Wedding Recap: Saturday

SATURDAY

Did I mentioned that my family was in town for my cousin's fiancee's bridal shower?

Saturday everyone woke up and had some coffee, but none of us felt hungry enough to really eat a big breakfast. Keep this in mind, it will play a not-insignificant part of this day's story.

We were looking at a one to one and a half hour drive up to the bridal shower, and neither MQF nor I had managed to secure a bridal shower gift before the event, so we raced from our condo to the mall, haggled with a variety of sales people over the bridal registry, gave up, spent 20 minutes trying to buy a gift card, and finally got out of the store. We hit the road for the hour and a half drive in Los Angeles traffic and very un-Los Angeles rain.

The bridal shower was nice, though I'm always nervous around large groups of strangers that know each other very well. Lots of college friends, so there was definitely shared history here. But everyone was nice, and the hardest thing about the shower was standing outside in our party clothes for a photo in the 40 degree weather.

I left my sister and step mom at a local mall to hang with the rest of the family who was in town for the shower and then drove back to LA, battling to keep my eyes open.

I had this lovely thought that there would be time for a nap (delirium?) before JW and AW arrived to help me start the flowers. However, I needed to rearrange / prep the room for flower arranging, and just as I finished that, JW and AW arrived! We started made 12 table arrangements and JW started working on the orchid and rose corsages (couldn't do the calla lily boutonnieres until Sunday morning for fear they'd die if we cut them too early). We worked until past midnight, at which point we called it a night (though we hadn't accomplished as much as we'd hoped to) and I crashed into bed. Oh, sometime in there my family returned from the shower and my sister and brother-in-law left to drive back to San Diego, and she forgot her purse.

That night I had one nightmare after another about the wedding. First I was so behind that I was making bridesmaids' bouquets as they were walking down the aisle and I ran out of time and couldn't make the bride's! Then someone had mixed all my emergency-in-case-it's-too-windy-for-the-altar-vases stones up with gravy so I couldn't put them in the vases or they'd make the water greasy. Then I dreamt we had had to park the cars really far away from the ceremony site, and every time I started to make another arrangement I had to run back for something I'd forgotten, and finally I got so lost I couldn't even find my way back to the wedding.

Night two of crappy sleep.