It is assumed that every bride and groom hope for a dream wedding. Not us. Some might say that I’m a dreamer…but I’m not the only one! After the dreams we’ve had about our wedding over the last few months, you can understand why we’re praying for something a little more normal (but not too normal obviously!).

Let us give you a little insight into our minds as we sleep, and how our wedding would pan out should our dreams come true.

We start with the banns of marriage. In some strange mix-up, the person reading the banns of marriage decided to do some kind of online resolution of our names (I guess a bit like a DNS lookup) and somehow came up with business names. So instead of “I announce the banns of marriage between Stephen…” etc, it was “I announce the banns of marriage between Qantas Airlines…”. Why Qantas Airlines? Who knows?

Next we think about the dress code. Well we’ve said it before and we’d like to stress again that it’s a case of wear what you’re comfortable in. In one of the two dress-code related dreams, Kiri was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and in the other one she was totally naked, but didn’t feel weird about it. I hasten to add that these were both Kiri’s dreams, not mine!

Moving onto the marriage service, we hope the dream of getting it wrong and having to do it over and over again won’t come true, otherwise there wouldn’t be time for the activities, which in wedding dreamland consist of:

• Steve collecting firewood
• Archery (we wish)
• Competition to make a spaghetti bridge that can hold a person’s weight…out of cooked spaghetti

This brings us nicely onto the evening time, when dusk falls and things get a little dark. Never fear though, for we have beacons to light the orchard. Full blown bonfires at the end of tall poles. Lovely! It’s a surprise then with all this heat and light that in another dream everyone decided to follow the newlywed couple (us) to our honeymoon venue. We won’t be happy if that happens!

And then finally, the day after and possibly my favourite dream of all – everyone wakes up to find someone’s legs sticking out from the side of the marquee, and we find out that someone has fallen asleep under the floor of the marquee. I won’t say who it is!

So…that’s why we don’t really want a dream wedding!

It’s an age-old adage that planning a wedding isn’t a sprint; it’s more of a marathon and we’ve been aware of that now for several months. As we turn the corner onto the home straight though, it does feel like there’s a bit of a sprint finish on it’s way as there’s still a lot to do and wedding planning is now a daley focus. All that considered, it’s a long jump from what we had achieved 6 months ago to where we are now.

It was lovely to have a brief rest from the athletics of wedding planning a couple of weeks ago to watch the dress rehearsal of the Olympics opening ceremony (thanks to Tim for getting us tickets) and lap up some of the atmosphere. They had a bit longer to plan the Olympics than we’ve had for the wedding, a slightly different budget, and a few more people involved…but let’s dive into some of the stuff that we’ve been thinking about recently for KISTfest.

As you’re probably aware, we’re going quite freestyle in terms of dress code, but we would like my shirt to match the bridesmaids’ dresses…so off we went in pursuit of a shirt. It’s actually harder than you might think to find a shirt to match a specific blue, but we found an eventual solution after a bit of a steeplechase in getting a white shirt colour-matched and professionally dyed for just £20.

We’ve already blogged about the bunting – this continues to be an addictive pastime for me; it’s not my vault – I just love it! Anyway, once it’s done we’ll probably have about 1000 flags all strung up – the next challenge will be to decide how to divide it up between the marquee, fencing and orchard.

One thing that you might not be aware of is the sponsorship deal we tried to secure with LEGO for KISTfest. We would brand our wedding with their logo in return for a bit of money towards the cost of it. To be fair, it was a bit of a long shot – put simply we had no response, so unfortunately can’t use their branding. We even offered them exclusive gold sponsorship of this momentous occasion…but it wasn’t enough.

There have been many other hurdles that we’ve passed in the planning and we’ve tried to relay information to our guests as we’ve gone along. It’s great that so many of you are choosing to camp – we’ll have a field for camping then next to it there’s a track and field for parking cars. Before the big day though, there’s plenty of stuff for us to do with both of us boxing stuff up to move house, so I’d better get cracking!

“Hidden” in this blog post are several references to the Olympics; some more obvious than others. Can you spot them all?