Berlinovo Wedding Blog

A note on your front door is never good news

Thursday afternoon, when we got back from the flower mart, there was a note on my front door from my neighbor. Never a good sign.

My neighbors were moving. Friday. The note was to tell me that a huge moving truck was expected between 8am and 10am Friday morning and would be there for 2-4 hours blocking any entrance or exit to or from my house (I live in one of those “modern” courts which are more like glorified driveways with 6 houses branching off of it). Hmm.. that made driving the van full of flowers in and out impossible. Well at least we knew ahead of time. We would just park on the street and bring them in.

Thursday night, when driving into our neighborhood, we noticed that the street was lined with cars for as far as the eye could see. It was a veritable parking lot. What the?! Well, it turns out that the apartment complex that is right by my community was having some repaving done. So all of the cars that would normally park in the apartment complex, were now parked on our street. Hmmm…. that made parking the flower van on the street nearby a trickier endeavor.

Not the end of the world, mind you. Just a few things to overcome in order to get the wedding flowers done. It just reinforced the question… why didn’t I hire a florist again?

Your job is to be a shepherd for the family sheep

My new step daughter came in to town a few days early and we assigned her the job of official sheep herder. Now, don’t get me wrong… everyone had a schedule and maps from location to location as I noted before, but as extra insurance and ease, we gave my fiance’s family a point person. She was staying at the same hotel as them and we had given her a walking tour of downtown so that she was familiar with her surroundings. Her job was to make sure that everyone she was responsible for was ready and on time.

I have to admit, making her responsible for my fiance’s family was a great relief to both my fiance and myself. Delegation is an absolute necessity in a wedding.

juggling 8 schedules at a time

A wedding is a carefully orchestrated event, with many players having to be at various places punctually for days. For some people this is old hat but for others it is as foreign as a Rothenburg sneeball. As much as I hate to admit it, I am normally in the sneeball catagory. So I made myself a schedule of where I needed to be, at what time, and what I needed to bring with me starting at 4:30 am on Thursday and ending at 10am on Sunday. After I did my schedule, I did my fiance’s.

Once I had done both of ours, I had to do schedules for people whose activities were interlaced with ours. Now I realize that this sounds very controlling, but in truth, I did this to ease the stress for the various folks that were involved in the wedding. My fiance’s family had been asking him for a while to outline what their days were going to be like. His standard answer of “uh, there is a rehearsal and dinner on Friday and the wedding is on Saturday at 5″ was not enough for them. So I made them a schedule, with locations and times of places they needed to be.

I scheduled the flower folks and the wedding clean up folks. I scheduled who was supposed to take what where, and when. By the end I had 8 schedules.  I handed them out to people as I saw them. Some people added more detail to the schedules. Others laughed and made numerous jokes about them. I knew they really appreciated them, at least that is what I told myself. 

Post-wedding: I am happy to report, everyone kept to their schedules!

add some blue die to the water and the tutti frutti ribbon will look great

This was the suggestion from my new step daughter who had flown in from Colorado that morning. I really hoped she was kidding. I suggested that we put goldfish in the blue water and give the guests pingpong balls. She KNEW I was kidding.

“The white ribbon that we bought is actually tutti-frutti rainbow colored” said my mom.

What?! Yes indeed. The outside of the ribbon had bleached to white (not a popular ribbon, I guess, and if you could see it you would know why). After a few vases had been prepared, the true color of the ribbon came out. The ribbon was subtly variegated pastel pink, yellow and blue. It would have been great for a hippie wedding, but it didn’t really scream classy urban wedding.

So we sent mom to the fabric store. She called to tell me that the store only had one roll of white ribbon in the width we needed. It was a 10 yard ribbon (at the time we thought we needed 30 yards) and it was $2 per yard. Gasp! I told her to forget it, we would go back to the floral supply place. We figured out later that we needed to go anyway because one of the glass vases was broken when we took it out of the case. So my mom and I drove over to the flower supply store to get our new supplies. We were glad that we had started prepping on Thursday because we still had time to do last minute supply runs.

It was a good thing we did. We got in line behind a real florist who was very chatty and was giving us lots of great tips (none of which I can remember now, but we did find them helpful and we used them).  What I do remember is that she thought we were nuts for doing our own flowers. Yet another person to think we were nuts. Once we had all of the flowers prepped, we took them to my local coffee shop to tuck them into the walk-in. The coffee shop owner had graciously allowed us to use her walk-in box to store our flowers. I think she was very surprised at how many flowers there were. But we stuffed them all in there and told her we would be back the next day.

At 4:15am I figured out that perhaps doing my own flowers was not a good idea

I crawled out of bed at 4:15am to be ready to go by 4:30am and arrived at my best friend’s mom’s house by 5am. Thankfully, when I got there, there was coffee. We chatted for a little while, then loaded up her mom’s van with coolers and buckets full of water for the flowers. Armed with my list of flowers that we had made at the flower trial run, we drove up to the flower mart.

