Start and stop, high and low. If that doesn’t sum up the past (almost) year of plan­ning then I don’t know what does. There’s been lots of ups and downs, some much more intense than oth­ers, which is never how I imag­ined it would be, but such is life.

The other night I attended the Jenny Yoo NYC Soirée at the Tribeca Rooftop (gor­geous venue, by the way) and to my sur­prise, at the end of the night I won a free engage­ment ses­sion with an NYC pho­tog­ra­pher. Engagement pho­tos were never in our bud­get and never some­thing we planned on doing, so it was such a fun prize! I started think­ing about what loca­tion we would choose, what we would wear. I even started writ­ing a post to tell you all about it and show some of her work. I was beyond excited.

So I emailed the pho­tog­ra­pher the next day to let her know I had won, and find out what the next steps were; only to find out that actu­ally, the cer­tifi­cate is only valid if I book my wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy with her as well. Problem is, I already have a pho­tog­ra­pher, so that’s not even an option for me. Crushed, I let her know and asked what that meant for the prize. And appar­ently, the answer is s.o.l. The cer­tifi­cate is just void. I was told to give it to a friend as an engage­ment gift.

I mean, come on. It’s just void? That’s it? I fig­ured I would be offered some sort of com­pro­mise, but nope, it just is how it is.

I can’t under­stand the idea of giv­ing a gift with strings attached, in any cir­cum­stance. To give you another exam­ple — I attended another one of these events a week or so ago. All over the place were adver­tise­ments about a hon­ey­moon to be raf­fled off. Then we finally get to the draw­ing por­tion of the event, and are sud­denly told, you don’t actu­ally win a hon­ey­moon. You win a chance to win a hon­ey­moon. Congratulations! Your name goes in another draw­ing! I real­ize they don’t have to do any of these things at all, but that would be fine. If you’re going to raf­fle off a prize or give a gift, why can’t it be just that? A gift, period.

Planning a wed­ding is such an emo­tional process for brides and grooms and their fam­i­lies. And luck­ily so far the ven­dors we’ve been work­ing with are great — super cool, help­ful and trust­wor­thy. But I’ve come across just as many (if not more) through­out the process who are quite the oppo­site. So when­ever that hap­pens, it’s just upsetting.

I real­ize in the grand scheme of things these prob­lems are minor. That I’ll look back after the wed­ding and think I was crazy for ago­niz­ing over all these lit­tle things. It’s just the con­stant cycle of excite­ment, dis­ap­point­ment, excite­ment, dis­ap­point­ment, that I have a hard time with.

Ok I’ll get off my soap­box now. Back to the pretty stuff!