Member- CakeSniffer
- 5 years ago
- Wedding: May 2016
I feel like I need a t-shirt that says, “I survived the wedding planning process and all I have to show for it is this shirt. And a husband.” I feel so free now that the burden of planning a major social event is no longer resting on my shoulders! I made it!
(Sorry for the creepy headless photo, I just don’t feel comfortable revealing my true identity here.) (Because I’m Batman.) (No, not really.) (Or am I?)
I will freely admit that 75% of the crap I worried about didn’t wind up mattering. Will the guests die of boredom if we don’t have dancing? Will they hate our ceremony? Who will be in charge of the ceremony music? Will my hair look awful since I’m not doing a hair trial? Will my makeup look awful since I’m doing that myself and have the makeup application skills of a two-year-old doing a fingerpainting? Will all of my DIY decor look cheap and pathetic? Blah blah blah blah blah. Be quiet, neurotic perfectionist voice in my head!
Turns out lots of s*** went wrong on the day of. The officiant, whom we’d never met before that day (bad idea), turned out be some sort of cyborg sent from the future to prevent the birth of John Connor by reciting our ceremony in the most robotic way. She added a phantom letter to my first name that isn’t actually there when performing our ceremony, although I do have an unusual name so I’ll cut her some slack for that. But then she proceeded to mispronounce our last name when introducing the new Mr. and Mrs. Now, that was particularly crappy because my husband has dealt with his name being mispronounced his entire life so it goes beyond being a pet peeve for him to something that genuinely irritates him. I made a point of letting her know the correct pronunciation before the ceremony. And she still screwed it up. This bothered my husband way more than it bugged me.
My poor Mother-In-Law, who headed to the reception venue right after the ceremony to make sure they’d set everything up correctly, got there to find that they hadn’t started setting anything up. And this was 20 minutes before it was set to start! Turns our our coordinator wasn’t able to be there that day, whoever was supposed to fill in for her was busy waiting tables since the restaurant had their usual Saturday night crowd, so my Mother-In-Law had to direct the staff on where to put everything. All this while guests were filtering into the room. Ugh. As a result they were late getting the appetizers out, which pushed back our whole timeline that was carefully planned around getting the cake cutting done before the time we booked with our photographer was up. But even that wasn’t enough to ruin anything. At that point I didn’t care what happened as long as everyone was happy and fed. And they were! Every time I looked around I saw people happily chatting away, which made me so happy to see. Everyone wound up having a great time and, at the end of the day, that was all I cared about.
All of the DIY stuff was so worth it. It really put a personal touch on the day and our guests loved our book page flower centerpieces, so much so that by the end of the night half of our guests had dismantled them and were wearing the flowers as boutonierres or stuck in their hair. I know so many people warn against tackling big projects for your wedding, but I baked 144 cupcakes in the weeks before the wedding, carefully wrapped and froze them, and then frosted them all the day before the wedding. No big deal. And people loved them! We provided cute to-go boxes so they served as our favors as well. I’m glad my hard work paid off and they were such a hit.
And of course it also poured rain on the way to the reception and guess who’s the dingbat who was so wrapped up in getting ready that she forgot to pack umbrellas. My little brother mercifully saved the day by running through the downpour to buy umbrellas at a nearby store so we wouldn’t get soaked on our way into the reception. Again, didn’t matter. OK, maybe this one mattered a little to my brother who looked like a drowned rat for the next 20 minutes but he’s never been vain so he’ll survive. Everything was great even with all of the snafus. If I could tell pre-wedding me how all of the little details and even some of the big stuff really didn’t matter I could have saved myself a lot of stress!
Some photos from the day:
