Friday. The day before the wedding. The day of the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner. Oy! oy! oy! what a day!
We’d kitted out the wedding party with custom made (thanks Aaron, my magic wizard designer!) matching T-shirts which we all wore for the rehearsal and on the morning of the wedding.
I loved the T-shirts! Col and I keep going to wear them (yes, we’re sad) but we don’t wanna ruin them (yes, we’re even more sad! LOL!). They were a great idea – again, another regret I have is we didn’t get a ‘team photo’ done with us and our wedding party in them (note to self – next time, fly Sarah in even earlier! LOL!).
The Rehearsal was due to start at 10am – turns out, we were behind schedule – which, served mainly as a warning to add an additional 60 minutes on to travel time for the wedding day schedule so we didn’t fall behind schedule (HA! or at least that was our intentions). Anyways, we were behind schedule, thankfully it wasn’t anything too formal and it was just a quick run through of what was going on, who stood where, who said what and when etc.
The venue was prepping for Halloween party, so, my ‘coordinator’, did very little to coordinate my wedding, and, instead was grossly preoccupied with the upcoming Halloween party in the country club. She did nothing more than instruct us to pause at the door for people to take pictures before we walked down the aisle (which was a good tip and I’m glad we did cause we got some cute pictures) and made my wedding party feel like crap. She was rude, abrasive, paid little attention to our needs and questions and she was bordering on just plain disrespectful – not cool. Not cool at all.
The rest of the day was an utter drama-fest. I can’t really attest to what went on behind the scenes other than I ended up spending 6 hours on my own. Some of that time I was in Starbucks on my laptop (I posted a blog post from there), but most of it, I spent sitting in Target car park, in the car, with the engine switched off shaking with anger and trying to calm down. UGH. Not a good day for me! :-/
I guess everyone has their own version of events, which, I suppose was a large part of the problem, with such a big group of people to be responsible for, not everyone is on the same page.
That is, except for one person. I swear, without Magz, I’d probably have jumped a plane to Florida and not come back! LOL!! She ran errands for me (including picking up my rehearsal dinner dress), she cleaned my house (yes, I arrived home to discover that she’d been in and cleaned up) and she looked after my brother (making sure he’d eaten etc). I truly believe she was sent to me by God to keep me sane, cause Lord knows, I needed it!
I ended up with no tan, no shoes for the rehearsal dinner that night, no sucky-in pants (spanx) and no hair product for the rehearsal dinner, however, by that point, I was long past caring! I had my $20 dress that my sister had found for me in a sale rack at Dress Barn when we went out shopping. It was down from over $100 and although it was a little big (yay!), it was perfect – aside from a small stain on the front of it, which we managed to get rid of with some ‘Granny’s secret spot remover’ from Bed, Bath and Beyond (recommended to me by the sales assistant in Dress Barn).
Nina wasn’t at all amused that she’d given me the dress (it’d have been perfect on her too!) because she went on to try on about 50 dresses and just couldn’t find a thing to wear! I definitely appreciated the gesture though cause I loved the dress, it suited the occasion and everyone commented on how nice it looked – so her being selfless helped make me feel like a princess on the night of our dinner and I most definitely appreciate THAT!
Thankfully, the rehearsal dinner went a lot better than the day had gone. In fact, I had a wonderful evening. We’d invited all of our out of town guests to join us for dinner, a tradition here in the States which we wanted to adopt for them coming all the way over here/down here to celebrate our wedding with us. It was the least we could do, to treat them all to a yummy dinner in our favourite Italian restaurant!
No one gave a speech or addressed the masses (ok, ok, 26 – the queen of overstatement strikes again – eh Sam?), which, I know, is tradition. I guess we all just got caught up in the evening going so well and things being so relaxed that no one thought to speak and by the time we realised, it was too late.
In retrospect I’d have liked for maybe Col or someone to have said a few words (apparently it’s not the ‘done thing’ for a bride to speak at these kind of events), but time just got away from us and our buzzing around chatting to our guests kind of took over, before long, it was time to go back to the hotel! I did remember to give out our thank-you gifts to Col’s mum and our Bridesmaids/Groomsmen/flower girl at least – which is something, I suppose.
The event itself was fun, in the beginning we were having a little service-issue. The restaurant had assigned only one waiter to us, drinks and bread baskets weren’t being refilled, service was slow (well it would be if you only have 1 guy working a room of 26 people!) and Col (y’know, the GROOM) didn’t even get his salad!
I was going to say something, but, instead, I delegated to my Maid of Honour and trusted that Helena would get the job done. She did (like anyone had any doubt!), and before long, we had 3 or 4 wait staff and the service improved 10 fold!
The food was lovely (but I’d say that anyway cause it’s my favourite Italian restaurant in the area), my only concern (again in hindsight) was that we ordered the food family-style, large, shareable portions to split up among the group. The restaurant told us how many people could ‘realistically’ share portions and we ordered based on that. We ended up with about 3 times more food than we needed – it was such a waste!
Beyond that, Carino’s did a great job of hosting our rehearsal dinner, the food was good, the service was good, the price was good – they offered everyone dessert, which we’d not budgeted for, but as it turned out, it was less than we thought it was going to be for just 2 courses – even after adding in the desserts and drinks! I also think mini-desserts are the best invention EVER!! (Just an FYI!).
After dinner, we went back to the hotel for a while. My friend Karen’s hubby David bought me some whiskey and we spent a while propping up the bar with our friends and family.
It was a lovely evening and by the time Col and I fell in to bed, a lot of the stresses and tension of the previous week had dissipated. We went to sleep feeling more relaxed, a little rejuvenated and excited as kids on Christmas eve about what the following day held in store for us!
