I hope you don't mind a little indulgence on my part. This report is a bit flash heavy and my writing style is no where near as eloquent as some (Cricks - you've ruined it for the rest of us ?), but I've really enjoyed reliving my day. Thanks to all on hitched who helped throughout the planning - you were stars.
Background...
The husband and I met way back in 2001 – our first year at university. We started seeing each other early in 2002. Fast forward ten years, a very small house, a crazy dog and a very lovely proposal later and here we are!
We chose Harlaxton Manor near Grantham as our wedding venue. A gorgeous place that is now the English campus of the University of Evansville, US.
The weeks before...
I, rather stupidly, decided to make an awful lot of the wedding stuff myself. So the weeks before were spent folding, trimming and embossing orders of service, painting wooden cake toppers, bagging scrabble names and printing the table plan on to see through acetate among other things. I finished work on Thursday lunchtime.
My mam had very kindly offered to make our wedding cake and chocolate favours so her week before the wedding was a bit stressful too. Bless her.
Friday 23rd March 2012...
We headed to our venue at about 3pm to set up. We had the dog with us as husband would be dropping him at the kennels later that day. The first thing to do was to drop the wine and champagne with the venue kitchen. As husband and I were doing this I heard him shout – the dog had managed to escape from the car and was tearing across the perfect lawn. I’d forgotten to wind the window up. Whoops.
The afternoon was dubbed ‘Harvey’s sweat shop’ with my lovely bridesmaids forming an assembly line to bag the chocolate favours my mam had made, my dad pouring sand and adding tea lights into 55 jars for the centrepieces, and my mam and I setting out the scrabble place names, menus, table names and orders of the day. I’m so happy I decided to hire chairs rather than chair covers – I think they looked fab with the venue.
The efficient, honey bee like atmosphere to the afternoon was only marred by the fact that we found out the cake was stuck in a traffic jam. The cake that my mam had lovingly made and iced. In butter cream. It was one of the hottest days of the year. There wasn’t much we could do though so we plodded on.
We had a reservation to meet husband and his parents and sister etc for dinner at 6pm and were finished at the venue just in time. The cake still hadn’t arrived.
Absent cake finally arrived with my uncle (the cake courier) at 7pm and was rushed straight to the venue for emergency medical treatment. It was rather melty. It looked fantastic on the day though.
As a lot of my family live in Newcastle and Kent, most of them decided to stay in the hotel on Friday as well. Friday night was fantastic. It was like a lovely, relaxed pre-celebration in the hotel bar.
Me and Bridesmaid EO took ourselves off to bed at midnight, leaving husband, father, FIL, best man no1 and bridesmaid MB up. We tried to sleep but it wasn’t helped by MB knocking on the bedroom door three times with excitement. Got to sleep about 1am.
