Photo by Judith Stephens Photography
It’s been a crazy ride but the wedding planning rollercoaster is finally finished and I’ve been married for almost two months!! Now starts the blog posts about the day, the vendors, what worked and what didn’t. Overall, our wedding rocked. I really didn’t let anything effect me, once it was “showtime” I let myself just say “if it’s not done, I don’t care. I’m going to enjoy myself.” Which for me is a big deal (just ask my husband… it’s still weird to call him that lol)
I wish I could have updated this blog more as I was going but with everything going on (not to mention my FT job, moving, photography business and nerd conventions) I didn’t have much time to sit down and indulge myself. I also didn’t want to ruin all the surprises of the wedding since some guests read this too. I’ll start the Monday before the wedding and chronicle everything I can remember happening in the whirlwind of “wedding hell week”
It doesn’t matter who you are or how simple or planned your wedding is, that week before is a bitch. Whether you made all those little details yourself or your expensive planner planned you the perfect “Celebrity” wedding very few people get to just roll up to the wedding and feel stress free. (and if they do they’re probably drunk in Vegas… and that’s not the wedding you want to wake up to now is it?)
I’ll start this with Sun/Mon since that’s my weekend. I think at this point I was frantically trying to remember if I had all those wedding “essentials” while gluing myself to a boutineer or two. This was crunch time and we were all feeling it. The week before I had some lovely friends come over for a pizza/Disney flick party and we made about 300+ tissue flowers for the poof chandeliers I talked about before on the blog. (scroll down for that) In conclusion, Monday was full of crafts, sewing and glue…. it was like prepping for Dragon*Con that only happens once.
Tuesday, while at work I realized that it was Tuesday before my wedding and I didn’t have a cake… yes, yes I did that. This was the first thing that started to give me the realization that I was getting married on Saturday. Not that I didn’t know this fact, but more of that “wait the 27th is when now?!” I didn’t leave thinking about the cake to the last minute, I just hated my options I had been boxed into by my caterer. They had two preferred bakers. One expensive baker that you had to make an appointment for 6-8 months before you could even order and as good as their cakes was I didn’t even get a caterer lined up until 5-6 months before the wedding so calling them the week before proved impossible to get a hold of someone let alone ordering. The other I tried their cake at two different shows and as affordable as their cake was they refuse to use anything other that buttercream frosting and their examples (present and in the book) looked like a half blind grandma had frosted them….
This is when I sat there and said “screw it, I’m ordering from the bakery I wanted to order from a year ago, Sugar Plum Bakery. I go in for their cupcakes and cookies every once in a while and anytime I go in I’m never sorry I did. Their flavors are to die for and anyone who makes a specialty Butterbeer cupcake is cool in my book. Anyways, I took my lunch break early and called the bakery after looking at the examples on the website. Joanna answered the phone and i politely explained that I was getting married on Saturday and I needed a small cake just big enough to look nice and cut for the traditional cake cutting. I said if they could do it because of the time constraint I totally understand but she assured me it would be alright which totally made my morning. I went on the website and told her I like a design of a cake on the site but in a color of another on the site. With a little bit of “yeah that one, no the one with the dots.. exactly” she had an idea of what I wanted and she gave me the full price for the 10″ round with a 6″ round on top and I was amazed at how reasonable it was compared to the other places. (btw, the cake was to die for, on top of that, and I’m tempted to eat the top of my cake every time I open the freezer O.o)
Wednesday! This was the day I decided not to be on Four Weddings of TLC. Yeah, back story. Saturday I was offered the chance to be featured on Four Weddings. The camp had been contacted about having a bride from the location to be on it and (though I didn’t know it at the time) were the last wedding of the season so she sent out an email asking for me to contact them if I was interested. I told Dan, discussed it with friends and most people said “Go for it! Why not?” I really thought it over and over.
The Pros-
- showing nerd weddings w/o Chewbacca giving me away on the bridge of the Enterprise on the TV (yes that was a joke)
- going to other weddings for fun
- a 1 in 4 chance of a second honeymoon.
Sounds great right?
Cons-
- TLC making my wedding look like I was given away by Chewie anyways…
- possibly having to change our honeymoon plans to go to some other chick’s (who I’m sure would have been just lovely) wedding
- having to watch the show and see (possibly) 3 woman bitch about a wedding they didn’t understand that I put my heart and soul into.
