Flowers and Luggage

This afternoon, I had an appointment with our florist to finalize the flowers. We actually ended up changing several things.

Instead of doing a mix of roses and calla lilies for me, we're going with all roses. She showed me the "hot pink" calla lilies, and they were actually way more purple than I wanted, so we nixed them altogether. Instead, my bouquet will be a mixture of two shades of hot pink, and orange roses.

For the bridesmaids, we were originally going to go with a mixture of roses, gerbera daisies and calla lilies. Since we got rid of the callas in my bouquet, we got rid of them for theirs, too. They will have the same hot pink and orange mixture, but they are going to be made up of roses, spray roses, and gerbera daisies.

I can't wait to see how they all turn out. Exciting.

We also nixed the order of boutonierres for all of the guys. We have decided to go with pocket squares for all the guys wearing tuxes--Michael, his groomsmen, and the dads. The only guys wearing boutonierres will be the grandfathers. They'll each get an orange rose.

Grandmothers are getting corsages--I forget what they're made out of, but whatever (not a high priority). Mothers are carrying really small bouquets. I forget what they are called. Just little clutch bouquets. Also not really sure what they will be made out of.

I also placed the order for gerbera daisy stems for the centerpieces. We have glass bowls with black rocks in the bottoms that are provided by our reception venue. We're going to fill them halfway with water, then cut the stems off of gerbera daisies to float them. We're going to put one hot pink and one orange gerbera daisy in every bowl.

In addition, I also ordered 8-10 hot pink roses for our cake baker to use on the top of the cake.

All of this--bride bouquet, 6 bridesmaid bouquets, 3 boutonierres, 4 corsages, 2 clutch bouquets, centerpiece flowers and cake flowers--$538. Not bad at all. I love Wegmans.

After the flower appointment, I swung by the house and picked up Michael. We planned to run a few errands. I had to go to Verizon to get a few accessories for my new BlackBerry, get gas (ummm hello $3.67/gallon--thank you, Dubya), and then we wanted to go to Macy's to buy a few pieces of our luggage.

We registered for luggage since we don't really have any. We each registered for a good size suitcase and a rolling carry-on size piece. Unfortunately, we didn't get any of the luggage for the shower. It's understandable, since it's pretty expensive. It's just that the luggage was something we really needed to get prior to the wedding.

At any rate, I looked on the Macy's website earlier this week and saw that they are having a big sale on our luggage. 50% off, plus an additional 10%. We decided we'd go today to get at least two of the pieces using gift cards and cash we received at the shower. We got there, picked up the two pieces, and headed to check out. The salesman said something like, "I'm going to make you spend an additional $5." Then he starts some schpeel about a donation to a charity I had never heard of. I was about to tell him to shove it (especially since I had just dropped $50 to fill my gas tank less than 10 minutes before), when he said, "by donating this $5, you'll receive a 20% off coupon that is good for the rest of the weekend, and counts toward this purchase. For your luggage, you'll get an additional $45 off."

Well, let's just say... he didn't have to tell us twice.

We paid for the luggage and as we were heading down the escalator out to the car, Michael and I were looking at the receipt, and it occurred to us... holy hell, there is no way we're going to get this kind of deal again. We looked at each other and immediately decided to drop off the two pieces in the car and go back in to get the other two pieces! :)

We ended up getting all four pieces of luggage at a ridiculous discount. Still expensive, definitely, but it's good quality luggage and I anticipate that we'll have it for many, many years. Hopefully we'll be putting a lot of miles on those things--we definitely want to try to travel more over the next few years, before we have kids.

Best part was that we were able to buy all of it using money I (we) received at the shower, and still have some money left over.

A very productive day!