Bridezillas Selling Out

One of the “wedding shows” that my fiancé would tolerate watching with me (mostly because he’s a reality TV junkie) was “Bridezillas.” It’s usually a pretty entertaining show. If you haven’t seen it, there’s a bride who’s unusually demanding or moody or just plain crazy, and her fiancé puts up with it. Hilarity ensues. Usually.

At the end of the last season, for several of the shows, one of the two brides on each show just happened to be trying to lose weight before the wedding. And, each of those brides just happened to try NV. Then, shockingly, the show went on a couple minute diversion, during which, the producers showed the bride testifying to the drug’s ease of use and the various beneficial side effects. Then they cut to a few minutes of the bride at the gym (in her NV-logoed apparel) working out with her NV-appointed trainer.

I mean, really. That’s just blatant product placement. It’s not even product placement, it’s just paid advertising under the guise of the show. Hopefully, it has been too obvious to too many other people, and the network will not do it during the next season.

You Know It's Love When...

Alright, so I had seen this video when I was looking for a YouTube clip for a class of mine. I, of course, clicked on it. The video is of a couple in England, who, for their first dance, re-enacted the final dance scene in Dirty Dancing. How does that happen? For this to happen, all of the following had to occur:

• The bride had to want to re-enact the dance
• The bride had to ask the groom to re-enact the dance with her, which means that he would be dancing (Swayze-style) in front of all of his drinking buddies and family.
• The bride and groom had to practice the dance (do you think they went to a lake and practiced in the water first?)
• The bride and groom had to convince a DJ that they actually wanted him to play the song while they performed the dance (again, the groom is emasculated in front of another guy)
• The bride and groom actually PERFORM

I can only imagine what my fiance would say when I approached him with this idea (not that I would - I have horrible stage fright, and a lack of a complete obsession with Dirty Dancing). So, yes, it is surprising, but not all that unexpected that one couple coordinated this. What is shocking is that if you search "wedding dirty dancing" on YouTube, there are multiple couple's who performed this choreography in public.
Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYhlm9GTAQ0

Save-the-Dates

The save-the-date drama has officially begun. My lovely sister has graciously offered to print the cards out for us and send them out, too. She put together a proof last night, and, as we were on our way home from our Thanksgiving trip, she called to tell me that it was done and that she would email a color copy of it to me from her office in the morning. She had included the web address for our website so that the guests could check for travel and lodging information. I realized that I hadn’t talked to my mom to see if she had reserved a block of rooms for the guests (which is a task that she took upon herself and told me not to mess with).

I hung up with my sister and rang up my mom to ask her about the rooms.

Mom: Well, I haven’t looked into that because I don’t know how many rooms to get. How many save-the-dates are you sending out?
Me: 100, but that doesn’t include some of dad’s relatives who aren’t getting one (because they don’t all need one).
Mom: Well, ok, why don’t you send the guest list to me.

She keeps obsessing over having the “final” copy of the guest list. She has a copy of it. I really think she’s making everything too hard for herself, I mean, there aren’t too many out of town guests that aren’t getting save-the-dates. The number of rooms is at best a guess, why does she think she needs the actual list? Why am I stressing out about this? Yargh.

Engagement Photo Session

I have been remiss in my writing, yet again. Of all the stories I have chosen to share with you, I have yet to inform you of our engagement photo session disaster. We decided that an outdoor shoot would look nicer, more natural, if you will. I wanted to get it out of the way before school started, which meant that we needed to do it in August, in Houston. We were crazy, I know, but I worked with the studio to schedule the session as early in the morning as they would let me.

We were to meet our photographer at 10:00 am down at the Japanese Gardens in Hermann Park. Our lovely dog was also scheduled to be in the pictures, so we planned to get to the gardens a few minutes early to allow for dog-handling issues. We also weren’t sure how long it would take us to get into the city, so allowed for some extra time there, as well, which meant that we arrived at the park at 9:30.

The gardens were lovely and, in true Hermann Park tradition, we ran into a couple of homeless people “showering” in the public restroom sink. To kill time (and tire the dog out), we walked around the gardens trying to stay in the shade to keep cool. Around 9:50, my cell phone rang; it was the photographer:

“I’m running a little behind. I was taking my grandmother to church and I got a flat tire. I should be there soon, but I just wanted to let you know I was running late.”

