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!

Wedding Nightmares

Alright, so I'm a little less than 8 months out... and it's happened.

I've started having wedding nightmares.

I don't wake up in cold sweats with my heart pounding or anything, but they are still NOT fun! I wake up in a panic, thinking... OK, well, that dream was reminding me of something I need to make SURE to do so the nightmare doesn't become a reality.

During the week last week sometime, I had a dream that our photographer didn't take any posed wedding photos of us together, or with our bridal party, with our parents/families, nothing. We hired "photojournalistic" photographers, so yeah, we want to keep that stuff to a minimum, but not to have ANY posed photos was surely not a good thing. So I woke up and thought to myself, "OK, we have to make sure to fill out that 'shot list' the Krackes gave to us!"

Then, on Saturday night, I had a dream about the wedding where all SORTS of things went wrong. First, it was like 20 minutes before the wedding was to start, and Michael came in the room and said to me, "OK, where are our clothes?" (meaning the guys' tuxes). I said, "I don't know, you were responsible for that." Turned out that he had never even ORDERED tuxes, let alone picked them up. Around that same time, I realized that we didn't have any wedding flowers. I had forgotten to arrange for someone to go pick them up for us. So I'm looking at the clock, and the wedding starts in like 5 minutes, and in my dream, I'm thinking... Michael and the guys don't have tuxes, we don't have flowers. AND, I'm not dressed. I didn't even have my stinkin' dress on. What chaos that whole dream was.

So I woke up on Sunday morning, and I had learned the following things from my "nightmare":

1) Make sure to be involved with the tux ordering/pick-up process.
2) Make sure to figure out who will go pick up the flowers since we're not having them delivered.
3) Plan to get dressed at LEAST an hour before the ceremony is to begin. And as a side to that, why was I still at the house 5 minutes before the wedding? Where was the LIMO in this dream? So there's a fourth lesson...
4) Make sure the limo is booked and on time, too.

I'm still 7+ months out. It's scary to think where the dreams can go from here.

Well, we're into October

Last Friday, I finally put a deposit down for our flowers. We decided to go with Wegmans Pittsford. Well, I decided to go with Wegmans Pittsford. They're flowers, Michael really couldn't care less. So that was one other thing to check off the list. I met with them back in August to discuss what might work with my dress/bridesmaids dresses. I think we decided to go with hot pink and orange roses and pink and orange calla lilies for me, and a mixture of pink/orange roses and gerbera daisies for the girls. We'll see, though. I'm going to make another appointment for February or March to meet again to finalize everything. When I went in to put the deposit down, they were working on someone's centerpieces for a wedding the next day. They looked fabulous. So even though it's a grocery store, it's WEGMANS people! They do EVERYTHING right! :)

We saw Michael's sister, Melissa, over this last weekend. She's one of my bridesmaids, and she and her husband came up from Binghamton to visit with their new baby. It was the baby's first time meeting a lot of the family that lives up here, so it was nice for everyone. Plus I'm totally in absolute love with that baby, so I rather enjoyed seeing them, too. Here are a few pics that I love:

I *heart* my little nephew!

I also love men who love babies. This is Michael with the baby... so cute. I *heart* him, too.

Feeding little Brendan. With my lovely glasses on--ugh.

Speaking of glasses... I guess that's the latest exciting news. This morning, I went in for a LASIK consultation. That's why I was wearing my glasses in that photo. I had to have my contacts out for a week before the consultation so they could get accurate measurements of my eye. After the two hours of extensive measurements and testing, they said I'm a good candidate for the surgery. I have thick corneas, and they have no reason to believe I'll have any complications as a result of the surgery. It's still a little bit scary, so I need to think about it a little bit more. I was completely into it until they gave me the consent form--which was EIGHT PAGES of horrible things that could happen to you. Gotta love that. I know it's just about them covering their asses, and most of that stuff on there has never even happened at this doctor's office before, but it's still enough to make you need to step back and think for a minute. If I want, I can have the surgery done as early as October 30. Less than two weeks away. Pretty crazy--so stay tuned for my decision on that!

When Melissa was up, she started talking about planning my bridal shower, which was a little weird. Sort of one of those things that makes it all seem more real, and that it's really not THAT far away. She was going to talk to my cousin and matron of honor, Lindsay, about it. I'm supposedly not supposed to be involved in any of the planning for that--which is part relief, part makes-me-go-insane. I admit, I'm a bit of a control freak, so it's hard for me not to have my hand in at least SOME part of every aspect of the planning. I'm working on getting over it, though. :)

Well, that's all for now... just a few more days here and we'll be under the 8-month mark.