Lia's 3-pronged approach to planning a wedding, and not sweating the details

There are as many ways to get married as there are people in the world. The only thing that really matters is that you feel your wedding is yours, be it traditional with 7 bridesmaids and groomsmen, or a just the two of you on a beach in Hawaii. This is how we narrowed down our endless choices, left the details to others, and enjoyed the party of our lives.

1. Theme
If you have a wedding "theme", it really helps make decisions along the way for you. In our case, we wanted our wedding to express our personalities as individuals and as a couple. The final winner was "marine" -- symbolic ceremony at sea, party at a yacht club, boat-classy untraditional, international flavour, sustainable where possible, not too formal matchy-matchy. We made our wedding colours cobalt blue and white, we chose a font. Done and done.

Then whenever someone asked us about what colour flowers we wanted, or what the decorations should be, designing the save-the-dates and invitations and website and Facebook group, it was really easy to just say "Marine, cobalt blue, white, trebuchet" and then we backed off and let people do the rest for us (while retaining vito rights). Many things didn't match the theme, but that also made the wedding more us.

Your theme should only act as a tool to help make decisions, not as the omnipotent symbol of your wedding. Let go of your theme when it's not working for you -- for example, there are no blue flowers in September, they only bloom in early spring (so we had sustainable air plants in dry colours -- almost the anti-marine theme -- but beautiful and contrasting).

Another theme could be "random", or "I hate themes" or whatever, it just has to be you and enable detailed decisions without your involvement.

2. Prioritise and rank
What we did very early on was brainstorm priorities, and then rank them. For example:

• Above anything, our wedding is about bringing together all the cool people we love from around the world
• Intimate expression of ourselves that include wedding traditions that are true to us, rather than a traditional wedding checklist
• An experience worth flying from abroad for
• Chances for guests to meet each other and be familiar with each other before the actual wedding ceremony
• Free drinks, no one but Canadians thinks it's okay to pay for drinks at parties
• Nice food
• Matching rings vs. each of us really liking our own rings
• Vintage car to drop us off / pick us up
• Not too many speeches
• Etc.

And then ranking them right at the beginning really helped, both in terms of how to spend our money, but more importantly how to spend our organisation time.

1. Out-of-town guests-centred experience
2. Honour our families in our ceremony / speeches
3. Activities before and after wedding day
4. Free drinks during all activities
5. Fabulous dress
6. Fabulous family and ceremony photographs
7. etc.

Then when it came down to the hard decisions -- caterer, menu, venue -- it was really easy because we just looked at the ranking of our priorities. Example:

Out-of-town guests-centred experience = easy access to venue, venue in centre of city that showcases beautiful Vancouver views, boat trip, guest down time sitting on patio while taking family photographs, etc. To afford that we needed to give up having a photographer for the full day and night (thank God), and go with a different menu, etc.

In the end, our priorities were clear in our budget spending: most of our budget was spent on venue, boat and booze, a medium amount on dress, suit, photographer, rings, activities before and after wedding, and food, and little was spent on transportation (carshare car), cake (I prefer chocolate and pies to cake), flowers (wedding bouquets for the bride and maid of honour, corsages and boutonnieres for family and friends who helped with wedding), decorations (the view was enough!).

3. Keeping track of details
​We used this great template to organise the details of our wedding:
http://www.google.com/weddings/#/fill-in-the-blanks

There are lots of tabs to help you, just delete the ones you​ don't use (we only used about half of the tabs). But it's great for keeping all of the details recorded in one place, and then sharing the template with whomever needs access to it (we shared ours between each other, our emcee, mom, brother, sister, etc.). If the details are all organised in one place and shared with the right people, then you won't have to think about it on your wedding day.

The first thing we needed to do was decide where we were getting married and when. So we created a new tab in the template and inputted all of our key guests, and then put columns for "Amsterdam", "Vancouver" and "Destination wedding", and then put the likelihood that those key guests would be able to come to each of those options. In the end, "Vancouver" was the overwhelming winner, so we decided to have the wedding there (even though I preferred to get married in Amsterdam), and then when we discovered that Eid was landing on Labour Day weekend that year, the date revealed itself too.

Conclusions
Do whatever you need to do ahead of time so that at showtime you are totally present and available to enjoy the love.

For us, organising our decisions around our theme and setting priorities early on, and then having a centralised document to record and share the details meant that in the week leading up to the wedding we were totally mentally, emotionally and physically available to just enjoy everyone. 

