Freedom Videography Wedding Blog

A couple years ago, my groom came up with a brilliant idea for handling our date budget. We were always running out of money before the month was out of Fridays, and our date on the last Friday of the month was often a pathetic affair. I still compliment my groom on what a great idea he had to solve this problem.

Groom’s idea was to take our $100 monthly date budget and divide it between the two of us:

Me = $50

Groom = $50

Besides this, though, our personal $50 is divided into two categories:

1) cheap date ($20)

2) expensive date ($30)

A $30 date may not sound “expensive,” but it works for us. For the four Fridays in an average month, I get one cheap date and one expensive date, and he gets one cheap date and one expensive date. A cheap date may be Chipotle and a Redbox. An expensive date may be Green Mill and a trip to the local cheap theater.

This strategy may not sound profound, but we can both attest to the fact that it is so much easier to stay within our overall $100 date budget if we think of one date as cheap and the other as expensive. At the end of the month, we sometimes find ourselves with date budget money left over!

Last week, Chris sent me a link to a story on examiner.com. When Matthew Still of Locust Grove, Georgia, wanted to propose to his girlfriend, Ginny, he concocted an elaborate plan involving his brother, a videographer, Ginny’s father, and a local movie theater. You can read the story here. Examiner.com bills this video as “soon-to-be-viral.” Enjoy!

The most famous wedding planning currently in progress that of England’s Price William and Catherine Middleton. I don’t really glom on to famous weddings much, but you can find the official website for their wedding here. What did catch my attention (enough to make a blog post on it, anyway) is T-Mobile’s spoof ad which features royal look-alikes in a tribute to the trend of surprise wedding dances. I like how the actors seem to reflect the personality of the royal they are playing, if loosely. Admittedly, I don’t know much about England’s royal family, but this ad’s “Queen Elizabeth” is reserved but amiable, not really dancing, and certainly not doing the Macarena down the aisle.

As a continuation of the theme of last week’s post, here is the video:

image courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio

A few days ago, I heard a brief story on Minnesota Public Radio about Brian Wunderlich and Margarita Jacobson, a Minnesota couple who had planned to get married in June. Brian is in the Minnesota National Guard and could be deployed to Kuwait shortly. In light of Brian’s possible deployment, he and Margarita made a last-minute decision to marry on April 2nd–in less than a week! Their wedding, attended by a small group of family and friends, was in Kasson, Minnesota. You can link to the story, including more photos, here.

It is definitely a challenge to face a separation from your new spouse soon after the wedding, but, as the original story pointed out, it is more feasible to be married than not when a partner is overseas. Marriage “offers insurance and a monthly combat allowance for the family left behind.”

I like how this story proves one of my mantras: if you end up married at the end of the day, the wedding was a success! Even a less-than-ideal situation can still work out beautifully.