That Which We Call A Hen Do...,

 Right, I've seen these called Hen Dos for years and I've seen American's call them bachelorette parties for years, too, but I saw it referred to as Stags and Does the other day and I don't know where that's from but it just doesn't sit right with me, to be quite honest. I don't know what it is, but I heard it and my only thought was, ew, no thanks. 

My image of a hen party has always been the 'classic' thing of Blackpool, getting drunk, wearing plaid skirts with plastic bottoms glued on (because I saw them in Blackpool once) and again it was one of those things that was like, yeah... no thanks, it's not for me. My future husband and I did consider just renting an Airbnb somewhere, having a few drinks with close friends and a bit of a games night but when we wrote out a list of people we would like to invite it started to get a little bit crazy and then get away from the idea of it being just a holiday of friends and more into typical stag or hen parties which are banned from some big houses because of the damage that previous drunken parties have done. The bigger it got, the more it felt like a mini wedding party before the wedding or we worried that there would be people we were inviting out of obligation rather than a desire for them to be there and so that went out of the window. I had thought before a spa day with just my mum or something might be nice, but even that didn't feel quite right, so it was back to the drawing board again. 

In the end I thought I would do the same thing as we have done for the wedding and take an approach of it's my party and I'm going to do what I want. 

One thing I did realise with it was that my ability to organise is shocking, and my ability to understand dates has got worse since having my son because I don't need to know what day or date it is most of the time, so there were a few people that I realised last minute that had I sat down and thought about it properly, I would have invited, but inviting people on the day of felt like an afterthought, which it wasn't but I think I've found the reason that the hen do is organised by your maid of honour or bridesmaids and it's because splitting focus between the wedding and the hen means you kind of do everything wrong.

I had desperately wanted to go to a certain Italian restaurant in Manchester, but when I came to book it, getting a table before 9pm wasn't possible, and we were meeting up earlier than that so I wasn't really up for going out for drinks and then going there because it was a group of neurodivergent friends and I, and we can get loud without realising it when we're sober, and I didn't want to interrupt other people's dinners, especially not there and especially not when the place was having a busy night, so instead I chose an Indian place which I love and got to introduce my super foodie friend to it. That never happens! There's also something very apt about it being a hen night and chaat bombs, because giving people warnings that they will go everywhere if you bite them. How is it that EVERY TIME someone does not heed the warning? So the night started with yoghurt everywhere and went from there. 

It wasn't a traditional thing in any way shape or form, because it was me and my male friends, I hated the white dress I had been planning on wearing so grabbed something black instead (and my green Doc Martens, so got to feel so like myself that it was incredible), and instead of doing the somewhat popular activity, food, drowning your liver in your tipple of choice we started with drinking at dinner and it all escalated from there. The lads hadn't known each other at the start of the night, but one of the great things is that they will now know each other at the wedding and that makes me feel a lot calmer, because people coming on their own who don't know anyone else there makes me worry. I don't want anyone to feel left out during the wedding, so it's good that they've got someone they vaguely know and once got drunk with.

It's also not lost on me that the people who were able to make it are those who don't have children, and those who couldn't make it have, because I know that had it been someone else's night and my son was ill, or he'd been a live wire for the day and I was exhausted, I wouldn't have made it either, and even though I do bring him up in conversation quite a bit, it was nice that the hen do wasn't completely about being his mum.

The night ended with my very soon to be husband picking up three of us and driving us home whilst I was insufferably drunk, and putting up with me as he does so well, and only partly because I've promised to do the same for him after his stag do.

I don't know whether it's that the hen do has happened or by sheer proximity, but everything for the wedding is feeling a lot more real now and whilst I love that, it is making me very nervous about things arriving on time or getting everything packed and to the venue, getting last things like hair cuts and nails done (why am I suddenly a person who cares about getting my nails done!) and I have genuinely considered starting to pack suitcases of bits we need but I keep telling myself that that is a bit neurotic, but I probably won't be able to hold off that long because it's getting very close now. 

I'm sure that a few people who have read this blog for a while will be glad when the wedding stuff goes off, but when it's so close and it's such a big thing in your life, it's obviously something you're going to talk about a lot of the time, and even when I don't, people ask.

How Much AI Is In Your Wedding,

Obviously I know AI is a hot button issue right now and there are a lot of feelings involved in vocal opposition of it, particularly when it comes to art or image creation, particularly because that is either people's side hustle or their business and that can come under threat because of the capabilities of AI.