When the "exotic" life abroad becomes just as conventional as the "settled" life at home

- I think moving abroad would bankrupt me. My 1500 square foot apartment is full of stuff.
- I used to have a rule to always limit myself to two suitcases when living in a country.
- Two suitcases? I could never live that way, being so limited. I mean I love to travel, but I also work really hard to enjoy some comforts at home. When you love your home you don't have to travel so much to enjoy yourself.
- That's very interesting. I see having few possessions as an expression of my freedom, and you see collecting things that bring you joy or comfort as your expression of freedom.


Three weeks ago I was on a project management course with a 30-something Belgian who works in Jerusalem for the UN, and a 40-something Dutchman who works for a large cable company in Amsterdam.

Throughout the course, we would relate the theoretical work we were learning about to our real-world experiences. The Belgian would relate one project management process to the time he was building a new temporary school in a refugee camp, and the Dutchman would talk about network architecture and engineers. Over lunch the Belgian described how exciting it was to be constantly surrounded by different people with different experiences, and how enriching his life was compared to if he had stayed home in his village in Belgium, and the Dutchman seemed very satisfied to have a good-paying job which he could work from 9-5 and come home and focus on his family.

I was the outsider and the insider, able to partially relate to both of these realities, but also playing devil's advocate. To the Belgian I asked how deep his connections were with the people he was meeting, if he would ever see them again when his post was over in 2 months and how long he imagined living this exotic international life. To the Dutchman I asked if he had ever felt a genuine excitement or passion about where he lived or his work, and what he found interesting and challenging about what he does.

The Belgian responded that the only thing he found difficult about it was finding and keeping a life partner, and that if he had children he thought the best place in the world to raise them would be on a post in Africa. The Dutchman said he admired people who are passionate about their work but never felt that way himself about it, and that his work involves constant growth and change and that it keeps him on his toes.

Am I the Belgian? Or the Dutchman?
At this moment in time, my life more resembles the conventional life of the Dutchman than the exotic life of the Belgian.

I have officially been living in the Netherlands for five years now, I am married, I own a condo, and I have 1.5 children. I often catch myself spending more time than I would like to admit thinking about re-negotiating our mortgage, which neighbourhood to move into so that our daughter can go to a good school in 2.5 years, searching real estate websites, and calculating the ideal distance between work and home.

This is the longest I've lived anywhere except my home town, where I spent my first 21 years. The other nine years were spent -- in descending order of time spent -- in Abu Dhabi, Montreal, Toronto, Japan, Ghana, Turkey, and France.

Settled vs. Mobile
What I love about being more settled in Amsterdam is the deeper relationships I've built, the new facets of life that I've gotten to see, actually learning the local language (for the first time) and really feeling like a genuine member of society.

What I don't like about being more settled in Amsterdam is that being part of society means that you are more influenced by what people think, and it's easy to slip into patterns that give you more material freedom but less mobility freedom.

In my home town of Vancouver I knew what it all meant: to live in a particular neighbourhood, to have a detached house vs. a townhouse vs. a condo, what each square footage bracket was, what car you drove, where you holiday, and what clothes you wore. I knew what it all meant to other people.

The downside of being a contributing member of society
For over a decade I lived outside of all of that: I didn't have much choice in the neighbourhood I lived, I didn't own possessions, my wardrobe was a collection of items I had bought in countries where I didn't have anything weather- or occasion-appropriate, and anyone who knew what any of these things "meant" never communicated it to me.

And now I own oyster shuckers, champagne flutes, and other unnecessary objects that symbolise settled-ness. And our priorities for good housing and owning a car are starting to eclipse our priority of being mobile and available to experience new things in the world.

Am I seeking more comforts in possessions because I'm getting older? Or am I simply diversifying the things that entertain me? Is the source of this change from inside myself? Or is the influence of my surroundings seeping in?

Regardless of the source, we have decided to start planning a mini-retirement to reset our values.

Carrot parsnip and apple soup

This was actually inspired by my daughter's baby food, but adapted for adults.

1 benghal spice tea bag (cinnamon, chicory, carob, vanilla, ginger, cardamom, black pepper, cloves, nutmeg)
2 parsnips (equal amounts of)
3 carrots (equal amounts of)
4 apples (equal amounts of)
fresh ginger, to taste
organic vegetable soup cube

Bring 1.5 litres of water to a boil with tea bag. Cut up all veggies into chunks. Add all vegetables to boiling water. Remove tea bag. Grate ginger into soup (don't add too much if you want your kids to like it). Add soup cube (half of what the packaging recommends for 1.5 litres of water).