In the end, I decided against it. Dan didn’t know quite how nerdy our wedding was going to be since I couldn’t tell him about his surprise, the life size Tardis. So I felt a bit alone in the decision but it was me that was going to be on camera and undoubtably that $5 bin DVD in Walmart.
Thursday! …. After work, this was the night that Dan had his Bachelor Party so my mom organized a little “Panties and Pasta” party at Olive Garden for any ladies who could make it. My MiL, mom, friends Bee and Nicole and I had a lovely time.
We headed back to the apartment and Bee helped me mark my short dress for the hemming I had to do. Soooo I cut the skirt and Bee headed out to pick up her beau at the bachelor party. This is when the “you should really not do anything after 11pm” moment happened. My short dress is VERY form fitting with boning and cotton lining. I sew for a hobby so I knew better than this but I spaced and tried to pull the form fitting dress over my head without undoing the zipper. Well, you can kinda visualize when I got the waist to my boobs and then couldn’t spin it for an escape. I was then left standing there with my arms stuck in a upwards position, dress kinda sideways on my chest and a face of ever gif of “really?!” on tumblr you’ve ever seen.
It was so tight I was having trouble breathing so I had this visual of Dan coming home to his bride two days before the wedding on the floor dead from “dress asphyxiation” That would have been a great way to go right? lol So I found my phone and called Bee back, explaining that I needed her to come back because I was stuck in the dress… If that’s not a well chosen bridesmaid, I don’t know what is.
Friday was the day everyone arrived for the bridal party and the day I really should have taken off of work… Don’t work the day before if you can help it, I love my job and wanted to make sure all my email marketing was good before I went “off the grid” with wedding stuff for the weekend but looking back my boss probably wouldn’t have minded if I had taken it off. I left work around 3ish and then headed to the mall to pick up my then future-hubby, his brother and Jim the best man from the Men’s Warehouse Tux Rental. We headed back to the apartment to drop off the guys, load up the car with what felt like everything I’ve ever owned to
bring to my parents for the night and the wedding the next day and headed out. He dropped me off and went to print the table cards for me, unaware that my father was in the garage putting the finishing touches on a life sized Tardis as a wedding gift to us and a surprise to his soon to be son-in-law.
The girls were arriving and starting to puff flowers with my mother (who had already made 150 personal, table flowers herself to our amazement) and attach them to the chandeliers, which I’ll do a how-to in a later blog post. I walked out to give my father a piece of the Jack Daniels B-day cake for my MoH and to check on the progress. This was the only time the garage door had been opened all day. I went back into the house and counted one extra man in the side room with everyone. Dan had come to drop off the table cards which I told him to give me at the rehearsal dinner so he wouldn’t come and ruin his surprise that was a year in secrecy. I asked him in a calmed mental panic, “I didn’t see you come up the driveway?” and he explained there were too many cars and he walked up the grass hill to the house. If he had walked up the driveway, he would have seen it. Everyone was dying after he left. All that secrecy to be almost ruined by a fluke parking spot. O.O
The rehearsal and dinner was that night so we headed to the Camp for 6 in multiple party cars. This was the first time most had seen the Camp in person so everyone ran around looking at stuff as I explained who I needed to do what tomorrow to make the set up as quick as possible. We did the rehearsal and my lovely friend Kelly was our wedding wrangler, which was a life saver.
The dinner was at Orta in Pembroke MA. We all had a wonderful time and the food was delicious. I will say, because they were serving so many of us it didn’t seem like they had the staff in the kitchen to handle it and we didn’t leave the dinner until 10″30 or so.
That made most of my girls, mother and friend Kyle staying up til 1am-ish to finish table cards, photo frames and chandeliers. Everyone konked out.
“Part II: The Wedding” to come soon!
d “under the stars” theme we have going. The building has a beautiful, wrap-around porch that would lend well with these too. We picked a camp lodge, so why fight with it? I’m going to accent those days of my future Husband and I’s days in the Scouts with classy, “home-grown” decor. I’d like to weight down with some sand and put in the electric tealights to light the path from the entrance and make a path to the fire pit (yes, the only place that is acceptable to have fire and we’ll keep “Uncle Earl” away from that for sure) for an extra surprise for our guests.