Seriously, that’s what she said. Even if that was the truth (who knows?), wouldn’t you lie and make up a more believable reason? Not that I'm a proponent of lying, but who would believe you? My mistake was not to ask her how long she thought she would be. The sun had come out from behind the clouds, and was starting to get hot. At this point, I went back to the car and retrieved a couple of kitchen towels that we had tossed in there in case the dog got muddy.

Finally, at 10:20, we saw a woman approach the park with a bag of camera gear. Tadaaaa! She had made it. She apologized profusely then claimed she would shoot quickly, so we wouldn’t be out in the heat too long. We hurried around the path in the park, stopping in several places to take shots, and finished in only an hour. Eww, it was so hot. Luckily I had brought the towels from the car, not for the dog, but because we used them to mop the sweat from our brows.

In short, it was a total fiasco. It did make it easier to choose which photos we wanted to send out to family, as there were few in which the dog behaved that we didn’t look like we had been plopped in the middle of the desert.

The Shortest Pre-Marriage Counseling Session Ever

We recently went back to visit with our deacon at the church (other posts at http://catholicweddinggirl.blogspot.com/search/label/Marriage%20Counseling). My fiancé and I were excited; the last time we went to visit the deacon, he told us that we would only need to meet one more time until the week before the wedding. Here is the timeline of events for the meeting:

10:00 We arrive at the church office reception area.
10:04 Our deacon escorts us back to his office.
10:05 We discuss the humorous anecdotes from the rehearsal the evening before for the wedding of a local “celebrity” who happened to be marrying my arch-nemesis from elementary school (I know it sounds a little hard core, but we really didn’t get along).
10:08 The deacon officially starts the meeting, the focus of which will be how God will be a part of our marriage.
10:18 We find out that we only need two more meetings – one in a month or so to go over our vows and the meaning of the vows, with the final meeting taking place two months before the wedding to go over logistics.
10:19 We’re back out in the parking lot letting my parents know that we can push up our plans for the rest of the day because we’re done with counseling.

I've Done It

I’ve finally done it or, actually, found out that I’ve done it. I was talking to the girl who introduced my fiancé and I the other night, and she let me know that I had officially committed the most common wedding crime of all. I have pissed off one of my friends because she is not one of my bridesmaids.

I understand why she’s upset; I was one of her bridesmaids. To tell the truth, I was actually somewhat shocked when she called me to ask me to be one of her bridesmaids as we hadn’t talked for several months before her engagement. We live less than 200 miles away from each other, but we haven’t really seen each other that often. Don’t get me wrong, I was honored to be in her bridal party, and a fun time was had by all.

For our wedding, I wanted to keep the bridal party on the “normal” side, which to me meant three or four girls. My two sisters were obvious choices, and apparently we made a pact during my sister’s wedding planning, so I didn’t even have to make the awful choice of who would be the maid of honor. This left two spots open. One of those had to be filled by my college roommate who I continued to live with until she left for law school three years later. Which meant that the last spot was left for my one of my best friends that I met on the first day of college, and we’ve been friends and pseudo-roommates ever since.

Obviously (maybe not to everyone), having an angry friend is not the happiest situation to think about, so my plan is to not talk about it. Surely if I ignore the problem it will go away, or at least I will make myself believe so. Maybe my hurt friend will read this blog and know that I mean her and that I did not mean to hurt her. Let’s hope so.

You Say You Don't Want Flowers...

My mom and I were set to go to the appointment to see the florist. I had tried to get my sister to come with me, but she and her husband made plans to go away for the weekend. Boo. There we were, driving down to the parish’s florist, which wasn’t exactly close, but at lease we had a recommendation from the church coordinator.

MOB: “Now, when we’re in there, don’t ask me for advice on how I think something looks, because I don’t know anything about flowers and how they look or smell.”
Me: “OK” (in my head: “I wish my sister was here…”)

With that pep talk behind us, we pulled up to the florist and walked into the shop, which was almost surreal. There were gorgeous silk display arrangements everywhere. The owner is the person we met with and he showed us some of the bonsai trees he had made, where he had hand-beaded all of the leaves. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted, so we looked through a book of bouquet ideas. We found one that I kind of liked, and then he made some great suggestions, like replacing one thing with hypericum berries. I had seen those before and liked them, but hadn’t remembered until I said something.