When we got there we noticed that only half of the shops in the warehouse were open. That was strange. Both times we had been there before, the entire warehouse had been open. I had no idea why so many shops were closed,  including the one that we had bought a lot of flowers from during the trial run. We hunted for hydrangeas, mums, calla lilies and orchids. Hydrangeas were everywhere, although finding dark blue ones was nearly impossible. We settled for light blue. Once our arms were full, we would trek back to the van and drop the flowers off. Four trips later, we had filled the van with flowers. We only ran in to one issue. There were no burgundy calla lilies. They were no longer in season and they were an integral part of one of the types of flower arrangement. The beautiful yellow orange ones were everywhere; there were even some that were almost black (we thought those were a little morbid for a wedding), but no burgundy ones. Oh well. That was the risk of going up 2 days before the wedding. We found ones that were a dark dusty pink called “captain romance” (pretty appropriate) and went with those. Besides that, things went fine.

THINGS I LEARNED: If you really want a certain flower, you can order it from the shops at the mart. You just need to plan ahead.

We got all of the flowers home and spent the better part of 4 hours stripping roses, boiling they hydrangea stems to preserve them and lining the vases with ribbon. Everything was moving along smoothly. The air conditioning was cranked to keep the house cold for the flowers; everyone had a task that they were diligently working on; then my mother dropped the bomb.

“The white ribbon that we bought is actually tutti-frutti rainbow colored.”

The calm before the storm

On the Wednesday before the wedding there was nothing that we had to do until 3pm. I had a schedule starting at the crack of dawn Thursday, literally, going through midday Sunday, but Wednesday we were free. We wandered around the mall and returned a few gifts that were duplicates. We enjoyed some lunch and some ice cream (no more bridal diet at this point). And at 3pm I had a mani & pedi appointment. It was fabulously relaxing, although I had never had a manicure before so it was strange for me. I was very aware of my fingertips for a long time. After the manicure we went to get some engagement photos printed for our family members. Here is where the mistake was made. While we were waiting for the photos to be done (it only took 30 minutes), I suggested that we go to Pete’s to get a coffee and I didn’t get decaf. Ugh.

When we got home, we moved the furniture in our living room and created a dance floor to practice our dance. We had just learned the beginning and ending the night before, so we figured we should practice it. We were still practicing around 10:30pm, when my fiance finally kicked me out of the living room and up to bed. I had to get up at 4:15am the next morning to go to the flower mart. The problem? that darn coffee. I was pumped up on caffeine and could not go to sleep. I woke up every hour, worried about not getting up in time the next morning. It was a rough night.

Let them eat cake - Again!

We got to go to Bijan’s bakery today to order our cake. Our baker is a friend of my dad’s. He also happens to be the best baker in the bay area (at least in my opinion). We brought a picture of the cake that we liked. We have fewer people than we originally estimated so we are having a 3 layer cake instead of a 4 layer cake. This means that we had to pick between two layer flavors that we had already chosen. We didn’t remember what the two tasted like so we had to taste cake again. Well, maybe we kind of remembered what they tasted like, but we weren’t about to say no to cake.

We went with chocolate with fresh raspberries because my fiance liked it best There will be other flavors as well. Cake tasting is by far the best part of planning a wedding. I highly recommend doing it as often as you can!  

Doesn’t the final try on mean the dress should be done?

Mom and I went to the alterations shop for the final fitting for the dress today. She and I were both under the impression that the dress would be done seeing as it was the last fitting before the wedding. Evidently “final” had a different meaning to the alterations lady. The hem was still not finished. The bustle was connected with a safety pin. The alterations lady did not finish the bustle because she wanted to show us an alternative bustle to the one we had chosen. We did agree that the new bustle looked better. It also needed 4 more hooks. Shockingly, those 4 extra hooks cost more money.

Mom and I will have to do a thorough inspection of the dress when we pick it up on Friday to make sure that “done” really means “done”.

Wedding dance boot camp

We signed up for Wedding Dance Boot Camp with my sister and her husband. It was a three hour class that was designed to introduce pre-wedding couples to different dances so that they could chose what kind of dance they might like to do for their first song. Needless to say, when we were doing introductions and were asked to give the date of our wedding, many were surprised to hear us say, “next week”. They were aghast at our unpreparedness. They may have even snickered. Little did they know, we were not THAT unorganized, and had actually been taking dance lessons for a whole WEEK already!

We learned the foxtrot, rumba, waltz and dance club two step.  It was a crash course, and was a ton of fun, even if in the end we may still end up doing more of the high school “rock” than actual dancing. I will have it be known that my fiance and I are not doing any of those dances for our first song, including the high school rock. We are rebels.

My brother-in-law, who brought his dancing shoes with him (he claims both shoes are lefties) showed off his athleticism and picked up dancing quite well. All his and my sister’s pre-dance class disclaimers were for naught. After a mere three hours of training, he will be a “dancing fool” at our wedding (well, he will be part of that phrase for sure).

Honoring the family

One of the nice ideas that I found in one of the wedding books was the idea to put old family pictures around the placecard area. I got some pictures of my grandparents, my parents, my fiance’s grandparents, parents and even his great-grandparents. It was a lot of fun to look through the old pictures! Also, we think it is a great way to honor the people who make up our history, some of whom have passed and others who will just laugh at the memories that the pictures invoke.