So, What's the Date??

After "Congratulations!" all newly engaged ladies can tell you that this is the first thing people will ask you (guilty of asking it myself).  While still on our engagement high in Hawai'i, Daniel and I took a little time to talk about some wedding basics, and the date was the first thing we tackled.

I couldn't help myself / Source

Now we knew all this planning would ultimately depend on our actual venues and what their availability was, but we wanted to be prepared with a best case scenario date.  We had a few things in particular we were considering while looking at potential wedding dates:

1) We wanted a Saturday.  Our thought was Saturday is the most convenient for our guests, and, well... it's Saturday.

2) Cooler time of the year.  Daniel (and pretty much his whole family) runs very warm.  In fact I always have to bring a jacket to his mom's, because she keeps all the windows open and the fans running practically year round. Everyone from other parts of the country/world, please don't laugh too much at the California girl for getting cold when it is 65 degrees out!  One of his only specific requests was that he did not want to be sweating profusely throughout his own wedding ceremony and reception (understandable).  Here in the Bay Area, that means maybe late September (although recently is has stayed quite warm into the fall months) through May-ish.

3) Not during peak wedding season.  This, of course, is easily taken care of by wanting a cooler month, since that eliminates all the summer months.  This was a hopeful cost saver and a terribly stubborn need to be different, because I'm difficult like that.

4) Not during any major sports season, but ESPECIALLY not during baseball playoff season.  We are big Bay Area sports fans, but particularly huge San Francisco Giants fans.  We liked the idea of not having any big sporting event going on during our wedding (or the day before or after) because we knew everyone would be distracted by the game, including us.  Football season is a big time for our group of friends also, so that was the other main season we wanted to avoid.

5) We wanted about a year to plan.  Because less than that seemed unrealistic (MAJOR props to all you ladies who plan your stuff in less than a year!!), and longer than that seemed, well, long.

These factors significantly slimmed our potential wedding dates to mid-late February, March, April, and May, with March or April being our top choice months.  We briefly considered some fall dates, but that would have been less than a year to plan, and to avoid baseball post-season (October) we were looking at pushing right up against the holidays, which seemed less than ideal.

This gave us a few months to tell people and potential vendors as the questions rolled in, which made me feel way in control of the whole wedding planning thing.  Ohhhh how I would realize later how little this small amount of planning would mean....

Anyone else get moving on their planning immediately after getting engaged? (The struggles of being crazy planner people.)