After I chose the bouquet, we went through the list of corsages and boutonnieres.

MOB: “I do not want to wear a corsage, so we don’t need to order one for me.”
Me: “Mom, if you don’t pick out what kind of corsage you would like, I’ll just order one that I like and make you wear it the day of the wedding.”
MOB: “Well, I just don’t know if I should wear yellow. I mean, what if what I decide to wear doesn’t work with yellow? Maybe we should wear another color. Let’s have the mothers have white flowers.”

Right. The woman who doesn’t want to wear a corsage now needs to wear a white one. Isn’t white supposed to be reserved for the bride? I don’t even know that I want white flowers or white tablecloths. My dress isn’t white (it’s “pearl”). White is so stark, ivory at least has a richness to it. Maybe I’ll just call the florist and say I want to change the white to ivory. My mom doesn’t need to know…

Flowers, Flowers Everywhere

The next thing that was on the list for a Houston trip was a trip to the florist, but how does one find a florist? I was trying to find a florist relatively close to the church and the reception site, which are twenty miles outside of Houston. One of my friends suggested it, as she had a friend whose florist who had forgotten one of the bouquets for the bridesmaids, and had to drive all the way back in town and back out to the site and was almost late for the wedding. The other main reason was cost. The flower shops down in town (unless you’re on Fannin) seemed to be pretty expensive, and flowers were not assigned a large part of the budget, so I didn’t want to go that route. Our reception site was absolutely unhelpful, as it doesn’t keep a list of recommended vendors (obviously they don’t have a kickback set up like the caterer).

My sister tried to help. She did a search of flower shops with some internet site and pulled up several that were in the area then sent me their numbers and websites. I scouted them out online and found that they looked okay, but all of the websites looked the same. They had different headers, titles and side things, but they were all pictures of the same bouquets. I called her up (at work J ) and asked what she thought.

Her: “Well, we can just go visit them and look at the flowers they have on display. If those look pretty, then they’re a good florist.”

Me: “That’s a horrible idea. I don’t want to spend all day driving around to florists and then judge them only by what they have out.”

A list of nightmarish possibilities ran through my head. The caterer could take the deposit and run, she could show up with not enough flowers, she could show up with the wrong flowers, or she could show up at the wrong spot. Not something to gamble on.

Then, a light bulb came on (actually, an email came in from the MBA student association notifying us about some networking event). I would use my networks, and the most powerful network of all is the Catholic Church. I quickly shot an email to the marriage coordinator at the church and asked her if the parish had a florist that worked well or often on the weddings in the church. Not five minutes later had gone by when she emailed me back with a name. So-and-so is the parish’s regular florist, and he will bend over backwards for you, especially if you let him know that you’re a parishioner. Bingo! I called the shop and set an appointment for that Saturday afternoon.

More Catering (Are you full yet?)

As I put in the last post, we had experienced a successful tasting with the caterer I had found. I decided to dig out the requirements that the reception site has for any outside caterers, which don’t apply to their “preferred” caterers. Some of my favorites are:

• Caterer must supply a $500 check as a deposit, which will not be deposited unless damages are discovered after the event.
• Dishwasher is reserved for washing glasses, and any other Chateau Polonez supplied items. This will be taken care of by a Chateau Polonez employee.
• Floors and counter tops need to be cleaned, mopped, and wiped dry.
• Kitchen should not be used to cook the entire meal. It may be used for rehaeating, and items needed to be cooked fresh.
• Caterer may use kitchen equipment for reheating, etc. Do not use equipment if you do not know how to use it. All equipment is powered by gas. DO NOT BLOW OUT THE PILOT LIGHTS!!!!
• We assume you are a complete idiot. Please do not use anything in the kitchen that might be of actual use to you. Even though your client is paying us an additional $1500, none of that fee is allocated to the cleaning of the kitchen, please let us know when you are done scrubbing the grout.

