the week of our wedding: the rehearsal

Between the stress of finding (or not finding, more like) the perfect flowers and the fact that we still didn't have any tents completely set up, the rehearsal was the furthest thing from my mind on the day before our wedding.

Thankfully, it went off without a hitch. Everyone minus two bridesmaids who were late was there for the run through and it went really well. Since I was a flower girl in the last wedding I had attended, I had absolutely no idea how anything was supposed to work that night but our officiant was amazing and she helped us work through the kinks.

One thing we did realize that night, however, is that every location has its obstacles. Since ours was set in the cove of a major waterway, boats and sea-doo's are a given. And where's there's water vehicles, there's motors. Loud ones. Periodically throughout the rehearsal, we were interrupted by these motors. But honestly, it was just funny for Mr. FP and I, we laughed every time it happened. While some may have been bothered by these rude interruptions, I could not have cared less.

Nonetheless, I had people ask me what we'd do if that happened during our ceremony.

"Seriously?!?", I thought. Did someone really just ask me that question? What do they think I should do? Run down to the beach in the middle of our ceremony and tell the motorists to quiet down? Or should we have been proactive and chosen a difficult location based on the background noise?

Honestly, the second choice would have seemed logical to some people. But those people are idiots. We'd always known this could be a problem but why the hell would we sacrifice our location just because of a little noise? I mean, really, have you seen the place?!


Our ceremony spot is far enough away from the beach that the noise doesn't render words completely inaudible. And it's not as though it's constant. They come, they go. Quick, quick.

Other than the noise, the only other problem was the deer flies. They were in full force the night of our rehearsal and we figured we might have the same problem the next day as well. My bridesmaids seemed most concerned by this problem. I was not. Once again, who cares? Wear bug spray, people. And that is what we did. Problem solved.

(Plus, I've heard there could be a photo of one of my bridesmaids trying to smack a fly in the middle of our ceremony. I hope it's true because that would be hilariously funny).

Oddly enough, the people who were most concerned were the young-ins. We got constant questions from the ring bearer and his sister who was one of the flower girls. They were very concerned about their duties and the timing of their walk. Plus, the ring bearer had the added task of giving the rings to our officiant during the ceremony. That's right, we trusted him with the real ones, none of this plastic rings on the pillow (or, in our case, nest) nonsense. We figured he's old enough not to eat them and he's such a particular little fellow that we knew he'd take good care of them.

And as much as I hate to be harassed with questions, these ones were welcome. I can still remember when I was the flower girl (for their mom's wedding, actually), and I was also very concerned about my role in the day. And since the flower girl has been asking me how she should wear her hair for the past 3 months, I knew they'd have more questions. And they did. Tons of them. Kids can get away with anything.

After all the questions were done, my dad fired up the BBQ and we ate our way through all the food my mom and I had purchased at Costco including some burgers (for the carnivores), salad (for herbivores like me) and cheesecake (for everyone, because if I knew of anyone who didn't like cheesecake, I would have kicked them out of our rehearsal dinner).

In spite of all the rehearsal dinner drama we'd been through, I'm glad we settled on backyard BBQ because it was easy to arrange and it's what we do all the time at the cottage. Some people brought stuff and some people helped cook and no one had to stress about reservations or money. Simplicity and nostalgia, it can't get any better than that.