I was so exited to start my blog and tell you about some of the charming wedding tidbits I saw on my trip to Italy that didn’t introduce myself properly. I’m Lana Leykin and I’m a wedding planner. My company is Miracle Events. If you have a moment, you can go over to my site: www.miracleevents.com and see what I do.

Some people ask me why do you need a wedding planner?

That’s pretty easy to answer in a big-picture way. For most people, a wedding is a once-in-a-lifetime event and they would be putting a wedding together for the first time. It’s a steep learning curve and there are some blind corners and dead ends that can be tricky to navigate.

The wedding planner is an experienced professional and has covered the territory many times. It’s a fairly straightforward question of, “What needs to be done, when do we need to do it, and how in the world do we manage it within our budget?” for a couple planning their own wedding, and the wedding planner who knows what needs to be done and knows how to do it. She has timelines and schedules and spreadsheets, not to mention vendors of all sorts right at her fingertips. Not to mention ideas. She has lots and lots of ideas! She has a map and knows the way.

Almost everyone has heard about wedding disasters. If you google <wedding disasters> it will auto-fill and you’ll see more than a million hits. There are TV shows we won’t mention (a guilty pleasure for some of us!) about wedding disasters.

A professional wedding planner knows how to prevent wedding disasters. Her experience tells her, Uh-oh, this (idea, venue, vendor, cake) isn’t going to work. Not only can she head off a would-be disaster, she’s highly skilled at last-minute or on-the-spot solutions for any glitch, small or large, that can pop up in a wedding.

What sort of a person does she need to be? She fills many roles along the wedding planning period and even more so on the day of your wedding. Foremost, she is the key person who is guiding the whole process. She’s like the producer and director of a movie.  She’s your ally, your advocate, your artistic director. She’s also a best friend, a close sister, your big brother, your favorite aunt, an unofficial therapist, a soother, an ear to listen to rants (yep, they happen), a shoulder to cry on. And a world-class problem solver.

More than anything, she wants your wedding to be everything that you dreamed of, and maybe even more than you ever expected.

That’s what I do. And I do it because I love it.