No, that last bullet wasn’t actually in the contract, but it did bring up another point about which I can get indignant – over the time span of 4 weeks, they increased the outside catering fee by $300. I’m not entirely sure it is not a scam, but if it happens again, I’ll sic my lawyer fiancé on them.I gave the requirements sheet to the caterer and asked her if she would mind faxing it to the reception site the Tuesday after the tasting (the reception site does not operate on Mondays). She readily agreed (she is so easy to work with).

I called the reception site manager on Tuesday to make sure that she had received the form, and to make sure that we were all set with our “alternative caterer” in that she had met the outside requirements.I received an email later that afternoon stating:“The approval process begins with the outside caterer arranging a meeting with me. The outside catering agreement in your packet was just a sample to you of our requirements of them. To become an approved caterer, xxx needs to call me and setup and Outside Catering Appointment before your due date of xxx. ”That’s funny, because I had initially requested that she sent me the requirements for outside caterers, and no mention of said appointment had been made.

I was irate; we had less than a week for the caterer to receive approval before our deadline. Dismal thoughts flew through my head. We were going to miss the deadline, I was going to have to deal with the difficult “default” caterer, AND pay her exorbitant prices. AAAAAAH.

I tried not to panic, and called my caterer to see if she would mind meeting with the site manager. She said she would call and set everything up (did I mention how easy she is to deal with?). A few hours later, she called to tell me that she had made an appointment for the next week, but that she had convinced the site manager to extend the deadline for the meeting. Hurray! I love my caterer! I’m going to name our first-born after her (not really, but it’s a nice sentiment, right?).

The Catering Saga Continues

I realized that I had not recently provided an update as to the condition of our catering plans for the reception, so here goes:

We were under the gun. Our reception site (as previously mentioned ) had imposed a 60 day timeline on us to find a new caterer, or suffer the exorbitant costs and inflexible scheduling requirements of the site’s “preferred caterer.” We had one weekend in which we could make the trip to Houston to meet with the alternative caterer.

I emailed the caterer and, feeling like a complete dork, asked her if we could have a conference call to talk about her requirements before we came to Houston. She readily agreed, and so I set about getting super-prepared for the meeting. I emailed (noticing a trend?) the reception site coordinator and asked her what the “approval requirements” were for an outside caterer. I received an email later that afternoon with a three-page list of demands, which seemed extensive and a little over the top. The one that really set off bells was the requirement that the outside caterer place a deposit with the site. I thought that one would do us in, I really did. The call went well, we went over the list, and the caterer thought the deposit was odd, but didn’t make a fuss. We set a time for the tasting for the weekend we were coming into town, and we were left with the task of choosing the menu.

Mistakenly, I assumed that the process of choosing the menu would be somewhat simple. My fiancé and I would review the list of entrees, sides, and appetizers. The MOB weighed in, of course, “Well, I wouldn’t pick out anything too crazy, or else no one will eat it, but maybe you should choose something you two like for an appetizer. I mean, you want to remember what you eat at your own wedding.” What a lovely sentiment (yargh).

We proceeded to choose a beef/seafood entrée and, of course, a chicken (the Chicken Divan Supreme – it sounds cheesy, but delicious). Then I called my dad, to find out that no, he didn’t like peppercorn sauce. Who doesn’t like peppercorns? They’re just pepper. Everyone likes pepper. Then we hit a snag with the appetizers; my mom doesn’t like feta cheese – it tastes funny. A grown woman told me that she didn’t like something because it tasted “funny” (double yargh). We finally whittled down the menu to some choices to give to our caterer for the tasting.

Day of the tasting:

My dad insisted that we play golf in the morning, despite the fact that when we finish we have to hurry to drive into the city for a 2:00 pm tasting. When we get home, I have an email from the caterer asking if we can bump back the meeting, since the church is having a meeting in the room she was planning on using. Church? This was the first time I had realized we were meeting at a church; I had assumed we were meeting at her house. I responded that we could bump the time back, thinking that the last thing we want to happen on our wedding day is for the caterer to bump things back.

