Our Two Year Journey Begins

So last week Eric and I finally have "the marriage talk" It's something that both of us decided from the very beginning that we wanted no part of, but now here we are, three years later, planning a wedding. According to him, we are not officially engaged until I have a ring on my finger, but I'm still just as excited and it's still just as surreal.
I've never been one of those women who has had their dream wedding planned since kindergarten because I've really never pictured myself getting married. I've never had the desire and I was relieved when Eric said that after two divorces, marriage was the last thing on his mind. Now every thing's different, and even before we had "the talk" I was finding myself wanting to be his wife This time what had me relieved was the fact that he wanted the same thing!

Now my only problem is that I have no idea where to start. Like I said, I've never had a desire to get married so I have no clue what it takes to plan a wedding. Luckily, I have two years to plan (the one thing that we do have figured out so far is the approximate date) and I'm the Maid of Honor in my cousin's wedding next summer so I'm hoping the time and the bit of experience will work to my advantage.

Last night we started talking about wedding details and at the very least we've come up with a rough estimate of a budget, one for the wedding and another for the honeymoon, and we do know that we want the date to be somewhere between the middle of July and the first of August of 2013. We've also been tossing around some ideas for song selections and what food we want to serve at the reception. I'm letting him take charge of all things food since he's a chef and knows way more about food than I ever will. He actually wants to do most of the cooking himself and have some friends help with anything that has to be done on the day of the wedding so that will really be a big money saver. :) And, we have a good idea who's going to be in our wedding party so we've got a pretty start so far, IMO.

My next big challenge in choosing colors, pretty sure that I like red and gold, but not sure if I love them yet...