wedding do-over

My cousin is getting married this week. We grew up in the same neighborhood, playing together/tormenting one another, as cousins so often do. And now he's a grown up person, a soon-to-be husband!

There was a time when weddings really sent me on a downward mental spiral. My own wedding was in December of 2008, and while I don't have a single solitary regret about the marriage itself, the wedding was a little ... meh. And for a few years afterward, other people's weddings provided great excuses to host my own little pity parties, because waaah waaah my wedding wasn't the picture of perfection, I'm so saaaaad! Et cetera.

Maybe I've matured or maybe my brain's gotten too busy with other things, because nowadays, weddings are just a time to be happy for the betrothed and eat mints, and even my wandering thoughts about how I'd do my wedding differently if I had the chance are pretty mellow. But since we're on the subject ...

Let's play pretends that I'm planning my wedding all over again. Here's what you could expect to see.

Or maybe ...

Or perhaps ...

Pretend worlds come with pretend budgets, right? All these dresses are by Jenny Packham, and they're as pricey as they are beautiful. (We're talking Duchess of Cambridge money, okay?)

I'm crazy about flowers with some wildness -- feathery ferns and open roses like these (from a beautiful spring wedding shoot, which you can see here).

I think my goal would be to create a wedding that was laidback, personal, and sweet. I can just see it now -- the tables littered with empty bottles of root beer and sangria, the ragtag band playing upbeat country love songs, a few Scrabble boards set up for folks like my husband who like to boast of their amazing vocabularies.