it possible to feel such a crazy combination of joy, sorrow, fear, elation, anticipation, apprehension and just out-and-out excitement that you get to put on a wedding?
    You’ve never seen her this happy. Not even when you got her a new puppy at seven, or when she made a personal best time at swimming, when she nailed a Chopin nocturne or when her water polo team won a national championship. She was a one-girl Disney movie, bursting into raucous song at inopportune moments.
    But you worry. You’ll never have this beloved child all to yourself again. Her heart and her emotional life are now in the care of someone else, still a relative stranger—soon to be a strange relative, perhaps. You think about splitting holidays with her “other” family, you think about all the bumps and bruises that occur in even the most deeply loving relationship. She’s taking a huge leap of faith, and all you can do is stand on the edge of the cliff and pray he’ll be her soft place to fall.

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START SPREADING THE NEWS
    Sharing the news with your family; first decisions—what to decide and what not to decide; planning an engagement party
    I’ve got the ring on my finger and the cell phone in my hand…now what?

ELIZABETH
    I woke up the morning after Dave had proposed to me wrapped in a fluffy blanket in the honeymoon suite of one of Seattle’s nicest hotels. The night had been absolutely dreamy—Dave and I had turned off our cell phones, ordered room service and spent all evening watching our favorite animated Disney films (a tradition that began in college when we realized we both knew every single word of every single Disney movie ever made). I had slept contentedly, smiling about the call Dave had allowed me to make to my mother the night before. He originally didn’t want to share the news until after we’d had a night just for ourselves to enjoy being newly engaged, but he’d made an exception for my mom. Because, you know, I’m kind of obsessed with her. And she with me. And Dave knew better than to try to get in between that.
    “Mommy, Dave just proposed to me!”
    “What? He…what?! He DID?! YOU [smacking sound] LITTLE [smack smack] SNEAK!”
    “What’s going on, Mommy?”
    “I’m beating your