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)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.”
1 week before "W" Day, Things I learned | Comment (0)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.
1 week before "W" Day, Reception, Things I learned | Comment (0)You have no other option but to come
The invitations sat, “airing out”. Mom and Dad came over for dinner one night and I handed them their RSVP card to have them fill out what they wanted for dinner. They gave me their RSVP and I tossed it into the RSVP box. Two days later, for some reason, that RSVP flashed into my brain and it occurred to me that I didn’t remember Mom checking a “will attend” box. I went racing upstairs to the RSVP box to confirm my suspicions and it was true. We were so concerned with getting the food choices on the RSVP that we did not give the guests the choice to attend or not. UGH. Thank goodness that we ordered them early. I still had time to reorder, but not much.
I went onto the website again and reordered the RSVP cards. They said they could turn them in 5-10 business days. This put us mailing the invitations somewhere between 6-7 weeks before the wedding. Common etiquette tells you that you need to mail the invitations 6-8 weeks before, so we were cutting it close. The Indian site did get the cards into fed-ex very quickly and they sent me a fed ex link, so that I could track my shipment. It was scheduled to show up July 3rd. All was going fine until there was a storm in India. My shipment got delayed! Because of the July 4th holiday my shipment was not going to show up until the 5th. This meant that in order to get the invitations out with in 6 weeks of the wedding, we only had a couple of days to get them out. The troops mobilized. Mom and Dad came over for dinner (that Mom brought over, thanks Mom). We set up different jobs for each person. Mom put the invitations together and numbered the RSVP cards (see: Things I Learned), I put the numbers by the guests names in the master spreadsheet, Dad stuffed the envelopes and my fiance sealed them (I had already put stamps on them days earlier).
Things I Learned: Put little numbers on the back of your RSVP cards. Keep a list of which guest the numbers are assigned to. Then, if an RSVP card comes back without the guest’s name on it, you will know who that RSVP card was sent to.
”The envelope is not sealing”.
What? Yes indeed, according to my fiance the envelope had no glue on it. Hmm. That was interesting. Well, there were some gold seals included with the envelopes. Perhaps we were meant to use those. I thought it was a bit odd, but didn’t think much of it.
It wasn’t until a friend of mine called me after she got the invitation that I figured out what had happened.
“The invitations were beautiful” she said, “but I thought I should let you know, there was no glue on the RSVP envelope, so I just taped it”. No glue?! Then it occurred to me. There had been a box for “self stick envelopes” when I ordered the invitations. I checked “no”, thinking that it meant that the envelopes would have that strip of paper that you had to peel off to stick the flap down. I thought that would look a little tacky on the RSVPs, so I opted “No self stick”. Of course, I thought by opting “No” that was opting FOR normal glue stripped envelopes, but evidently not. I opted for NO glue. Oops!
My fiance’s solution? “Just tell everyone that tells you that their envelope didn’t have glue….’Really? It must have just been yours. Everyone else’s came back glued”.
Funny guy my fiance.
Invitations, Things I learned | Comment (0)Simple yet elegant
We ended up choosing invitations that were simple, but elegant. I lean a little more to the exotic, but my fiance leans more towards simple patterns. Thus, our invitations were born. It is a nice combination of simple and a little exotic. For those of you who received invitations, and find this hard to believe, you should see the runners up.
Once we chose the invitations, we had to order them. I have to say, this process is not for the weak. Ordering was pretty easy, go online, chose your card and all of the extras that come with it. Extra pages behind the invitation? Yes. Thank you notes? Yes, please. Address pre printed on the invitation envelopes? Yup. Hand calligraphy of names and addresses of guests or laser printed or none? Self stick envelopes or not? Menu cards? And the list goes on. You then need to send in the wording for the invitation, the RSVP and anything else you want in the invitation. This actually takes a little bit of work. Because the site was Indian, there weren’t as many examples of what typical American invitation wording was. My fiance and I searched the Internet for a while looking for proper wording and designing our cards. Then we had to figure out how to design an RSVP card that would allow us to let each guest list their dinner choice (we are having a sit down dinner). We needed to be able to provide the dinner choice of each guest to the event director by table, so it was important to get this information on the RSVP. Once we finally nailed it down, we sent the documents by email to India. Now here is the beauty of outsourcing… the next morning there was an email from the company with proofs for us. We changed a few words and the font and sent it back. The next morning the changes were made.
THINGS I LEARNED: Make sure you have multiple people proof your invitations, RSVP and guest list to try to catch all of the errors before you send them off to the printers for the final run. The company is not going to proof it for you, even for basic mistakes. Now, this could be one of the hazards using an outsourced invitation vendor to be sure. I don’t know what the American invitation companies are like.
The back and forth went on for a few more turns until we were done. We then ordered the invitations a month ahead of when they were supposed to be sent. They arrived a week later. I was thrilled, they were well ahead of when we needed them. Remember the smell I referred to in an earlier post? Well it was strong! We separated all of our invitations and envelopes and let them air out. I was very glad we had gotten them so far ahead of when we needed them. Little did I know, that I was going to need that time.
Invitations, Things I learned | Comment (0)Trial run on the flowers
Today my best friend and I did a trial run on the flowers. We got a bit of a late start up to the flower mart and learned a valuable lesson. When they say that they close at 10am, they mean it. We made it up there around 9am, so we had some time, but they were definitely closing up shop by the end of our trip and we were running around a little frenzied. We will be up there much earlier for the wedding flowers.
I had pulled a lot of flower arrangement pictures off of the net (www.projectwedding.com has great pictures of flowers) and out of magazines, so we had a pretty good idea of what look we were going for. We bought armfuls of hydrangeas, dahlias, mums, calla lilies, roses, and orchids. We had planned ahead this time and brought a bucket with water in it to hold the flowers.
We drove over to her mom’s house and started designing the arrangements.
THINGS I LEARNED: Hydrangeas are VERY temperamental. They wilt very quickly. They don’t like hot weather and need to be in water. A trick I learned on the internet… cut the stem and submerge it in boiling water for 30 seconds. Then put it in the arrangement. (http://www.hydrangeashydrangeas.com/cut_dont_wilt.html)
My reception hall is long and narrow with 2 tables across and 6 tables long. Visually, I did not want a room of clone tables and table arrangements. We designed 3 different kinds of flower arrangements. After 5 hours of creating and taking apart flower arrangements, I think we have got the final designs completed. I am really happy with how they have turned out.
I am not sure we have saved tons of money on this. I have chosen some very expensive flowers and the trial run has to be added to the overall cost. The average cost of flowers at a wedding in big cities according to Bridal Bargains is $2500-$6000 in a big city. I consider the heart of Silicon Valley to have big city prices, especially since a friend of mine just got married and I know her floral bill was in that range. Those statistics being stated, we are well under the low on that range, so I feel pretty good. We will see how I feel when we are arranging these the day before the wedding.
5 weeks before "W" Day, Things I learned | Comment (0)