Recaps… GO!
The day before the wedding was, well, totally crazy. I was not relaxed, I was not a happy camper, and there were tons of little things that brought me to the brink of a bridal meltdown. That Friday was packed with entirely too many things. I should have been sitting on a lily pad being worshipped, but instead I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off.
Bright and early, I took off from LaGrange to our Atlanta apartment. Starting the day with a nice 1.25 hour drive. Good choice. I dropped off some stuff at the apartment, then walked in the heavy humidity to the nail place. In the blazing heat. While wearing jeans. (This was a poor decision. I don’t know what possessed me to put on jeans, but I digress.) I then received one of the most awful manicures and pedicures in the history of man. My nails looked like crap, my feet were a hot mess, and they ripped up the backs of my heels/ankles so that the next day my feet were too raw to wear the love flats past the ceremony. 75 bucks and another hour down. I crankily walked back to the apartment, happy to see that JP, his best man, and his brother were back at the apartment, complete with tuxedos. Happiness was interrupted by minor stress when I somehow jammed my toe under JP’s shoe while hugging. Screwed up the gummy polish, messed up our romantic hug. (This, ladies, is why you always bring your own nail polish to the nail place. So you can fix it later.) While I hastily packed up some random honeymoon clothes and walked in circles, the guys packed up wedding props, video game consoles, and all of their stuff.
Then? Emergency run to the dry cleaners. JP was having his rehearsal dinner clothes cleaned, and we almost forgot to get them. While waiting at the dry cleaners, a mini-crisis occurred. After being totally SOOL with transportation (details later), my father had finally found a solution: the Toyota dealership was going to lend us some cars. Sweet, but we didn’t have anybody to pick them up because the house was wide open, and if my parents left to get the cars, then there would be nobody to man the fort. That was a problem, and we needed to get back to LaGrange ASAP.
After pulling out of the dry cleaners, I realized that I needed gas. Great. Over to the gas station, where I pumped gas and the guys went inside to grab drinks and some snacks because none of us had eaten yet. Gas pumped, everybody loaded back up, and I went back into whine mode. I’d asked JP to grab me crackers and a Diet Coke, and he came back with Ritz crackers (and a Diet Coke.) I hate Ritz crackers, and went the irrational “How are we getting married tomorrow if you don’t even know what crackers I want?! I wanted the reduced fat sandwich crackers” route. Uh-huh. I went there. Poor behavior on my part, and poor JP for having an irrational bride that thought he should be a mind-reader.
By the time we got onto the highway, I had manned up and stopped pouting. Ate two crackers, played music really loudly, and drove the hour-point-five drive back to LaGrange. Made it back to the house, parked my car in the woods, and we unloaded. My maid of honor, Laura, was there within five minutes equipped with actual lunch for JP and me. I tried to run in circles some more, but Laura made us both sit down to eat. I felt like I was going to hurl from stress, but dutifully ate half of my cheeseburger and sucked down an entire Diet Coke. JP’s parents swung by to pick up the boys so that they could check into the hotel, Julie, our DOC, met my parents at the house so they could all convoy to pick up the cars for the next day, the florist was running in and out of the house getting arrangements set up, and then? Five minutes of silence. Laura and I were able to sit down for five minutes, and it was glorious.
Then we all realized we had no idea what time we had to be at the church for the rehearsal. I had made up some fake time in my notebook so that I wouldn’t be late, but we weren’t sure what the exact time was. Was it 5:30? 5:45? 6:00? 6:15? I still don’t remember. We had told the bridal party to get there at 5:45, but, well, that was way off. Now approaching an unknown critical time-point, Laura thrust me into the shower with a “Let me take care of it.” I was so grateful that she took the cat-herding lead. Mid-way through dressing, Matt Miller came to set up the Smilebooth, and of course I had to run downstairs to do a “I AM NOT SURE IF I LAID THIS OUT CORRECTLY” spiel. Laura herded me upstairs to finish dressing, and that is when all of the fun began.
Fun? What fun? With my makeup finished, I decided to go all snazzy and break out a new pair of contacts since my current pair were a little past-due. I wanted to be able to have crystal-clear peepers to be able to absorb all of the events to come. One contact in, relief. (There’s nothing like the feeling of a good, fresh, contact. Creepy? Yeah.) The second contact? “OW OMG OMG OW OW OW OW OW.” There was something wrong. It felt like I had daggers in my eye. JP and Laura ran in to see what was going on, and then tried to serve as my calm-down crew. I yanked the contact out of my eye and put it in some solution. My left eye was on FIRE and was bloodshot like crazy. Eye-makeup? Destroyed. I looked like a one-sided weepy mess.
“Just wear glasses!” they said. I was having none of that.
“NO! I cannot wear giant glasses with this cupcake dress and go to church and go to dinner and have pictures taken? Inconceivable!”
“You look fine. Swear.”
“I don’t want to look fine.”
“You know what we mean.”
“I’m still not wearing glasses.”
Somehow I managed to repair my eye makeup, decide I was allergic to something, clean the contact, and try to convince myself it was okay. With one teary and blood-shot eye and forty wads of paper towels for blotting, I threw on my dress and we all left for the church.
At 6:20.
Do you (or did you) have a packed day-before-the-wedding? To those already married, what crises did you field, and how did you handle them? With grace, or with whining? (Clearly I fall not into the grace category. Nice.) Learn from my mistakes– take a break the day before.
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