• BY APRILL BRANDON - ABRANDON@VICAD.COM
• Originally published January 26, 2010 at 5:45 p.m., updated January 26, 2010 at 11:15 p.m.

As the days to your wedding tick down, no matter how hard you try to fight it, you become "that" couple.

With less than five weeks to go until the big day, my fiance and I are now so wrapped up in finalizing every detail, I'm pretty sure a jet plane could land in our living room and we'd still be talking about napkin folds and cheese plate appetizers.

No matter how busy we get with work or other projects, every conversation eventually turns back around to "The Wedding."

For instance, at dinner:

"Honey, these are some great mashed potatoes."

"Why thank you, dear. Oh, that reminds me, has the caterer finished that life-sized mashed potato sculpture of us?"

At work:

"Aprill, can you get that story about the polka-dancing homeless monkey to me by 5?"

"Sure, boss. Hmm ... I wonder if he'd perform at our wedding?"

Even at night while sleeping, "The Wedding" will cruelly sneak into your dreams about a shirtless Ryan Reynolds. One minute he is oiling his bulging chest and the next, you're jolting upright in bed incoherently yelling about buffet table centerpieces.

What is so easy to forget when dealing with the multi-billion dollar wedding industry is that you don't have to have the same wedding as everyone else. I am by no means a traditional bride (SHOCKING, I know), but suddenly I was having panic attacks about such things as flowers. And I'm the kind of girl who can't tell you the difference between a daisy and a dandelion.

See, I think the wedding industry wants us to feel like we should be concerned with these things. From magazines, to TV shows, to movies, we are inundated with images of what constitutes that "perfect wedding."

But after one too many sleepless nights, I had had enough. And that's when myself and 'ol Schnookum Bear decided to ignore what was expected of our wedding and make some new wedding traditions, just for ourselves.

The first thing we did was get rid of the wedding party dance. After going through no less than eight weddings as a bridesmaid, I've spent way too many awkward dances with random groomsmen I didn't know, desperately trying to make small talk over the blare of a Celine Dion song.

"SO ... HOW DO YOU KNOW THE BRIDE AND GROOM ... WHAT'S THAT? I'M SORRY, I CAN'T HEAR YOU. YOU'RE THEIR BLACKSMITH?"

Since my step-dad is walking me down the aisle, I wanted to come up with a way to honor my mom, who spent 16 years raising me by herself. So, instead of a father-daughter dance, we're having a mother-daughter dance. Unconventional? Yes. But I felt she deserved that honor (plus she's a wicked better dancer than my step-dad, who has been known to crush small children on the dance floor).

I have two best friends and as such, I'm having two maids of honor. Why choose?

After years of being forced into bridesmaid dresses that didn't fit my body type, I also decided to let my bridesmaids pick whatever style dress they wanted to let their individual personalities shine through.

Considering we're having a small wedding, a huge wedding cake sculpted to look like the Millennium Falcon seemed rather unnecessary (albeit AWESOME). So we're just having two small cakes that have our photos on them. And in keeping with our tradition of trying to embarrass each other mercilessly on a daily basis, those photos will be of him a 1980s mullet and me with bangs so big they could have their own zip code.

In the end, no one will remember what was written on our cocktail napkins or what my bouquet looked like years from now. But what they will remember is that they had a good time, the bride couldn't stop smiling and that they have photographic proof the groom once had a mullet.

Aprill Brandon is a reporter for the Advocate. At this point, she knows more about napkin folds than anyone ever should.

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