the week of our wedding: the day before

Ugh, the day before.

As much as I'd like to say that the past year and a half of preparations and planning made the day before run as smoothly as a baby's bottom, that would be a huge lie. I swear, no matter how much prep work I'd done, it likely would have remained just as stressful. Crazy, isn't it?

I naively thought that all the work we'd done ahead of time would have made the day before a little easier. Okay, it may have made it a little easier. In fact, without all the prep, it likely would have been a nightmare, but it still felt pretty damn difficult.

Emphasis on the damn difficult.

We were up bright and early at 7am, a little later than intended, as Mr. FP and his dad were headed to get the rentals while my mom and I were going back to the city to get food for the rehearsal dinner and the flowers for all the bouquets.

The food hunt went swimmingly as the newly opened Costco in our town was full of enough stuff to feed the 15 or so people we were set to have at the rehearsal dinner. And the flowers... well, that's a subject for another day.

When we arrived back at the cottage, I was expecting to see the tents completed with tables all ready to beneath them. As it turns out, that isn't what I got. The rental pick-up had taken longer than planned and so only the frames of the tents had been completed at that point. And with the rehearsal time quickly approaching, Mr. FP had to head back into the city to pick up his Best Lady and some last minute things. At this point, I thought the tents would never get done and since I couldn't put them up myself, I settled for arranging chairs.

Once again, we return to the whole multiple of 80's debacle. After setting up 30 or so chairs, I started wondering things: Why did we have to invite so many people? Maybe we could go with a guests standing kind of ceremony? What's a bad hip or two, I mean, there's 80 freakin' chairs that I have to set up?!?

And then my mental sanity returned to me and I stopped stressing out about the chairs and just got them done. And although they weren't the stereotypical wedding chairs in my mind, you know, the ones with the padded seats and square backs, I thought they looked damn good in the space.

It was at that moment that I, for the first time, realized how thankful I was to be having an outdoor ceremony in such a pretty location. There's something about a beautiful backdrop that makes even standard white plastic chairs look beautiful. Plus, I was also excited by the thought that these chairs would be filled by our closest family members and friends the next day.




One thing I was not thrilled by, however, was my ability to set up chairs. I suck at making straight rows. Moreover, although I had been aiming for a straight aisle, it ended up being more of a triangle as it was wider at the back than at the front where we'd be standing. This fact, however, was not enough of a motivation for me to set up 80 chairs all over again.

No siree, perfectly imperfect is just fine with me.