Congratulations, you’re getting hitched in 2012! It’s hard enough finding balance in every day life, but now that you’re engaged you have a lot more to juggle. Most importantly: finding the right balance between your own personal style and what’s hot and current. This is especially true when it comes to your wedding dress. But don’t stress. Here’s the plan:

First, knead out those knots of stress with a wedding planning massage. (We insist!)

Then, narrow down the gazillion wedding dress options by knowing the top trends of the season, as told by The Knot.

Here’s a glimpse at what’s timeless yet modern – check out the top 10 wedding dress trends for 2012, according to theknot.com.

1. Sheer Lace Capes

Alfred Angelo

Last season it was all about long sleeves a la Kate Middleton, but the latest craze is gracefully draped capes. Try this trend for a modest, traditional look on your big day.

2. A Hint of Tint

Rivini

Peach, champagne, cotton candy, sorbet, lavender and mint – you’ve seen stars like Gwen Stefani and Portia de Rossi rock partially-tinted wedding dresses and brides like Kholé Kardashian and Reese Witherspoon add colorful accents to their gowns in the past, but this year the runway is totally dipped and dyed with a rainbow of feminine and romantic hues.  This trend is definitively not for the faint of heart.

3. Embellished Bodices

Anne Bowen

It’s all eyes on you with a glitzy bodice paired with a soft and simple skirt. This style option is great for pear figures who want to enhance their chest, cinch their waist and hide curvy hips.

4. Illusion Necklines

Ines Di Santo

According to The Knot, “Sheer bateau necklines continue to be all the rage on the bridal runways, and this season, crystal and pearl appliques give these see-through styles a more glamorous vibe.” This style is perfect for showing off toned shoulders, arms and back.

5. Hi-Low Hemlines

Oscar de la Renta

Often refereed to as a “mullet dress,” this style of gown is incredibly fashion-forward and edgy (and all business in the front, party in the back, ha!) ; perfect for a beach or outdoor wedding. Plus, the peekaboo hemline is the chicest way to show off amazing wedding shoes.

6. Romantic Ruffles

Pronovias

Use ruffles and ruching to your advantage! Fluffy fabric and cascading frills – when used properly – can accentuate or diminish curves where needed, in order to create a perfectly flattering shape for your individual body type. Plus, they will add the perfect amount of fairytale drama to your special day.

7. Cap Sleeves

Reem Aarca

By opting for a dress with cap sleeves, the eyes are drawn upwards towards the face, elongating your appearance and creating a flattering balance between the lower and upper halves of the body. Depending on the style, cap sleeves can also mask a bra stap, if you need the extra support.

8. Voluminous Ball Gowns

Maggie Sottero

For a traditional, princess-themed event, the bigger the ballgown skirt the better. This style is great if you’re a confident, all-eyes-on-me bride who wants to accentuate that tiny waist you worked for during your engagement. Show it off, girl!

9. Soaring Slits

Monique Lhuillier

Try this sexy trend if you are on the taller side and/or have great gams. Sky-high slits are great for adding drama to fashion-forward or old-Hollywood themed weddings. Want to try the trend but apprehensive about baring so much skin at the service? Save the slit for your reception dress and dance the night away with the freedom to shake a leg.

10. Cold Shoulders

Marchesa

Off-the-shoulder gowns can help you get the look of a strapless neckline and show off those collarbones without the awkwardness of always having to pull up your top. This style is perfect for larger busted brides.

Images via

If you are planning an autumn or winter wedding – you’re in luck! Spa Week, October 10 – 16 is the perfect time for brides-to-be to get perfectly polished and pampered before the ceremony. Spa Week offers brides (and non-brides, moms, sisters, friends, boyfriends and husbands) the chance to get beautiful from head-to-toe, literally. You know, like “head, shoulders, knees and toes.” Starting with the head and moving all the way down to the toes, here are 5 treatments that will help you get wedding- ready during Spa Week:

Head:

Rup Day Spa head over to Hoboken, NJ (pun intended) and get your chakra tweeked and aligned, while you hair is slathered in nourishing warm oil with their 60 Min Shirodhara, Energy Balancing Ayurvedic Treatment for Stress Relief and Hair Conditioning. You hair will be soft as silk and your mind will be clear as a bell!

Shoulders:

Then,  jet-set across the country to  A Touch of Clover Skin Care in San Diego, CA for a pain-melting 60 Min Warm Bamboo Massage, perfect for the most stressed bride(zilla)!

Body:

Get touchably soft skin and the perfect (autumn-appropriate) airbrush tan glow at Atlantic Resort & Spa with their 50 Min Spray Tanning with Full- Body Exfoliation.

