Congratulations!!

Congratulations! If you are reading this book, you must be engaged! Or you are my mother, who is only reading this book because I sent her a free copy.

So to all of you who are not my mother, JUMP UP AND DOWN! You're getting married!!! Someone loves you, and you love him, and you're both just insane enough to think it's going to last.

HO HO! And! I kid!

Now, I recognize the fact that some of you reading this may not be marrying a a mister and that you really meant it when you said you look fat in white. You might even want a small kind of party, and might consider yourself too pretty to make a budget, or maybe you already own the Kitchen Aid Mixer of Dreams, so WHAT MORE could you possibly want in life.

Because every bride is different, I decided to write a book about planning a wedding that YOU really want.

My experience as a bride-to-be was anything but conventional. Some people said that my fiance John and I should have gone to Vegas. Others said we should have eloped. Believe it or not, the manual was yet to be written on "Wedding Planning for the Boston-based, Irish-American, Recent Convert to Seventh-Day Adventism Bride-to-Be, whose parents are divorced and living in Ohio (where the wedding was going to be) and the Korean-Canadian Groom-to-be whose parents speak minimal English." Shockingly, no such textbooks were available for our broken family/broken English multi-cultural relationship on amazon.com at the time of our engagement. So I decided to write my own manual on wedding planning. Not just for me, but for brides everywhere who didn't have a cookie-cutter life and therefore would not expect to plan a wedding by someone else's recipe.

The books that I read about Being Engaged and Planning a Wedding were mostly serious, cerebral, or just plain corny. I wanted mine to have spirit and spunk. I wanted to share my stories and insights with other brides-to-be. I want to do so in a form that balanced seriousness with lightheartedness. In a form that encouraged laughter and self-deprication as a means to not only survive the wedding planning but to hopefully usher in a wonderful marriage built upon laughter and love.

Of course, this book is not for everyone. I address many aspects of wedding planning that may not pertain to your experience. Additionally, I possess certain values, biases, and perspectives that are unique to me. I am a Christian. I am an American. I am straight. I am white. I am not a cat person. I like ginger ale. I am phobic of all watertowers. Thus, some aspects of this book may only appeal to one gal out there in Elkhorn Nebraska, who just happens to be riding through the Great Plains, dodging cats and watertowers, chuggin' on ginger ale, thinking about her wedding. And for that plucky gal in Elkhorn, this one's for you. And maybe also for you, Mom.