Well here it is, time for my report that you’ve been nagging me for! I don’t promise that it will be eloquent or flow in a way that’s easy to read. It might even contain details you’d really rather not read about (what I ate for breakfast..!) but I’m not going to apologise, I will however give you permission to skim through the wordy bits and just nosy at the pictures if you so wish.
Background
Before we got together in 2010, we knew each other through work for a good 3yrs beforehand although our paths rarely crossed. To be honest I never gave him a second glance as far as any romance was concerned but he says I made an impression on him from day 1! To cut a long story short it was very much a case of needing to be the right time for both of us and then bam it went from nothing to everything just like that!
Planning a Wedding
In all honesty I think I have ranged from being the biggest nightmare bride to being totally chilled out and having a good amount of perspective (my hitched and HOF friends have helped me with the latter!) We gave ourselves about 18months to plan, although really the time was for saving rather than planning and we had to fix the date around work. I drove myself mad with how obsessive I was to begin with, there are some things you just can’t do that early and it frustrated me! I work in events planning and am used to planning to precision!
During the course of planning the wedding, we both changed jobs twice, I gained a bridesmaid and then lost one, I fell out epically with my own mum and pretty much lost the plot a couple of times. But before I knew it, it was 2013. The wedding was now just 9 weeks away and for every person I could have happily slapped for telling me it would fly by, they were right!!!
The few weeks before were both boring and a rollercoaster at the same time. My dress had not gone to plan and wasn’t ready yet (separate dress report to follow!) but everything else was falling into place and my planning was paying off (I believe I even complained of being bored!) I was really quite taken aback with everyone else’s behaviour in these last few weeks, their excitement overwhelmed me, certain people really stepped up to the mark and took weights off my shoulders. D was the absolute cutest, clearly excited about me becoming his wife. No cold feet in our house! 2 weeks before I had my Mum down with me for a dress fitting and we had a lovely chilled out day, then the weekend before the wedding my best friend (and BM) came all the way from Liverpool to be with me even though it was just 5 days before she had to come all the way down again. She is the best. I luffs her. She kept me excited and squeeeed with me in unison!!!
Wedding week!
I still had to get through 3 days of work. These 3 days were some of the longest of my life EVER! Work was really busy and I kept having to sneak off to print wedding stuff or have my nails done in between pretending to work ?
Evenings were also pretty painful during the early part of the week and I suffered a mini meltdown every night, from my Granny saying she didn’t want to be in any photos, to finding out guests weren’t coming 3rd hand and contemplating the implications of that.
Finally though I finished work and I am not exaggerating when I say I woke up on Thursday morning feeling like a new person. I was calm, rational and nothing could phase me! [insertgirlpoweremoctionhere!]
So, with 2 days to go, we did what every normal bride and groom does. He went off to a job interview the other side of town and I went to the dentist and library… !! Whilst running my little errands I was fielding calls between venue, caterer, mum and my aunty about changing table plans and room allocations. Thursday night I stuck the table plan down.. man that felt good!
It really started to hit home at this point how close we were to getting the show on the road and although we had wedding stuff packed up, we had yet to pack any kind of overnight bags for ourselves.. what would I need, my hair & makeup was being done for me, did I even need anything other than pjs? (sounds trivial but I really did panic, I’m the kind of person who hates packing for holiday for fear of forgetting something)
Once we’d given up on doing any more jobs for the night we laid back and just let it sink in that this was our last night together pre marriage and that this really was real and yes we really did want to marry each other.
