Rehearsal time
3pm rehearsal and remarkably everyone was there. I will not say that we started on time, because when you get a large group of people together the chatting starts. We started with the recessional, practiced the processional, the officiant went through the ceremony and then we practiced the recessional again. Mom and I both choked up walking up the aisle. I knew there was potential that I would be a basket case at the wedding. We did one last processional, stood up at the front when suddenly I realized I was missing something. The bouquet! Otherwise known as the paper plate full of the ribbons from the bridal showers. We had to do a quick practice with that. After all of the practice we still ended right on schedule!
Uncategorized | Comment (0)Attack of the stress monster
After the rehearsal, my fiance and I went back to our room with his family. We visited for a little while and they left to go to their rooms to relax a little before the rehearsal dinner. On their way out, my fiance’s nephew figured out that our suite had a door bell. He figured it out a few times, if you know what I mean. A few minutes after the family left, the doorbell rang again. We figured the family came back, but we were surprised when room service rolled in with champagne and chocolate dipped strawberries. Lovely! We called up some friends of ours that had come in from Colorado and invited them to share in our wedding bounty. We really wanted to find time to see our out of town guests since they had been kind enough to travel long distances to celebrate with us. That is the benefit of inviting the out of town guests to the rehearsal dinner. You get some semi-private time to visit with people who traveled to see you, because at the wedding it is really hard to spend any quality time with people.
So, we sat and enjoyed our champagne before we headed over to the restaurant, our normal Friday night hang out, for dinner. Dad pulled out the stops at the restaurant. We started with fried calamari and marinated eggplant salad. That was before the salad and dinner. Dinner ended with a Lasagna cake for my fiance. He kept joking that he wanted a lasagna cake for his groom’s cake so my mom had a picture of lasagna scanned onto an Italian rum cake to surprise him. It was great!
Unfortunately, the champagne on an empty stomach plus the fried food and garlic bread plus the lasagna and cake did not set well with my stomach. I went to the grocery store and picked up some Tums and some snacks for the next day. If anything had been drilled into me, it was the the bride NEEDED to eat on the wedding day.
We went back to our room and went to bed. I felt awful. I had taken Tums, but to no avail and I had a headache. Mom had made me an emergency pack with Advil among other things for the wedding day, but she had it in her purse. Not exactly helpful at 3am.
THINGS I LEARNED: Make sure to pack an emergency medical kit with band-aids, pain medication, Tums, safety pins, bobby pins, and other medical sundries. Make sure you have it with you as soon as you leave your house.
So I decided, against my better judgement, to take the only pain killer that we had, Tylenol PM. I knew it was risky to take a pain killer that was coupled with sleep medication, but the headache was too much for me to take. Little did I know. The Tylenol PM made me sick to my stomach. So I spent the rest of the night alternating between the bed and the bathroom floor. Needless to say, my fiance didn’t get much sleep either. Maybe that is what we got for eschewing the norm of staying apart the night before the wedding. Who knows. What I do know is that neither of us slept until about the time we were supposed to get up. And of course we had not set an alarm, because normally we are up by 7am. Thank goodness we had told our Colorado friends that they could stop by before 10am if they wanted to drop off our gift. The doorbell woke us up at 9:15. So much for a relaxing morning.
1 week before "W" Day, Things I learned, Uncategorized | Comment (0)flower extravaganza (watch the manicure, please)
Friday morning. The day before the wedding. Wow! That day snuck up quickly. I had estimated that the flowers should only take us a few hours. After all, we had prepped the flowers the day before, the oasis was soaked, the vases that could have ribbons around them, did have ribbons around them and there were 5 of us doing them. I had figured out that we had 24 arrangements to do, but it really wasn’t that bad. Twelve of the arrangements couldn’t be done until the ceremony (they were just vases filled with water with flowers in them). That left 12. Six of those were only tricky because we had to float some oasis without having the water spill over. Once that was figured out, the arrangements themselves were pretty simple. That left 6 more arrangements. They were big arrangements, but we already had a prototype in pictures from the trial run. A few hours tops.
We got the flowers from the coffee shop (and coffee and bagels) at around 7:30am. We had a nice relaxed breakfast, chatting and talking about the arrangements (we had plenty of time after all.) The moms took care of the floating oasis arrangements and the other 3 of us took on the big arrangements. We decided that we would tackle the big arrangements by using the assembly line method.
By about 12:00, we had the floating oasis arrangements done and we had to do the big arrangements. No problem right? Well, first a model arrangement had to be done. We had pictures from the trial run. My best friend worked on it for a while and pretty soon the model arrangement was done and we had 5 more to do. But the clock was ticking. Ahead of me on the schedule was picking up the dress, checking into the hotel and rehearsal at 3pm, so I was watching the clock. We all pulled together to crank out the last 5 arrangements. I have to admit though, it was pretty stressful.
My mom and I had to run out at 2pm to get the dress. My friends took care of getting all of the arrangements back to the coffee shop and gathering all of the extra flowers, which was a huge job. They had to figure the schedule the for the next day, how and when to get the flowers from the shop to the reception hall and who was going to help.
1 week before "W" Day | Comment (0)back in time
It is now a week after the wedding and I have to catch up on my blogging. I knew that it was going to be busy, but I had no idea. I will fill in and pre-date the pre-wedding entries.
Post wedding | Comment (0)