Berlinovo Wedding Blog

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.

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. 

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?

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.”

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.

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.

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).

Things I learned: starting the box

One bit of advice given to me by a friend, who got to her wedding location (many miles away from her home) without the toasting flutes, was to start the ceremony/reception box a week before the wedding. Start gathering the items that will be needed for the wedding. I have found this very helpful, because it has given me a few days to remember what I need to bring and let me tell you, it is amazing how much crap you need (especially for a do-it-yourself decorating wedding). I have a ton of candle holders (that will most likely go up for sale on Craig’s list the Sunday after the wedding), flutes, cake cutting utensils, favors, place cards, table numbers, family pictures, guest book and pen, and lists for the event planner. Fortunately, we have a meeting with the event planner the Tuesday before the wedding where we get to drop off all of the stuff. If we have forgotten anything, she will let us know.