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I see you girls seem to as excited about my wedding as I am which warms my heart completely.  Judging by my Instagram Stories (@arumlilea) it appears that you want all the details about how far I am in the wedding planning process so I’m so excited to share them with you.  I will be documenting all the details every step of the way so that I can update you in real time.  I also think it will be such a lovely way to be able to look back on this time and how it all comes together.

Venue

The week after our engagement I started looking for venues.  We’d always spoken about having a wedding in the Cape winelands and there are so many incredible venues to choose from in that region.  As you’ll see later in this post, we have a large number of guests from outside South Africa and we wanted to showcase our favourite part of our country on our wedding day.  I narrowed down my favourite and made appointments at each one in December when we’d be in Cape Town on holiday.  From there we narrowed it down to our top 3 venues and the venue we’ve settled on is ultimately not on a wine farm at all!  It was such a tough decision because they are all so beautiful in that part of the world! We’ve also booked the church for our ceremony. We will be getting married on 22 February 2020.  All the twos make us really happy for some silly reason.

Engagement Party

We are having an engagement party with our closest family and friends that we have not yet seen since Ryan proposed which is very exciting.  It’s been so much fun planning the invites, booking our venue for the party and picking out the menu.  Truth be told though, it was a little overwhelming doing it all simultaneously with booking appointments for wedding venues, planning two graduation parties and prepping for Christmas.  It has been, however, the absolute best kind of stress a girl could ask for.  There has just been so much love involved in every single process.

Bridesmaids

This year I used my birthday as a bit of a decoy when I asked my sister and two of my friends to come over for a birthday brunch when, secretly, I’d planned it to be a “bridesmaid brunch”.  I’d put together a little box to ask them to be bridesmaids and it was honestly one of the most precious moments I could have dreamed of.  I have six beautiful bridesmaids, 3 in the country and 3 outside of SA, (USA, Switzerland and Mauritius).  As you all know, my sister is my absolute best friend so she will be my Maid of Honour.  I’m honestly so lucky to have them all in my life. I can’t wait to do all the next steps of the planning together with them.

Wedding theme and colours

I’ve always wanted a truly traditional wedding.  The words I’d use to describe the day would be classic, timeless and elegant.  It probably comes as absolutely no surprise, but shades of pink and white are the only colours that I’ve ever wanted for my wedding day.

Guest list

We’re looking at a guest list of 100 people.  We both feel this is the best number and while it could easily become more than that, we thought that we’ll only have those that will play a role in our marriage and our children’s lives at the wedding.

Invitations

About 50% of our guests are situated outside South Africa.  For that reason, I’ll be sending out our Save The Dates within the few weeks to ensure that everyone has more than enough time to plan ahead.    I will be sending both our Save The Dates and invitations electronically so that they don’t get lost in our infamous South African postal system.  I’m using Paperless Post to send out both.  I love their style!

Wedding Playlist

One of the things we’ve had the most fun planning is the music for the wedding.  Driving all around the Cape over December we kept adding to it and every time we had a get together with family we were given more excellent suggestions so our playlist has grown and grown and we love it!  We’ve chosen the song for our first dance, however, I need your advice – should we be going for dancing lessons or do you think it looks more authentic if the couple dances an unchoreographed first dance?

Photographer

I’ve been really picky about choosing a wedding photographer but I’ve narrowed down my list of favourites so that booking will hopefully be crossed off my to-do list within the next few weeks.  We also need to make a plan for our engagement shoot but I have a feeling that we will only be able to schedule that in a couple months purely due to Ryan’s hospital schedule.  I definitely want to do an engagement shoot though!  I think they’re a beautiful way of documenting that stage before marriage.

Honeymoon

Again, because we have a large number of foreign guests that we don’t get to see as often as we would love to, we’ve decided to skip leaving for honeymoon directly after the wedding so that we can spend a week with friends and family in Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Franschhoek after the wedding.  The thought of this makes both of us absolutely over the moon.  Perhaps we’ll book a more traditional style honeymoon for later in the year but this is the best way we can imagine to use our time.  I’m sure those memories will be cherished forever.

To-do list

I still need to book all our vendors, find a videographer, decide on a menu and a cake.  I also need to do the biggest task of all – find the wedding dress!!!  You would think that I’d know exactly what dress I would want to wear but I actually have zero ideas.  Crazy, I know.  Do you guys have any suggestions for me?  I’m also looking for a wedding hashtag so if you can think of any please let me know!  Our surname will be Maroun (pronounced maroon – like the Maroon 5 lol) if that helps at all.

I’ll be doing another wedding planning update, perhaps two months from now when I’ve made more progress and then I will be able to piece together more of the coordinating for our big day.  By then hopefully, I’ll have been dress shopping so that will be fun to update you on.  Thank you again for all the love you’ve shown us over this incredible period in our lives.  I can’t thank you enough!