We arrived at the church and found the caterer waiting to direct us into the gathering hall, where she had a table set up just for us. She then brought out the appetizers, including the spinach and feta triangles, which I snuck onto the tasting list. My parents loved them! We loved it all; everything we tasted was delicious. At first we were a little wary of the beef tenderloin; it looked a little dry on the outside, but the inside was one of the most tender pieces of meet you would ever taste. Huzzah! We found a caterer! Now all I had to do was submit her information to the reception hall and we are good to go. Or so I thought…

More tomorrow - off to class.

Ordering the Dress (or The Hunt, Concluded)

My mom has been mad at me because I’ve waited so long since I showed her the dress to order it. Unfortunately, the week after I showed her the dress, I had my two weeks of midterms start. That weekend, she told me not to even think about the wedding until after midterms. Done. Tuesday I get a call asking me, “Have you ordered your dress yet?” Seriously.

So, this week I made plans to order my dress. Since my mom is in Houston (and paying for my dress), and Belle Saison is in Austin, I called the store to see if she would still be able to pay for it, or if I would have to put the down payment on my credit card and then she would reimburse me. Luckily, they have a website where you can put in payments, so I was all set.

I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of time to order it, so I went on Friday, when we don’t have classes scheduled. Excitement was bubbling out of me during the Thursday night dinner-with-the-girls. I told one of my friends that I was setting aside the whole day for ordering the dress: the morning to prepare, before lunch to actually order it, and the rest of the day to be excited about it.

The problem is, ordering the dress is very anti-climactic. I walked in to the store and saw my sales consultant Kim. It would have been nice if she had remembered me, but I had only been in once, and that was a month ago. Once she pulled my file and asked me which dress I had decided on, she did remember me coming in to the store, so that was nice. She asked me if I wanted to try on the dress again.

Me (excitedly): Yes! I mean, is that OK?
Kim: Of course you can.

She pulled all the “foundation garments” that I needed for my dress and I tried it on and went and stood in front of the mirror again. Sigh. We also tried it with a couple of veils and tiaras, but then it was time for me to put on my real clothes and get measured. One thing that was exciting is that my measurements exactly matched a size on the size chart, so I probably won’t have to have much done to the dress, as far as alterations. The whole experience was over with in about twenty minutes, and then I went home and ate lunch. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wish there had been something more.

Other trials and tribulations in the hunt for “the dress”
http://catholicweddinggirl.blogspot.com/search/label/Wedding%20Dress

Green Weddings (or - I'm a Bad Person)

My fiance sent me an article yesterday that he saw on MSNBC (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19054513/). The article describes how couples can plan their wedding ceremony and reception to be “green.” I understand that we should conserve energy, reduce pollutants, and try to use sustainable resources, but I keep hearing this nagging voice in my head, “It’s your day - the one day you are excused from saving the earth...”

Some of the ideas seem doable: having your reception during the day outdoors, catering with organic meals, and having your guests carpool. I feel like those measures are normal, feasible, as I said a second ago, doable. However, there are some “different” ideas, such as “mak[ing] a group activity of trash time, throwing plates made out of sugar cane and utensils made from potato starch or corn plastic into compost piles.” Right. When I envisioned my wedding, I pictured my grandmother sorting her dinner remnants into compost piles.

Another point might be completely moot is the one in which they recommend you not use disposable dishes. I think most people choose their dinnerware based on affordability, and if they can afford it, they use china. If they cannot afford china, they would probably use disposable dishes, but most likely not the “plates made out of sugar cane and utensils made from potato starch or corn plastic,” because those sound expensive to me.

Dress Approval (or the Hunt, Take IV)

As I described in this post ( http://catholicweddinggirl.blogspot.com/search/label/Wedding%20Dress ), I had finally found a dress that I thought was the one, which left only one obstacle: the dress had to pass Mom’s inspection (insert ominous sound here). As she was in Houston, I obviously didn’t want to make her come all the way to Austin to see me try on the dress, so it had to wait until I got to Houston. Luckily, my fiancé and I went in to town a week later, so I was able to show my sisters and mom what my dress looked like.

