Nathan and I got married on a Saturday, and we left for our Maui honeymoon the following Tuesday. If it is even remotely within the realm of possibility, do not leave for your honeymoon until a few days after your wedding.
The wedding was fun but EXHAUSTING. We were worn out. If we had left for Maui the day after our wedding, we would have just spent the first 48 hours of our honeymoon sleeping. And hey, I have nothing against sleeping, but I can sleep at home. When I'm staying at the Four Seasons in Maui, I want to at least have the energy to walk to the beach and float in the ocean. But if I had tried swimming in the ocean the day after our wedding, I would have drowned. The waves would have just carried me out to sea and I would have been a story on the evening news: Bride Carried Out to Sea During Honeymoon Because She Was Too Damned To Swim.
More importantly, because we delayed our honeymoon until Tuesday, we were also able to take care of some errands before our trip. About a week before our wedding, our sprinkler system crapped out on us. The sprinklers are run by an automatic timer system, and our plumber broke that system. (The fact that the plumber was in our basement a week before the wedding is another fun story).
We could not get the sprinklers to turn on manually. I spent hours circling our house, trying to solve this mystery because seriously, there must be a way to turn on the sprinklers manually. But to this day, I have no idea where our manual sprinkler switch is.
The week before our wedding, Nathan did not have time to fix the sprinkler system. And if I had tried, bad things would have happened. I don't mean "bad" as in "breaking a fingernail." I mean "bad" as in "flooding the entire house." So the sprinklers stayed broken, and I watered the lawn with a hose to keep it alive in the summer heat.
Thank god for the two-day buffer between our wedding and honeymoon. If we had left for Maui the day after our nuptials, we would not have had time to deal with the sprinkler system crisis and our lawn would have turned to ash while we were honeymooning. But instead, we had time for our first Home Depot field trip as a married couple. When you are a newlywed, even Home Depot feels romantic. (Then we went to Wal-mart to stock up on sunblock. Wal-mart? Never romantic).
Now Spucky, I know you are 23 years old and this doesn't sound like a big deal to you. Oh no, the sprinklers broke! Whatever will we do if the front lawn dies? But talk to me again in five or ten years when you have a front lawn and a husband, and you will understand the gravity of this situation. If our front lawn had died, a little piece of Nathan's soul would have died with it. And if we had been in Maui while the front lawn was dying, he would have been stressed and constantly wondering about the lawn's health. Take my word on this: when you are honeymooning, you do not want your new husband to be having a continuous nervous breakdown regarding the front yard.
So do yourself a favor: wait a couple of days before you leave for your honeymoon. In the days and even weeks before the wedding, you will spend an ungodly amount of time attending to wedding tasks. It doesn't matter how organized you are or how much you get done in advance. You will spend all of your free time either (a) putting out wedding-related fires or (b) recovering from the stress of the latest wedding-related fire. You will not have time for Normal Life Stuff.
Maybe you will get lucky, and you won't have any errands or chores that need your attention between the wedding and honeymoon. If that's the case: congratulations! Go take your groom to the movies and gorge yourself on popcorn and candy. Now that the wedding is over, you don't have to worry about fitting into your dress.
I got married in July 2011, and now I have lots of opinions about weddings. My baby sister Katherine (aka Spucky) is ten years younger than me. Someday, she will get engaged and I will want to go into crazy big sister mode and inundate her with advice. Instead, I'm writing blog posts so when she gets engaged, she can read (or not read) my advice at her leisure.