Legs:

Ensure you’re wedding dress fits flawlessly; rid your gams of dimples with a 65 Min Triactive Laserdermology and Endermologie Combination to Reduce Cellulite from Cellulite Center at Luminesa Medi-Spa in NYC. It may sound like science-fiction but this treatment will help you lose inches while smoothing, tightening and toning.

Hands & Toes:

For picture-perfect tootsies, Allure Day Spa in Davie, FL has your nails covered – in pumpkin that is! Their 90 Min Pumpkin Therapy Manicure and Pedicure will insure your hands and feet are deliciously rubbed, buffed and polished.

To find all of these $50 treatments and more, visit SpaWeek.com and book your appointment today!

Rain, rain, go away. Don’t come back on my wedding day. Over the weekend, Hurricane Irene ruined so many things: from Freshman move-in day at NYU to The Dave Matthews Band Caravan festival on Governors Island. And now you can add true love to that list. Irene’s tyrannical rampage soaked-out weddings, stranded guests and forced bridal parties to head for higher ground… However, there were a few happy hopefuls that chose to weather the elements and continue their nuptials. I mean, hey, the show must go on, right? Take a look at some of the most adorably devastating wedding accounts of six almost-newlyweds from across the East Coast.
Bride-to-be Rona Geller reluctantly called off her Long Island, NY nuptials which were supposed to happen on Sunday. “It was the hardest decision I ever made,” said Geller. Geller initially tried to ignore the depressing weather updates, because she didn’t want to be “one of those panicked brides.” But eventually, she and fiancé Michael Field realized they had no choice in the matter—they now plan to wed on Oct. 16. Ironically, Field is the nephew of meteorologist Frank Field, and cousin to TV weather-watchers Storm Field and Allison Field. Also, Field’s brother, Joe, married wife Robyn during Hurricane Bertha, a Category 3 churner that hit Long Island in 1996.
Wedding Guests in Vermont weren’t so lucky. At least a dozen wedding guests were airlifted by helicopter from a Vermont town of Pittsfield on Tuesday where they had been stranded since Tropical Storm Irene hit two days earlier, turning rivers into roiling flood waters that washed away the only road in town.
A Rockland, MA bride has learned that she doesn’t need electricity for her big day — her new husband is the light of her life. Tropical Storm Irene forced their wedding venue to shut down, but that didn’t stop them from tying the knot by candlelight at a local tavern. That’s right — the bar saved the wedding!
Erica Sternin Weiss should be honeymooning in Tahiti right now. But because of Hurricane Irene, her wedding and honeymoon were cancelled. “I was supposed to get married on Saturday in a waterfront park in New Rochelle, N.Y. at 6:30 p.m.,” Weiss said. “On Friday night, our venue called and explained that the county was forcing them to close and our wedding was canceled.” So what did the couple do? Erica and Brett Weiss were married at their rehearsal dinner Friday night, right after they found out that their wedding venue would be closed due to Hurricane Irene.
A New Hampshire couple refused to let tropical storm Irene ruin their wedding and found a new location when authorities forced them to move the reception. Bill Luquette and Kyla Brown said they decided not to postpone their wedding when they heard Irene was expected to reach New Hampshire Sunday but they were left scrambling for a venue when the Windham Fire Department told them the reception they were planning at Searles Castle in Windham would not be safe during the storm, the New Hampshire Union-Leader reported Tuesday. The couple said they found a new location, the basement of St. Peter Church in Auburn, and the disc jockey, Mr. Jonathan DJ, was able to organize a reception with catering services in only 3 hours.
Hurricanes and Melissa Cook just don’t get along. Last August, she and her boyfriend, Jason Archbell, got engaged on a trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina; the celebratory week at the beach was cut short when Hurricane Earl prompted mandatory evacuations. This August, the happy couple from Philadelphia made a return trip to welcome 150 guests to their wedding, planned for Saturday at Jennette’s Pier, a brand-new reception area perched atop the Atlantic Ocean. On Wednesday night, they learned from The Weather Channel that their plans had been scuttled yet again, this time by a blustery bully named Irene. “I saw the words ‘mandatory evacuation,’ and I just burst into tears,” says Cook, 29 and a civil engineer. “My thinking was because it happened this time last year, there’s no way it could happen again.” But it did. “I haven’t found someone to marry us quite yet,” says Cook. “But come hell or high water, I have said I will go on my honeymoon as a married woman.” (The honeymoon, to Aruba, was selected “very intentionally” because it’s outside the typical hurricane track.)

