Besides knowing the difference between Asian wedding favors and garden wedding favors, a good wedding planner should be a wealth of knowledge and should know how to plan every detail of your wedding. Unfortunately, there are only a few ways to tell if your wedding planner really knows his or her stuff until he actually starts planning your wedding. Here are four quick things to look for when interviewing your wedding planners that will tell you more about them without asking the related questions.

If your wedding planner shows up for the interview half an hour late, odds are, they are not as organized as they claim to be. While this particular clue is not a dead giveaway to their capabilities, it is certainly a good step in the wrong direction. If they have a legitimate sounding excuse, it is only fair to continue the interview in earnest but keep that red flag in the back of your mind as you go. Take a moment and think about the excuse that they give you for being late. If they say that they were stuck in traffic at ten in the morning, it is more likely they slept in as the morning rush is usually over by nine, since that is the start time for the majority of the working world. That is unless, of course, everyone in your city was late for work on that day, like your candidate.

After a year of planning details, hiring caterers and interviewing bands, disc jockeys, and surveying wedding halls and churches, you are going to be either completely exhausted or totally focused. In either case, the last day of your wait, which is the day before your wedding, you have 24 hours to wrap up the details and take care of a few commitments. However, the biggest challenge you now face is getting some rest, you are going to need it.

The last day before your wedding is usually reserved for beauty treatments such as hair and make-up prep, nails and for final rehearsals. With any luck, you have worn and broken in those shoes you are going to be standing in for eight to ten hours tomorrow. If not, today is your last chance to get them worn so you know what to expect from them. You have a long day tomorrow, which means you have a lot to do today.

Don’t Forget to Breathe The big day is coming faster than you can prepare for it and you are so stressed out you could light a match…just by looking at it. Pre-wedding stress can be a royal pain in the wallet as well as the heart and there is no worry worse than one that involves money. You have planned a wonderful wedding and reception but more things have seemingly gone wrong than right. You have heard that wedding planning is supposed to be fun but by now, that is just a vague rumor and you know the truth. If this sounds familiar and you are still planning your wedding…, STOP! Do not forget to breathe.

Choosing Your State of Mind Wedding stress is natural and is sometimes hard to deal with. It is also fun and a wonderful experience. Which one of these you get the most out of is completely up to you. If you are in a frenzied, ready to pull your hair out and then start on someone else, very stressed out mode and you are just weeks from the big day it is time for a breather because this kind of state is the last frame of mind that you want to be in going into your wedding day. It is okay to let someone else take the reins for a little bit while you gain your composure. Pass smaller but important tasks, like choosing wedding favors, especially unique wedding favors, on to someone you trust. You do not have to do everything yourself.

Perhaps one of the most overlooked and difficult decisions couples face when deciding to get married is the name change. While it is customary for the bride to take the husbands last name, it is not something that has to be done. Once the decision is made of what the name will be changed to, if at all, here are five things you will need to know.

The first thing you will want to do is to call your local government office and have the forms mailed to you. Many towns used to hand out the forms when you applied for the marriage license but this practice is no longer followed in most cities. Once you have the forms, make sure you have all of your ducks in a row before you submit them. It is important that you fill out this form very carefully and check your spelling or you may wind up with a variation of the name and have to submit the forms twice.

Feeling a bit dangerous and want to show the world just how dangerous and wonderfully unpredictable you can be when you set your mind to it. Plan the wedding that no one would ever expect, and then take that up a notch. If you have an adventurous bride to be, there is no limit to the kind of wedding planning the two of you can devilishly sink your teeth into, especially if she is as dangerous as you are. Have you ever thought of getting married while plummeting to the ground from twelve thousand feet? It is possible, although you will run into three problems. The first and probably the most difficult will be finding a preacher or justice of the peace who is not only willing to do it but will do it at an affordable rate. If I were a justice of the peace, you would have to pay me a pretty penny to marry you while free falling from a perfectly functional airplane.

You are planning a wedding and you need some ideas that will make it special and unique but you do not know where to look. Well, if you are looking for ways to make your wedding unique, it will not be unique. In order for you to do something special you only have to look at your heart and what it tells you. Find your inspiration from within and if that does not work, try these ideas on for size and maybe you will be inspired. It is the little things that will make your wedding experience different because it is the little things that people notice the most. A good for instance would be to add little tags everywhere your guest will look that have poems or declarations of love. Even love song titles will stick in your guest’s minds and remind them of how special this occasion really is.

Chances are that if you are having a big wedding you are going to have a very diverse age group representing several generations of your families. This means that no matter what type of music you chose, someone is going to be left out or possibly even insulted should you have an acid rock or rap wedding. It is not like picking out the wedding favors where is does not matter to any age group whether they receive golf wedding favors or beach wedding favors. There is an old saying you can’t please all the people all the time and that holds particularly true when picking out the music for your wedding. There are things you can do, however, to minimize the damage. Here are a few ideas that might make your musical montage more palatable for everyone.

In 1549, the “Book of Common Prayer” was published and the first wedding vows were introduced to the world but before then, and until they were commonly recognized as part of a ceremony, the father and the groom would meet and agree that his daughter would be the “groom’s” wife. This was usually accompanied by an agreement of services provided by the groom and a small dowry provided by the bride’s father. The wealthy lords and ladies of the day would put the agreement into a legal document to make it seem official and would hold a ball or party to make it official. This was the era where the first vows and the first marriage licenses came into play.

The ceremony and prayer went something like this. While the wealthy usually had a prominent church elder ordinate, the poorer class of people would have the local dicker or other minor clergyman present the groom to the bride and remind them that they were speaking publicly and before God and after a reading from the then accepted matrimonial verse from the Bible, the groom would say,

I know a couple that has been married for fifty years. When they first tied the knot, they must have tied it well and double knotted it because they are more in love now than they ever were. I just had to ask what their secret is since I have been married twice myself and I’m hoping this one will last forever. What I learned is actually no secret at all. In fact, it is common knowledge that most of us tend to forget or take for granted from time to time.

John and Mary were poor when they married back in the fifties. He worked his heart out in the automobile industry and she waited tables deep into the night shift. They saved their money diligently and started a family. They encountered many difficulties over the years but the one thing they held true to was their love for each other. John told me that the secret to his marital longevity was simple. Whenever he tried to imagine what his life would be like if his Mary were suddenly gone it would scare him so bad that he knew he could not bear it. Mary told me just about the same thing. She looks at their friends who are married and thanks God every day that her John is not like the other husbands who stay out late at night and put their marriages second.

Imagine that you were going to get married. What would be, in your mind, the perfect place for such an occasion to take place? For many people asked this very question, the first thing that pops in their mind is a church. Occasionally some people answer with a location that is considered to be romantic, yet some think it is unorthodox. The location in which they think of is a beach. Think about it, how many times can you say that you have attended a wedding on a beach? Not very often is it?

The location of a beach causes other questions to arise as well. It often leaves people wondering to themselves what some ideas for beach wedding favors are, as well as if they should also invest in some summer wedding favors to go along with the theme. Both themes pretty much coincide together because when one thinks of a beach, they generally think of the summertime as well. The trick is to find things which actually fit with the surroundings.