It's been a while since I've blogged. I think this is what you might call "crazy time," or as Obama might say "silly season," or as my 3-year-old nephew might say, "bananapants." Things are, shall we say, hectic.

Brides, this is the time when we start to settle.

Settle?! (that's you gasping)... you didn't settle on the man, why should you settle on the wedding details? Oh honey. For those of us who don't have a full-time wedding planner, there are just some things you have to say "Eh, I can live with that. I need my sanity." Allow me to illustrate: 

1. The officiant, recommended by our wedding venue, isn't someone we know at all, but who could get to know us well enough in two months, right? Even if she's a little new age-y for our taste, offering to have her husband co-officiate and play from one of his 30 handcrafted, feather-adorned flutes. No flutes. She's fine.

2. We screwed up and forgot to put stamps on the RSVP envelopes in the first batch of 10 invites. Three envelopes we re-did, the other invitees will have to fork over the 41 cents (and those six won't wag a finger at us).

3. Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. can't play our wedding. Call me cheesy, call me crazy, but I tried to contact the married duo on a lark. I've loved the high-gloss grooviness of the Fifth Dimension since I was five or six -- my dad would drive me to school and listen to them on his eight-track tape player.

How cool would it be to hear "Wedding Bell Blues" at the wedding?

Alas, no response from the duo. I think they're too busy working on their wacky website. The local jazz quartet will do just fine. One less bell to answer.

4. No dancing. We got the venue we wanted. We got the date we wanted. There's no room to dance (or break dance for that matter).

5. I can't use my hairstylist. She doesn't do weddings anymore because she's never recovered from one particularly nasty mother-of-the-groom.

6. We were going to have a fancy website designed. Nah.

7. The budget for the flowers is, oh, $600 over budget.

8. We'd planned for months to go to Europe for our honeymoon, but due to the declining dollar opted for an only slightly cheaper South America. OK that's not really settling, that's maybe enhancing. 

You start your wedding planning with all the big picture, blue sky decisions: big wedding/ small wedding; beach/church/city hall. But once the details of reality emerge, once you have to opt for chocolate frosting on your cupcakes instead of peanut butter frosting, because the baker is allergic to nuts (thankfully ours is not), you just have to make do.

NearlyWed Asks: Have you made concessions to your Dream Wedding. Have you "settled"?