We went back to the store we had first visited, but while I was still in Austin I called to make sure that the store did carry the dress that I wanted. I wasn’t especially looking forward to hunting through the racks for a style of dress (there were probably over a hundred on each row of racking). Luckily, when we got to the store, we had a salesperson assigned to us (I think we were lucky because we went early, and this is a store that won’t take appointments, so the store wasn’t busy yet). This saleswoman was probably someone’s daughter; she looked about 19 or 20, but the woman behind the desk proclaimed her an expert.

The salesperson had an idea of where the dress was located, but apparently, no idea what it looked like. I described it to her, but ultimately I was the one that found it. I went to the dressing room, where my sister helped me put the dress on, while I mistakenly left my mother outside with the store’s “expert.” When I came out to show her the dress, I got an expected response (from my mother): “That’s nothing like the other dresses you tried on.” I kept the groaning in my head and replied, “Well, I know, but I really like this dress.”

Then she said that she thought the train was too long, to which the “expert” saleswoman replied that the train came in three different lengths: royal, cathedral, and chapel. It did not. I had been to the website, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t see a purpose in telling the woman that she was wrong, after all, we weren’t going to purchase the dress at that store (the three lengths was actually referencing the three different “hem-to-hollow” lengths).

My mother then decided that I had no idea how they would decide which size to order, and then explained it to me, even though I had just ordered a bridesmaid’s dress with the same process (for those of you not familiar with the process, they take your measurements, then order the largest size that accommodates your measurements. My mom, for some reason (J), became upset when I cut her off and finished her explanation for her. I understand to a certain degree, when my younger sister got married, she was quite a bit younger, and didn’t know what she was looking at most of the time, or what questions to ask.

Pre-Marriage Counseling, Take 4

We went back to Houston this past weekend, and while we were there we met with the deacon for our next counseling meeting. To our surprise, he had changed his tune with regards to the extent of our pre-marriage counseling. We did a short exercise at the beginning of the meeting in which I had to close my eyes, and then describe what my fiancé was wearing. I got into trouble right out of the gate, because I described my fiancé as “he” and not by his first name. Apparently the use of pronouns is a sign that you are taking your future spouse for granted.

He then went over the results of our visit with the actual marriage counselor. “I can see why you didn’t enjoy your session,” he said. The deacon then went on to say that he had “had a talk” with the marriage counselor and how her interpretation of the FOCCUS results differed from his interpretation. Aha! We are vindicated! We’re not the most doomed couple in the history of Catholicism and I am not the worst bride in said history! The deacon didn’t merely disagree with her assessment; he went to bat for us!

This was possibly the best counseling session in the history of counseling, because the deacon then went on to tell us that we probably only needed to meet one or two more times, until right before the wedding. He did not even mention the need for us to go on a retreat. We spent the rest of the meeting discussing how we would raise our children in a dual-religion marriage. At the end of the meeting he went even further in his praise and told us that we were in the top 5 couples that he had ever counseled. This information was even better because my sister and brother-in-law had been giving us a hard time over the last time we had been in, when the deacon had given us the impression that we would have a long counseling process (see http://catholicweddinggirl.blogspot.com/search/label/Marriage%20Counseling). I went home to tell my sister that our deacon thought that we were an even better couple than she and her husband. All-in-all it was a very satisfying pre-marriage counseling session.

The Wedding Dress Hunt, Take III

I had been having some issues with finding a dress, but I knew that I needed to broaden my horizons as to what I was looking at, no beading had turned into some beading and further into “enough beading to be seen in photographs.” A week or two after the last dress outing I emailed the girls to see if they would accompany me to another bridal salon. This time, we would go to Belle Saison.

The staff was fabulous! I had called earlier that week to see if I needed an appointment, and the woman who answered the phone replied that I didn’t. I called with a new list of dresses that I might want to try, and the store had most of them, but for several of the ones that the store did not carry, the salesperson told me that she had specific dresses by other designers that looked extremely similar to the dress I was speaking to her about.

I arrived at the store in the afternoon, and there was an empty dressing room waiting for me. A saleswoman greeted me, remembered that I had called, and showed me the layout of the store, which was by style of dress. She asked us to simply pull the dresses I liked, then put them on the end of the row and she would put them in the room for us. When we had pulled them, we went to the dressing room, I was instructed to put on the strapless bra and slip and then ask her to come back in so that she could dress me. “Oh, no, I can’t have a stranger dressing me!” is the thought that went through my head, but it was actually a lot faster. She literally threw the dress on over my head.

