Dear all,
I am looking for some urgent advice: we are planning our wedding for late July and it will be a family-planned and run wedding with about 200 guests on my family's property. We have a lot of work to do to prepare and make everything really nice. My fiance's family always plans a yearly 7-10 day vacation with all siblings, parents and kids at their family home (four hours away from the wedding site). The date is always variable and decided each year depending on family needs.
Anyway, my fiance is saying that he thinks that there is so much to do for the wedding that he is afraid that we can't pull it off, but then he is saying that the family vacation week can be in the few weeks before the wedding….. and that it would be okay for he and I to arrive back to my family place to finish preparing for the wedding 5 days before! Now there is a lot to do.... we have all of our own tables, chairs, linen, dish ware, vases, and will be doing all of our own flowers, decorations, and have no wedding planner. And there are 92 acres and fields that all have to be cut at a certain time before the wedding.... never mind all the grass all around the house, pond, barns, etc. We are hiring a caterer, but we may need to buy the food and we will be involved with other areas of it. We are also hiring parking attendants, food staff, etc., but it is not a rented venue where the people there would be responsible for all set up and tear down, plus since it is our own place, we want to make it nice looking. I am not hiring a wedding planner. My fiance says that we can get enough done ahead of time and I and my family have expliained that there are many things that cannot be done way ahead of time and that cannot wait until days before the wedding.
Anyway, my family (and sister's husband) all are pretty worried and distressed, saying that there is no way to have a good situation for preparing for the wedding if my fiance and I go away to his family vacation if it is before the wedding. I agree wholeheartedly with them! My brother-in-law knows as he and my sister were married on our farm 7 years ago and it was a huge stressful situation. They gave us 6 weeks notice and we pulled it off, but we don't want to have a situation this time. They had gotten engaged in the summer and wanted to have a wedding before fall to have an outdoor wedding and not delay till the next year for family-starting reasons. The short notice ensured lots of issues... but as they say, they signed up for that. My whole family wants to avoid those issues this time.
Anyway, anybody out there have any advice or ideas? I am trying to explain to my fiance that his family vacation plans need to be after the wedding.... Anybody out there that planned and ran their own huge wedding on their own property with a similar situation? Please give me any feedback that you have on all of the things that need to be done for planning a big wedding? I don't want to plan for what I am sure will be a disaster and a failure if I arrive home soon before the wedding. So my point is that even if all planning goes okay and there are no issues, planning a vacation before a wedding, is in my opinion, a recipe for disaster. I should also clarify that we cannot afford to hire people to do everything. Thank you for the comments. I just need help with the reasons why a vacation beforehand is an issue. And I am super upset as he is very upset with me and saying he isn't going to agree with me on this one, will attend the vacation no matter what without me, and I feel that he is being extremely unrealistic. Please help!
Thank you!
