How to make wedding planning fun

Today we've done two things on the wedding to-do list - and we enjoyed doing both of them. Whoever said wedding planning was stressful clearly isn't doing it our way!

This morning we drove out to Kumeu in West Auckland to go wine tasting. The wine merchant our venue works with has suggested three wines from Babich - and as their office is only 20 minutes from our apartment, it would be rude not to give them a go! We tried two of the suggested wines (the merlot cabernet was ok, and the chardonnay we're not sure about) and bought a bottle of the Gimlett Gravels syrah for $10. They didn't have any open to try, but we tried their other syrah and really liked it. The plan is to try the Gimlett Gravels with dinner one night this week, and we think that might be the red wine we choose for the wedding.

Us with what is hopefully our wedding Syrah at Babich Winery

Whilst we were in Kumeu we stopped in at Soljan's vineyard for wine tasting and lunch - they had a really interesting sparkling muscat (no, mum, we can't bring you a bottle back!) - and then went to Cooper's Creek for more tastings. All in all it was a good day, despite the heavy rain that stopped us carrying on to the hot springs as we'd planned.

This evening we've been narrowing down the choices for our first dance song. After extensive research we had a long list of 19, and reading the lyrics carefully ruled three of those out. I recommend reading lyrics - one of the songs I quite liked sounded like it was about self harm, and many well-used first dance songs are actually about breaking up.

Then I got technical (it's the only way to go with Gadget around). We didn't have all the songs on the list, so I went onto Spotify and created a playlist with them all in. After dinner we listened to each song briefly, and ruled a couple out for being too soppy. The last few songs on the list were clearly not as good as the early songs, so they went as well.

This left us with nine songs, five of which we had in iTunes. We bought the other four, as we figured we must like them a lot for them to make it into the top 10! Then came the fun part - we tried dancing round the living room to all nine songs. Unfortunately The Wannadies "you and me song" is very hard to dance too, so that was off the list along with four others.

So we have a short list of four songs, which are now in an iTunes playlist for us to listen to on the way to work and attempt to make a decision. They're fairly diverse - there's one from 2006 and one from 2007, with the other two being from 1959 and 1977! They range from big band to ballad, and from soft rock to mainstream pop. It could be a tricky choice, but I'll happily dance to any of them. And no, I'm not saying what they are - not yet at least!