Congratulations, you’ve just got married, came back from your honeymoon, and found yourself into a whole new life, where your old habits have no more place.

Everything was just marvellous until now, but your first morning home with your husband raises a big question mark: what do we eat today?

Can you give an answer, other than “let’s go to a restaurant”?

Every bride to be should consider experimenting with some easy, fast recipes.

For example, you should be able to prepare some easy categories of dishes:

Breakfast:

• scrambled eggs
• fried eggs
• baked mushrooms with cheese and ham

Lunch:

• vegetables soup
• tomatoes soup
• risotto
• salad (a raw veggies salad will do)
• main course: (spinach with garlic and lemon, or some other vegetarian dish, or some chicken recipes)
• pasta with minced meat

Dinner:

• steaks
• fried potatoes
• mashed potatoes
• stuffed mushrooms with cheese

Don’t panic if you never cooked in your life. It is not so difficult, and you’ll catch up very fast, especially if you find some cook books to guide you in the beginning.

In case you are new to bridal things, find out that bridal shower is a party organized before the wedding, in the bride’s honour. The purpose of the bridal shower is that the bride receives gifts from the guests. The party is organized by the bridesmaids, and its etiquette has changed over time, and varies with the zone.

Amongst most common bridal shower activities there are the so called society games, like Truth or Dare, or Consequences, or lots of other great games which are a lot of fun.

If you are the maid of honor, and you need ideas for the bridal shower, you can consider organizing it in a different location, not in the future bride’s house. For example, you can invite everybody to a striptease show, or to a fancy restaurant, or to a club.

Whatever variant you may choose, when it comes to putting together the guests list, it would be wise to ask the bride to approve it in the first place. This will help you avoid unpleasant surprises that may spoil your party, and will keep your bride happy. Make sure that you do at least a RSVP after you send out the invitations, because people are so busy that they may forget.

You’ll say nothing. Well, it was true until recently: in UK, the new football stadium of Shrewsbury Town was granted the licence to accomodate weddings. This seems to be a great idea, as the space is more than generous, plus you can decorate the place in such a way that theme weddings will be very well represented. The stadium lights will offer a cozy atmosphere at night, and the sonorization has to be great, so the guests will have all necessary conditions to dance and party as they wish.

And think of the wedding photos: due to the configuration of the place, photographers will be able to take pictures from the height of the tribunes, thus offering a new perspective of the wedding. By using a fish eye lens, they will be able to capture the panorama of the whole place, to the delight of the guests and of the protagonists.

For not so romantic brides, the stadium can be the perfect place to organize a wedding with the theme Football (although it is quite hard to believe that any bride would ever want the wedding cake in shape of a football, or the guests to wear sport shoes and numbered T-shirts.

1. Food

• Organize a buffet with everything necessary. In this way, the guests will feel more at ease, they will be able to circulate, they won’t be stuck to their tables as it happens in general at parties with fixed menu. Besides, you’ll pay less, because you won’t have so many leftovers.
• Give guests breaks for dancing. They don’t have to eat all the time during the party. Serve first some appetizers, then wait for a few hours until serving the main courses and the sweets.

2. Drinks

• If possible, bring them from somewhere else: you can buy them at discount stores, and ask the restaurant manager if you are allowed to serve them to your guests. You’ll spend less money than in the case of buying drinks from the restaurant.
• Besides, the remaining bottles will be yours to drink at further parties.

With well instructed serving personnel, you’ll manage to make your wedding dinner look fabulous, while keeping a good part of your money in your pocket.

More and more weddings take place directly on the beach. You can bring there everybody, including priests, so there is no reason why not having a beach wedding, if you wish.

Imagine the scenery:

Tables set in the sunset light, lots of candles, the sound of waves combined with romantic music, the white sand reflecting the lights, and you, the bride, dressed up like a fairy, enjoying every moment of your unique wedding day. For dance moments, you can have a wooden platform arranged on the spot, as dancing in the sand is not the best way to treat your well-dressed guests.

For not so formal wedding ceremonies, you can even arrange a collective swim, but make sure to have a bridal swimware, as swimming in the wedding dress can be harmful to your health and even to your life

I’ll remember all my life my first wedding day. Not that I will ever forget the next three ones, but the first wedding day of my life was really unique.

I was 18, I was day dreaming, I smiled a lot, sang a lot, and worked in a small cofee shop, serving people with coffee and apple pies. This is how I met my husband to be: I put a hot apple pie in his lap, and I could not hold my laughter while he was crying with pain. Useless to say that I got fired over the next couple of minutes.

I stepped out of the coffee shop, sat down on the sidewalk, and suddenly I burst into tears, thinking that I will not be able to find another job and I won’t have money to pay the rent… and when I raised my eyes, the man of my dreams was sitting next to me, with his pants full of pie and smelling like an apple tree, and he didn’t know how to say how sorry he is for getting me fired.

Well, he walked me home and we ended up at my place, with him promissing me that he’d find me another job, or he’d marry me.

Of course he couldn’t find me a job, because I was not qualified to do anything. So, this is how I got to be a very young and happy bride: he proposed me after two tiring months of jobs hunting, and I accepted on the spot, because I was already in love with his blue eyes.