The dress, the flowers, the venue, the cake… These days planning a wedding can be seriously stressful. All those choices can lead to crazy Bridezilla and an unethused Groom. During the wedding planning, defuse heated debates and keep sparks alive  by writing your own wedding vows. From funny to silly to serious and everywhere in between, here are six different wedding vows to fit (almost) every relationship:

1. Pirate Vows

Groom: I, Mad Dog [name] take ye, Saucy [Bride] as me Heart, me Soul, me Good Wench with a stout right hook, the bright dawn of each new day and the soft bed of each day’s night. I promise to love ye and honor ye; to make ye laugh when yer feelin’ out of sorts and pretend to listen to ye when ye babble on and on about nothin’ in particular. I will protect you from the elements and the elephants should we ever encounter them as it is my understanding that they can be very large and unpredictable. I will love thee through scurvy and through fire, in wealth or poverty whether ye be near or far. And when I speak of treasure, as I am wont to do, everyone within the sound of me voice will know that what I am really speaking about is you. All of this will I undertake until there are no horizons left to chase and the rum is gone.

Bride: I, Saucy [name] take ye, Mad Dog [Groom] as me Heart, me Soul, me Salty Jack with a crooked smile, the foggy haze of each new day and the lumpy (but familiar) mattress of each day’s night. I promise to love ye and honor ye; to make ye laugh so hard the rum comes out yer nose and pretend to listen to ye when ye babble on about nothin’ in particular. I will protect you from my wrath and from giraffes which I understand are very tall and will sometimes step on people because they are not looking where they are stepping. I will love thee through scurvy and through fire, in wealth or poverty whether ye be near or far. And when I speak of treasure, as I am wont to do, everyone within the sound of me voice will know that I am day dreaming again. All of this will I undertake until there are no horizons left to chase and the rum is gone.

2. Zombie Vows

Bride: My love, as I gaze into your mesmerizingly vacant crimson eyes, stroke the pale, flaking skin of your cheek, and drool over the human arm that you dragged behind you down the aisle, I cannot help but smile knowing that you have chosen me with which to spend the rest of undead eternity. “’Till death do us part” is but a mundane mortal musing; you and I will shuffle through the streets, trudge over the grasslands, and limp along the seashore for every sunrise and sunset to come. I cannot wait to feast on the living with you by my side and to admire your strength and your focus as you tastefully terrorize the mortal population. There is no other woman, living or dead, with whom I would rather spend a mindless and unending undead existence. I love you more than death itself.

3. The Princess Bride Vows

The Impressive Clergyman: Mawage. Mawage is wot bwings us togeder tooday. Mawage, that bwessed awangment, that dweam wifin a dweam…
The Impressive Clergyman: And wuv, tru wuv, will fowow you foweva…
The Impressive Clergyman: So tweasure your wuv.
Prince Humperdinck: Skip to the end.
The Impressive Clergyman: Have you the wing?
The Impressive Clergyman: …and do you,Pwincess Buwwercup…
Prince Humperdinck: Man and wife. Say man and wife.
The Impressive Clergyman: Man an’ wife.

4. Dr. Seuss Vows

Minister: Will you take her as your wife? Will you love her all your life?
Groom: Yes, I take her as my wife, Yes, I’ll love her all my life.
Minister: Will you have, and also hold Just as you have at this time told?
Groom: Yes, I will have, and I will hold, Just as I have at this time told, Yes, I will love her all my life As I now take her as my wife.

5. Wedding Crashers Vows

Groom: “I, [name], take you, [Bride], to be my wife, my best friend, and my first mate. Through sickness and health, clear skies and squalls.”
Bride: “I, [name], take you, [Groom], to be my best friend and my captain, to be your anchor and your sail, your starboard and your port.”

6. Star Wars Vows

Groom: My Queen, may the Force be with us as we travel through the galaxy of life. I pledge to never turn to the Dark Side but stand forever in the illumination of our love. I vow to fight the Evil Emperor and I invite you take your place at my side as we rule the galaxy. Take my hand and stand with me for light and justice throughout our lives.

Bride: My Jedi, my love, I take your hand and accept your pledge. May the force be strong with us all the days of our lives. There is good in you, I sense it. Remain a Jedi and I will stand by you. I pledge to you my love and my companionship as long as I live.

We’ve all heard the playground tune, “First comes love then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage.” But these days, that sing-song doesn’t apply for most couples. People are getting married later in life, or not at all, or opting for kids before the ceremony or skipping kids all together. For many  families kids are out and pets are in. So much so that Rover isn’t just a pet anymore, he’s a adopted child. (Especially when, according to BabyCenter.com, the cost of raising a child is 250,000 and that’s NOT including college). If your inner circle is comprised of two lovers and a lab, then you’re in luck because today we are going to help you add a little woof to your wedding.

But, before you rush over to Pet Smart to buy a cute doggy tuxedo, here are a few tips from PetFinder.com to help you decide if Fido is ready for your big day.

Is my pup up for the challenge?

Planning the doggy debut:

Practice and lots of treats:

.

Before the big day…

On the day you say “I Do,” don’t forget to have a bowl of fresh water for your pooch.