Daisy and her parents had long before planned for everything involving the rehearsal dinner on Friday night. Because Daisy is vegan, it had been planned that the entire rehearsal dinner (as well as the wedding catering itself) would be vegan. And the rehearsal dinner was going to be a cookout, so many boxes of Boca burgers and Boca chicken patties were purchased, and other vegan cookout food (like Mama's famous potato salad, three-bean salad, baked beans, normal salad, etc) were made and set up, along with a ton of cookies and dessert bars. I notified my parents as well as my party, including April (who wouldn't arrive until Friday evening) when and where the dinner would be. I also told my friend Jane as well, who arrived sometime in the afternoon, as she was invited to everything we did. Daisy did the same with all of her own party, friends, and family who were in town, so we had a large group of folks who were either already there when we got there, or who would be there shortly thereafter.
The dinner was good; I helped Dad make all of the vegan burgers and chicken patties on the grill (as much as I could, anyway, which wasn't much), and made sure I could help out with the other around-the-house work between eating, meeting/mingling with people I'd never met before that night, and I welcomed Jane and April and her husband when all of them arrived. I wanted everyone to feel special and included, as this was just the beginning of the adventure heading into the wedding itself. My parents were there, my whole party was there, and all of Daisy's party was there as well. We had fun, and I was surprised my mother enjoyed the vegan fare for the most part (I don't think she had any of the Boca burgers, but she did like the chicken patties and the other sides/desserts).
When everyone began filtering out around 10PM or so, some of them earlier, Daisy and I hung out in the living room for a while with most of her party before we sent them off so we could go back over to the apartment.
This. Did not happen. At least not immediately, anyhow. We didn't actually get home until around 1, and didn't get to bed until around 2. We hadn't done an actual rehearsal or walkthrough during the rehearsal dinner -- there were too many people there and not enough room -- so we'd set the rough schedule for the entire day with the parties beforehand:
- 6AM: Alarm set, wake up, use the time here to get ready enough to go about the day.
- 8AM: Daisy and I go over to the VFW hall to start setting everything up.
- 9-10AM: Walkthrough and practice of the wedding ceremony, including full parties and mimicry of everything.
- 1:45PM: Photography with everyone in wedding clothes and makeup, group shots, etc etc. Everything.
- 4PM: Actual ceremony.
- 5:30PM: Food arrives.
- 6PM-7PM: Food and drink, speeches given, etc.
- 7PM-10:30PM: Party time.
This was a rough plan, anyway. We tried to sort it out with enough time for everyone to go back home to their hotel rooms to begin getting ready, tried to set it up so that everyone wouldn't be rushing around and things wouldn't be forgotten. However, as they say...when something can go wrong, it will go wrong. We didn't know that yet, of course, as we had just made the plan, and we had just gotten home from the parents'.
At 2AM, we finally got to sleep -- exhausted and drained. We had but four hours to sleep before our wedding day would begin.
How did it go? Well, that's a story for the next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment