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.

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. 

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?

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.

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!

“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.

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.”

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.