The Wedding: Act II - The Rehearsal Dinner

We'd worked very hard all week to make sure we were ready for Saturday.  So by Friday morning there were only a few things left to do: namely, the rehearsal dinner and the flowers.  We couldn't really do those earlier anyway because, unlike when we painted our house, we were going for Vintage Ghetto, not Gothic Dead.

My mom's side of the family (all from out of town) wasn't flying in until the morning of the wedding, so the rehearsal dinner was my dad's side of the family, most of MacGyver's family, and the few extra people in the wedding party that weren't MacGyver's family.  All in all it was a really fantastic time.  Since the reception was the part of the wedding I was most looking forward to anyway, this was a nice preview of what was to come the next night.

We did a quick run through of the wedding ceremony with the wedding party going over most of the important bits (emphasis on most) before everyone left for the evening.

Mr. and Mrs. B stayed after most of the guests left to help with flowers.  We had four bridesmaids bouquets to make, my bouquet, eight (?) boutonnieres to manufacture, and a handful of corsages.  It was about 8:00pm when we started.  Because that's how I roll.

We had all the flowers sitting in big five gallon buckets in my mom's laundry room  so we set up shop in there.  The bouquets actually went fairly quickly and they turned out spectacularly.  I didn't take any photos of us making them because, well, we were busy making them.  But I assure you that between my mom, myself, Mr. and Mrs. B, and my brother's girlfriend, we rocked those bouquets.

Here are some of my bouquet.  I don't think I have any that are just the girls' bouquets without the girls in them, so I'll wait until the next post for those.  The charms on my bouquet are of both of my grandfathers and one of my grandmothers who have passed away.  I found the hardware at Joann's and used sepia colored photos of them.  The pictures of my dad's parents are their wedding photos.  It was a nice way to honor them at the wedding.

The bouquets turned out pretty awesome.  The boutonnieres on the other hand...not so much.  After much fussing, my mom called for reinforcements.  One of her best friends, Mrs. H, is apparently knowledgeable about these things and offered to help us if we needed it.  She has been in my life as long as I can remember.  She's driven me to school when I missed the bus, and we stayed at her house a few times when my parents went on trips.  I love Mrs. H.  When Mom called her, she came straight over and set to work.  We used some leaves from the lilies in the large bouquet to lay the roses on and tied them all together with some floral tape.  Even MacGyver had to admit they looked pretty snappy!

My parents went to bed shortly after we finished the flower stuff.  I sat down to go through the wedding slideshow one more time and review the playlist for the reception.  It was about then that I realized MacGyver and my brother, Turbo, had been drinking since about noon.  It was now about 11:00pm.  I won't detail everything that happened in the next few hours, but it involved singing and dancing and other drunken debauchery.  I finally went to bed around midnight because the girls were showing up the house about 10am to get ready and I wanted to sleep.

I hadn't really been nervous about getting married in the months and weeks leading up to the wedding.  But I remember that the last thoughts I had before falling asleep that night were that tomorrow my name was going to be different, and that started to freak me out just a little bit.

Okay a lot.