Planning in Peace: Sharon Naylor's blog to being a harmonious bride at iVillage.com

Here's a little secret that can help take away some of your wedding stress: on the wedding day, you'll notice the things that go wrong (like someone arrives under-dressed for the formality, or the flowergirl pitches the fit you worried about) but it won't throw you. SO much great stuff will be occurring all around you, so many compliments from your guests, seeing the details of your cake for the first time, seeing your guests dancing and having fun, that the problems you fretted over won't make a dent in your happiness.

Even if your outdoor wedding gets rained out and you have to move indoors, you'll find -- as most brides and grooms do -- that the Plan B brings about very special elements that often turn out better than what you planned.

I know these insights won't take away all of your stress right now, but just be open to the idea that what will go wrong won't have any power to wreck your day.

It's true -- even as a wedding expert with tons of experience in planning and an arsenal of de-stressing tips, I couldn't help but worry about some elements of our wedding day [which was gorgeous, on a beautiful spring day in April]. Even when I was pulled together, I was getting worried calls from family and friends, and my groom had his moments of "Let's just elope!" I did as well. On some days, all I wanted was just to BE married to Joe and skip all the chaos that no one -- no one -- can ever fully eliminate. There are just too many facets to a wedding to ensure a completely stress-free wedding planning experience. The best you can do is handle the stress as it occurs, use the tips here in my blog to help yourself and others through the season of chaos, and remember to enjoy.

Which we did.

But I can report that I worried about some things for nothing. The things I worried about never came to pass, and the things we didn't think to worry about did happen (a crasher, missed photo opportunities, the kids stealing all the tabletop cameras and snapping 300 photos of themselves -- which actually turned out to be a good thing...we have lots of pix to share with their parents!). We can laugh off the snafus, and we laughed them off during the wedding day too, because we weren't going to let anything or anyone steal our joy. That's the best wedding gift you can get: your own ability to experience every moment of happiness on your own wedding day.

Just shrug off what goes wrong, grab your new spouse, and get out on the dance floor. The day goes by so quickly...

Boy, they really know how to work you, don't they? In my many years as a wedding expert, I've comforted brides whose parents have attempted to guilt them into having the wedding *the parents* want, and not what the bride and groom want. And the tactics can be spine-chilling. One of the worst is when parents say, "Well, you never know how long I'll be alive" or "I might not be here next year." It happens more often than you might expect. When parents show their dark side and zing you with a scary guilt trip, how are you supposed to handle that?

I have some steps for you here...

1. You HAVE to do a little self-assessment to see where your parents have programmed you, which fears they successfully hit. Where else in the past have they guilt-tripped you successfully?

2. Now, you have to journal out how those guilt trips felt to you then, what you did about it, and how long you regretted giving in (could it be that you STILL regret it?). Write out all of the ways these guilt trips have hurt you. I know, it seems disloyal to parents to write about their trickery, but hey...if they're going to manipulate you like this, your faults in writing down your feelings pale in comparison.

3. You have to create new scripts for yourself. The words come before the confidence you'll eventually feel when you get some practice at defusing their threats. When Mom says, 'Hey, I might not be here next year,' it would be far better to laugh and say, "Wow, I just saw that same line delivered by the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding." If you call her on the fact that such a line has been used as 'ridiculous' in a comedy, that could drain the danger from it. Or, say, "I wish you wouldn't say such things."

4. Call your parent on the guilt trip. Just say, "Please don't try to push me into what you want by saying such things. We agreed to (x) when we first started talking about the wedding, and that's what we'd like to do."

Part 2 on Wedding Guilt Trips coming soon.

You can spin yourself out of control if you look ahead to all of the tasks on your list, try to multi-task the way you've always been able to with great efficiency [newsflash: your multi-tasking skills are going to be challenged right now!], and think about too many things at once.

So keep an organized To Do list, and while it might help you in the early stages to jump ahead and get some of the later tasks done right now, overall you should limit your focus to just one or two Need to Do items right now. Especially if your wedding is weeks or days away. Stay in this moment, do what's essential now, and know that you can handle every tasks when each one's time comes. You'll feel less pressured, more organized and confident, and you won't push your groom and your bridal party to jump all over the map with you.

Just breathe and take it all one little step at a time. Are you looking ahead at too many things right now? Share your story in the Comments, especially if you try this OTAAT (one thing at a time) process and feel a big difference.

When your wedding day gets closer, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the vast amounts of To-Dos related to the wedding AND all of the work stuff, bills and other business of your regular life. Now here's a little secret that has just done wonders for my own wedding preparations...I created an AFTER THE WEDDING file, a cute little pink folder where I've stashed the e-mail printouts for assignments due in May, invoices and bills, correspondence I have to get to...all of the craziness that I'm going to have to handle when I get home from the honeymoon.

I started to feel a little pressured with all of the papers on my desk, wondering 'How am I going to keep track of all of this?' and just placing each paper in the folder gets them out of my eyeline, safely stored away in an organized file, and off of my current To Do list. I don't have to worry about these things at all right now! The effect was immediate -- there is truth to 'out of sight, out of mind!' So create this new folder for yourself, and you'll feel so much better. You can return to planning in peace!