Additions to your Non-Traditional Day

Your wedding planning experience will vary depending on the budget and look and feel you’re going for on your big day. While most brides will choose something elegant, understated, and refined (probably something with soft lighting, a plated dinner, and white branches), there are always a handful of brides who will scoff  at such a venture and opt instead for a bouncy house. This is for those brides.   The “wedding experience” is not universal, and nowhere is it written in stone that you must conform to a certain set of standards for your event to count as a wedding. Do you want your guests to kick off their shoes and dance barefoot in the grass? Do you want orange dreamsicles instead of a fancy cake? Do you want the youngest members of your family to have as much fun as the oldest? Cool. Here are a couple of ideas for your awesome wedding:

A Bouncy House!
A bounce house is a colorful air-filled palace of joy and bruising. As long as all kids are properly supervised (and you make it clear that there will be no lifeguard on duty during the reception), there’s no reason why a bounce house couldn’t be a great addition to your reception. Obviously, this venture is best suited to outdoor weddings, but you’ll be amazed how fast your guests turn into 5-year-olds as soon as the thing is inflated. The pictures you’ll get due to the goings-on of the bounce house will be worth every penny you drop on the house (and, by the way, the pennies will be much fewer than other wedding staples, such as a photo booth). Crayons!
For the brides who still ask for the kids menu due to the many coloring opportunities, this option might quicken your pulse. Forget fancy (and expensive) linens for butcher paper and small buckets of crayons at each table and watch your guests glue their noses to the table as they try to beat their neighbor at tick-tack-toe or doodle all through the night. Brides with more traditional weddings can pull this off too, though you might restrict it to the kids table or opt for fancier buckets.   If you’re going for a casual wedding where crayons and a bounce house won’t be out of place, just make sure you warn your guests on your invitation or save-the-date. You don’t have to spell it out for them, but the style of the stationary and accompanying casual pictorials can be helpful.