Thursday, December 29, 2011

Dating our Wedding

If I were a Serious Blogger with a Serious Following, this is where I would apologize for my several-day absence after such a good blog-a-day start.  I was in Chicago and Canada with my family-in-law-to-be [plot twist: crossing the international border was faster than travelling between US cities], and so didn't really have much to share.  However, I am not a Serious Blogger and I really have no idea how many people are reading this, so I won't say any of that.

I've been thinking more about specific dates for the wedding over the last several days, and I have come to the conclusion that we really can't count on the spring/summer of 2013.  As I said before, Joey's big test, the USMLE Step 1 (The Boards), will be somewhere between early May and late July, and it is going to be like the MCAT with a hemorrhoid: extra cranky and less accommodating.  For those of you who knew and loved either of us during junior year of college when Joey was prepping for the MCAT, you understand just how bad of an idea it would be to plan to get married within a month of that, on either side.

The American Association of Medical Colleges, in all their benevolent wisdom, will not tell us when the actual test dates are for another several months, and then Joey does not get his personal test date until this summer.  Rather than plan an entire wedding for summer 2013, only to have it taken away by Joey's evil mistress, Med School, I would like to hold off on concrete plans until we know when his test date is, which won't be for a while.  If he gets the early May test date, then a wedding in late summer could be possible.  The weather will be cooling down, people will be finishing with camp or summer programs or whatever else would keep them from attending, and Joey will have had time to come down off the USMLE 1 plane of insanity and be emotionally and mentally present for the last bits of planning and, of course, the Big Day itself.

If, however, Joey gets a mid-summer test date, it might not be worth it to force a wedding immediately on the heels of the exam.  It will just cement the idea that planning a wedding is, as his mother put it, the most stressful thing we will ever do together, worse than pregnancy, childbirth, or raising kids.  No sense in rushing to a stressful process and starting our marriage off with something so difficult.

Plan B, which is initially a difficult idea but, in light of everything else, might just be the best option, is to wait till spring/summer 2014.  This is 2.5 years from now.  I don't like that.  He doesn't like that.  I'm sure that many of you are wrinkling your noses.  Waiting that long is far from ideal, I get that.  But is it worth it to wait the extra year so that we can all be happy and enjoy ourselves?  I'm not sure.  On the one hand, it's the biggest day of our lives (or at least one of), but on the other it's just one day.  Another way to look at it is that one year in the grand scheme of The Rest of Our Lives, is a drop in the bucket.  Is it really so awful to wait that one extra year to make sure that everything is happy and smooth when we're going to have (God willing) sixty to eighty years to be married?

So here's the basic summation of scattered thoughts:  If everything falls into place and things work out nicely, we'd like to get married in August 2013 (we have a specific date in mind), and if Med School doesn't let us then, we'd like to get married in May 2014 (again, we have a specific date in mind).  The August date is before any of the collective siblings start school (and so hopefully will also accommodate our younger friends and relatives who will theoretically be in school at that time), and the May date is after the siblings' schools get out (again, hopefully that will work out for the rest of our tiny loved ones as well).


BONUS: I have now futzed with the settings so that anyone can comment, even anonymous users.  I ask that, should you choose to comment sans sign-in, you please sign your comment so I know who you are.  Other than that, enjoy your new freedom!  (thanks, Nathalie, for pointing this out to me)

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