There are some things that, with the best will in the world, AI is not ready to replace. For one thing, it can design things, but it can't build them or interact fully with the physical world or physical things so even if you were to ask it to design a manicure or a hairstyle, it can merely provide ideas which then have to be brought to life by a person. Does that de-value the knowledge, skills and experience of those who have been in the industry for years? Of course it can do, but it can also help inform first time brides of options, help them feel a sense of control over their wedding and their planning and even assist newer suppliers, vendors and such in the industry by doing some of that work for them, but does that prevent them from gaining the experience that has a value later? Possibly. Despite saying that, my nails and my hair are things I'm working with lovely local businesses on without the use of AI. 

Even my dress isn't something which has been informed by AI. I did consider putting a photo of me through an AI and asking it to help me with some general guidelines of what would look better on my body, and then I decided to just choose something that I liked, which didn't go super well the first time over but I have since made up for it. I did ask AI to design me a wedding dress, just for poops and giggles really, but even if I had done that long enough ago to contact a seamstress, get a pattern designed, resized, tested, revised and eventually finished, I don't know if there would have been enough time between when we booked the wedding and when the wedding is, and it would have been ludicrously expensive. Even trying to do it myself would have been so beyond my skill level and excessively expensive, so it was really just for fun. And it did make me love my dress more, because it's real and it's well designed and it's pretty.

Before this sounds like a thing where I didn't use AI at all, I used templates on Canva for a lot of our wedding stationery because after extensive Googling I couldn't find anything that matched what I wanted or what I liked, and then when it came to our seating plan, we figured it out without using AI (partly by cork mats screwed to a wooden board and push pins in it) but then needed to have a seating plan image which we could share with the venue and I didn't want to have to draw it myself. The funny thing is that despite repeated attempts to get it to correct the errors, like going 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 or not putting enough seats at tables or too many seats at tables etc, it was still riddled with errors, but it was good enough to give an illustration. It definitely wasn't good enough to be printed, but that's fine since I wasn't planning on using it for that! 

I did consider using AI to make our welcome sign, but couldn't get close to what I wanted. At the point I was about to give up I found something a local artist had made that wasn't a welcome sign, messaged her with an idea that I had that was along the lines of what she does, and she was game for trying something a bit different. And it's amazing! 

There are other bits and pieces which my totally not artistic self is making or painting or doing and trying my best with, but we'll just see how it goes and how it turns out. Obviously I don't want to write too much about those at the moment, but maybe after the wedding... 

How Big Is Your Small Wedding,

And we're back onto weddings...

I may have said this before, but if I don't remember then what's the likelihood anyone else does? Actually, it's probable that someone else would remember better than me because my memory is terrible at the moment.

The smallest wedding that you can legally have in the UK (and probably anywhere, but I'm just writing what I know) is the two partners, two witnesses and then your celebrant(s), registrars or religious leader(s) which works out to five people at the very bare minimum, and the very easiest that you can do that is at a registry office, but even then you have to give notice and wait for twenty nine days (the day you give notice and twenty eight days afterwards) before you are actually able to get married. I will admit that I would have appreciated a wedding like that, partly because it's not having to talk in front of a bunch of people or having to have too many people involved or too many people's opinions and inevitably it's one of the cheapest ways to get married. I don't think it was ever something that we entertained though, because my partner wants his family with them and I do, too, and there are some people it would just be more hassle to not have there than it is to have them.

Thinking a little bit bigger would have been just including both sets of our parents, which for us would have meant the two of us, four parents and assuming that two of them could be witnesses (it's actually not a given) and then the registrars which would make for a room of eight people, or if we could have done something we did consider, at least for a minute, seven people by being married on a cruise ship and having the ceremony done by the captain. The problem with that being that my partners parents are raising one of their grandchildren, so we would have needed to include them, and then both sets of parents would likely have wanted us to include our siblings, which would have been another three, plus one sibling's partner, so four. Once you're including that number of people there are other family that we would need to include which then started to tick the numbers up even further, and as we went through it our small wedding seemed to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

This is one of the reasons, and there are a few on a list, but this is one of the bigger reasons why we weren't allowing plus ones for the wedding. To me, plus ones are just adding random people you need to pay for and accommodate and also tolerate to your wedding day, but they are likely people you don't know, have never met and will never see again, so unless necessary - like they are the spouse of someone who knows no one else at the event - they were something we definitely wanted to avoid. When other people have wanted to invite people to our wedding, it's been hard to say no, but for the majority of times it has been a no, because we didn't want some sort of massive event (and only partly because we didn't want a massive bill for it). 

By the end of it, we could have added probably another fifty people onto the evening do if we had really wanted to, but the most important thing to us was that it would be an event of people we are close to, who are close to us and it be something we can both enjoy and that our son can enjoy without being surrounded by hundreds of people we or he don't know, or have to spend the entire wedding introducing each other to half of the room. How big is our small wedding? Maybe a little bigger than we quite wanted it to be, but still small enough for comfort, I think.