The Effort List

So when I finally freed myself from the clutches of wedding plans that just weren't gonna happen, what was I spending my time and effort doing the week of the wedding?

Anything and everything, pretty much.

Something I know about myself: I work best under pressure.  Which is the nice way to describe a chronic procrastinator.   This did not change one lick because I was getting married.  So with a burst of "under pressure" adrenaline (and the Memorial Day holiday falling the Monday before the wedding), we were able to finalize a few things that had been sitting on the Wedding Wire checklist for months.  These are their stories.  (dun dun!)

When I scrapped one of the cutest ideas I've ever had - Game of Thrones chair signs - I knew that I still wanted to have something to hang on the chairs at our sweetheart table.  So I recycled the second cutest idea I've ever had (ranking system debatable) - our signs from the engagement pictures!

Pulled our cute Geaux Tigers signs out of retirement!/ 

I stapled on some ribbon left over from invitation making, and boom - chair signs! No reason not to reuse some props.  I know I saw our videographer grabbing some footage of this at some point in the night, so I'm glad we included the cute little detail, but also glad I didn't stress too hard about it.



Something I always see brides leaving til the end are programs.  I guess because you need all of your details finalized, right?  Honestly, this should have been something we could have taken care of a few weeks ahead of time, since all of our readings and songs were picked out at the final meeting with the priest, but it got pushed back to last minute because of some unmade decisions.  Such as our readers.

Inside of the folded program: I based ours off of one that I had saved from another wedding, and I was so happy with the turnout.

I'm still embarrassed we put off that task for so long.  We were going back and forth about who to include (bridal party vs. not, equal representation of my side and his side, etc.).  In the end, we chose my brother, Sphinx's sister, and one of my high school teachers who is friends with my mom.  So once that was settled, I punched their names into the template I had started and sent it off to J at my godfather's print shop to help us out one more time.  Unlike with our invitations, I wasn't too picky at this point.  I just wanted something that would allow our non-Catholic guests to follow along with the order of mass and recognize the family and bridal party.  J cleaned it up a good bit, included the same font and fleur de lis detail as our invites, and in general made it look awesome.  I gave her the okay to print, and that was was that for ceremony programs.

Front and back of the folded program:  I wanted some heartfelt messages, so those took some work too.  I'm not sure if anyone read it, but it was there!

We also left gifts until the last minute.  Our bridal party gifts were taken care of, but those for parents and the newly assigned readers still needed to be bought, assembled, and wrapped.  I'll do a separate post on what we gave everyone, but leaving everything to the last week or two was NOT a good idea.  Our moms kept offering to help and pick up things for me while I was at work, but I couldn't ask them to do those things!

A task I did delegate to the moms was gathering and printing the pictures for our family table.  I bought frames ages ago for this, but never got around to getting the family photos together.  Once I finally got some pictures, pretty much all of them needed to be resized and reprinted to fit the frames, and we kept hitting bumps with that.  In the end, we got them all done (including some great-grandparents!) and I think it really was worth the hustle in the end.

Here's a sneak peek of the family photo table before our florist prettied it up some more.  Yes, it's in front of the restrooms, but  I love those windows!  

Is that enough going on? Add all that to the business of packing for the honeymoon, organizing and dropping off the decorations, cleaning up the house so bridal party members could stay there, writing and mailing checks and info forms, wrapping up my work to prepare for my time off, buying snacks and beverages for the hotel room, and who knows what else (I refuse to look at my checklists from that week, because they still give me a twinge of anxiety, even though all the items are completed), and I think saying the last week of May was a whirlwind was an extreme understatement.

If I could do it all over again, ideally I would have taken care of everything earlier.  Still probably wouldn't, because that's my nature, but I could try.  I kept thinking that I would change my mind or want to do something different, but that never happened!  All's well that ends well, right?

Were you scrambling to get things completed in the week of the wedding?  No? Then I don't want to talk to you.