Even better, she knew what I was thinking almost before I did. She reassured me that I would try on many pretty dresses, but that I would find “the one.” We pulled almost a dozen different dresses that I tried on, but the second one struck a chord. She advised me to try on the rest of the dresses, just to see. I wanted to, as well, as I had come to try on a certain one, which was nearly solid beads on the bodice, with a plainer skirt. The dress was a little bling-bling, gorgeous dress, but definitely a party dress. I later told my fiancé that if we were having a “platinum wedding,” and I were going to have two dresses, that would be my reception dress.

Wedding Nightmares

I’ve already started having nightmares about the wedding, and the wedding is still 9 months away. It couldn’t possibly have been instigated by the fact that my parents called 18 hours after we got engaged to ask if we had made any plans yet. No, that surely couldn’t instigate paranoia.

The nightmares are pretty benign, nothing too terrible, but sometimes they are bad enough to wake me up. Dreams are weird that way, the more you think about them, the more likely you are to remember them, even if you don’t want to remember them. My fiancé has gone through several stages with reference to these dreams: first he was a little worried, just a little, that I was already having nightmares about the wedding, then he went through the stage of annoyance, and finally to my favorite stage, where I say, “I had another nightmare about the wedding last night,” and he says, “Of course you did.”

Last night, I dreamt that we kept having problems with the “practice weddings.” I’m not sure what a “practice wedding” is, but it is not a rehearsal, and the deacon was not the person requiring it. If I remember correctly, the first practice went alright, except that everyone was sitting in one big, long pew at the back of the church. Then, during the second practice wedding, it was raining. I was getting dressed, and I had 4 dresses to choose from, which was a nice thought (thanks subconscious) then the storm caused the power to go out. Everyone was apparently ok with continuing the practice with the lights out, but I could not get the dress that I wanted to wear to fit; it was huge. Luckily, it was only the practice wedding, so we had time to get the dress altered before the wedding.

I have a feeling that this week’s nightmares have been instigated by the stress of going to Houston on Saturday. I was originally supposed to go out and look at centerpieces with my sister, also a bridesmaid, but now she’s off to the casino with her husband, and I’m going with my mom. Alone. Don’t get me wrong, I love my mom, and my parents are being very generous with the wedding, but I am not looking forward to this weekend. Clashes in tastes will abound, along with exclamations such as, “Oh, I didn’t think you would like that, that’s so odd.” Let’s all hope that I can bite my tongue for as long as needed.

Finding a Dress, Part II

I wasn’t in panic mode yet, but I knew that since I hadn’t found “the” dress the first time I went looking that it may take me several trips to find it. In typical business school fashion, I sent out an Outlook appointment request to my girlfriends in school to see if they wanted to come, and a couple had prior commitments, but a few could make it. I had looked online at Watters to find a bridal shop in Austin, and it worked out that The Bridesmaids Store looked like a good choice (especially since I also had to order a bridesmaid’s dress for a friend’s wedding). Having learnt my lesson from the last time, I called ahead to see if they had the styles I was interested in trying on, and they had several of them, so I thought I would give it a shot.
The setup was very nice, the store had hundreds (thousands?) of bridesmaids dresses in the front, and to see the bridal gowns you went to the back of the store, where they had a salon-style dressing room, with a living room outside of it for guests to wait while you were trying on. Another plus is that we were allowed to look through the dresses (even though there weren’t nearly as many bridal gowns as bridesmaid dresses). I gave my friends a general idea of what I was looking for, but I also told them I’d try on dresses “outside the box.”
My experience was much the same as the last shop, the store associates drifted in and out of the bridal section, asking if we needed anything, which is good, because I don’t think I could stand someone dressing me. Like the last time, I found several dresses that I liked, and my friends found their favorite one, but I didn’t find “the one.” I did try to “create” “the one,” I pulled a sash off of one dress and wrapped it around another, at which point my friends intervened, because I had crossed the line into desperation. Another day with no dress in sight: time to schedule another dress excursion.