In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I covered creation and use of the wedding website as a planning aid for those too-close wedding dates, visiting Target and Dillards for the wedding registries, creating the wedding program, choosing a place for the rehearsal dinner, and selection of a minister to perform the actual ceremony. Those were some pretty large projects to tackle and get finalized, but ya gotta do 'em, right?

This week, I'll tackle some pretty important projects that allowed my wife and I to really pull a nice wedding together in only five weeks. We wanted to make our day very special even with a severe planning time crunch, so with all the planning paying off by week three of the five-week period, we decided to find a nice frame at a local Hobby Lobby store and have a 5x7 insert cut out so we could eventually place a black & white wedding photo there.

Until that time, we planted a family image in there and planned on having the glass removed so that wedding invitees could sign the backer board (with the five-pack of Sharpies we invested in) with well wishes. The photo above contains only a few, but by the wedding night, the entire frame was covered with signatures and wishes for our new family. It was, in a word, one of the neatest treasures from that special evening. In one fell swoop, we had this project done, so we put it aside until the wedding night came. Date: July 18th, 2007.

In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I covered the very beginning of my recent 'race' to prepare and execute the perfect wedding in just five weeks. My wife and I ended up pulling everything off, much to the delight of our guests and ourselves. Our honeymoon included some much-needed relaxation time for seven days, but before we get ahead of ourselves, there are more -- much more -- basics to be covered. Well, basics may be a misnomer of sorts, as hardly anything in the preparation of a wedding could be described as 'basic.'

Starting off where I left off last week, our invitations went off within three days of ordering them, which ended up being perfectly timed. Alas, we gave our guests about four weeks notice of our wedding, which seemed an appropriate amount of time. Nobody -- at the time -- knew that we'd just began preparations for the wedding a few days earlier, but we weren't about to spill the beans just yet.

The next step in planning our wedding was squaring away the tuxedo rentals. With eight men to get measured and lined up, we headed to Tuxedo Junction at a location near our area. The tuxes were reserved on the day we ordered our invitations, so now was the time to notify all seven guys that they would have to drag, push and pull themselves to the tuxedo rental location to have measurements and show sizes taken.

From June 23rd to August 2nd of this year, I was in a frenzy of planning. So was my fiancé, as we both tried to carry on with our daily lives while planning a full-blown wedding by ourselves at the very same time.

You see, I asked my now-wife to marry me on the eve of our one-year date anniversary, and from there, the happiness and subsequent semi-madness ensued.

You see, with my then-fiancé, being an elementary schoolteacher, there was little time to actually get married, go on an extended honeymoon and then have a little decompression time after all the festivities were over.

We both did not want to wait an entire year (until next summer, during her break), nor did we want to squeeze in a fall wedding at the end of November when a few days out from school would have been possible. My schedule was pretty flexible, but hers? Not so much.

Our solution? Throw our collective sanities in the trash can and plan a full wedding and reception in only five weeks. We were exceedingly lucky to find our dream wedding location available on such short notice, and once we booked that, we were on a roll that would not stop for five straight weeks