The wedding took place in a hot August day, on a lake shore, nearby an old castle. Very romantic, but I should have checked the restaurant and the services before going to get married in the countryside. I could tell you only that they had only one dirty toilet, for both men and women (I have a big family and lots of friends, so we had about 200 guests), that the table napkins were white a century ago (now being dirty gray with brown spots), that the dishes were partially broken and the hot food was warm to cold. Now you get the full romantic picture of a happy wedding day. Not to mention that in the evening, a wind started out of the blue, making my hair look like thousand snakes and my maids look like wet chicken (the wind also brought some rain with it).

If something can go wrong, it will go like that for sure. So much truth in this saying: some of our friends got drunk, and pushed me into the lake. Luckily the water wasn’t deep, but it surely was dirty, and so was my beautiful wedding dress when I got out of the water. Too bad I had the photo camera with me when I fell into the water. We were never able to recover the photos from our memorable wedding ceremony.

I wish I had those photos today, because that marriage lasted only a bit longer than our honeymoon, and now, at three marriages distance, I still feel the romance when I think how me and Bob met, and how good I felt that day, sitting on the sidewalk.

Can you fell the romance? It must be magic.

Every bride wants to be beautiful and special during her wedding. Updos can offer an elegance unequaled by other hairstyles. Wedding updos are special: they can be done with long hair as well as with medium hair, or even with short hair, if you use some add-ons. Updos allow the bride to use hair accessories, such as hair ornaments, flowers, tiaras, hair pins or ribbons, to complete the overall glamorous look of the wedding dress.

As your wedding day is unique, and you cannot turn back time, a rehearsal of all details, including bridal makeup and hair style is a must. You are paying a lot of money, after all, and you get married maybe once in a lifetime (at least the first time is unique), so why not make sure you know exactly how you’ll look in your best day?

So, find yourself a good hair stylist, look through catalogues and magazines with wedding hair styles, choose your favorites, be them updos, extensions, curles or other styles, and ask your stylist to do your wedding hairstyle like it was for the wedding day, with a months or two before the wedding.

In this way, if something goes wrong (maybe you don’t like how you look with an updo hairstyle, or maybe you just don’t like the hair stylist), you’ll have time to seek for a better solution in regard to your hair, which has to look its best in the wedding day.

Another advantage of this hairstyling rehearsal is that your stylist may advise you on what treatments you should do to your hair, in order to make it look shiny and healthy. A dry and torn hair is not a very good material for a wedding updo, no matter how skilled your stylist may be.

So brides, you’d better rehearse your wedding updos, wouldn’t you?

Some brides believe in superstitions. Some other don’t, but because their friends do, they avoid doing those things which could bring them bad luck in their marriage.

Here are some funny if not strange superstitions regarding brides, grooms and weddings from all over the world:

1. If your wedding dress has pearls on it, this means you are going to cry in your wedding day
2. If the bride steps on the groom’s foot when they step out of the church after the wedding ceremony, this means she will be the “boss” of the new family.The same applies also if the groom steps on the bride’s foot (if she doesn’t kill him first )
3. If it rains on your wedding day, you’ll have a happy marriage and a wealthy family
4. If the guests throw rice on the bride and groom when they exit the church, it means good luck
5. If two brides meet, this means bad luck for their marriages
6. If a girl falls down, it means she’ll get married that year
7. The bride is never supposed to practice walking down the aisle during her rehearsal or it will bring bad luck

Can you add some more wedding superstitions to my list? Please feel free to add them in the comments section below.

The wedding day is without doubt the best of all for the bride to be (except the cases when she’s forced to step into a marriage by who knows what reasons).
My dear bride, it may be your best day, but do you think your guest share your feelings? Wedding guests fall into three big categories:

Family: most of them will come from pure pleasure to see you happy. Maybe some cousins or further relatives may wish you haven’t invited them, but generally speaking, the family is happy to assist you.

Friends: they will come because they love you and cherish you, and want to see you happy, and because they want to be part of the special moments of your life (and weddings are special). Some of them might have to skip it because they don’t have the necessary budget to buy clothes and bring you the wedding gift.

Colleagues: these are people who might try to find excuses for not attending your wedding. Some of them may not like you, some others may tolerate you around, but none of your colleagues really loves you. However, you’d like to see them there, in your wedding day, just because you are happy, and also because you’ll have spent so much with the ceremony that every guest who comes and gives you a financial present actually matters.

Tricks for making sure most of your invitees will attend the wedding:

Make transportation available for them. Rent a bus (or more), pick everybody up from the church and bring them to the ceremony location. Be sure to specify this in the wedding invitations. Your guests will be happy that they won’t be forced to drive (and not drink during the party) and they won’t have to pay a lot of money for a taxi to return home.

Make accomodation available for wedding guests. Some of your relatives may not live in the same city with you. If they attend, they’ll have to pay for at least one night accomodation in a hotel. Estimate the number of people from outside the city and book some hotel rooms for them nearby the wedding location.

Don’t make your wedding guests spend a fortune on clothes they’ll never wear again. If you decide to go for a theme wedding, do it, but don’t force your guests to dress up like a bunch of hobbits if you want a “hobbit” wedding.