The Second Week

The second week I was home I began to feel more pressure to get wedding stuff done, as it was really my last free week before a bunch of wonderful, but time consuming, events. What was unknown to everyone in the house but me and my dad was that there were two surprises planned for the weekend, one for mum & one for John, on top of my church bridal shower. As the organiser in the family I was definitely feeling a bit of strain to ensure that the surprises went off without a hitch whilst we worked on wedding stuff.

I am really grateful that I did not go crazy with the idea of planning out every little detail of the wedding. Perhaps that was the reason that we had to be so flexible with our plans, but it also meant that I could retain most of my sanity. There was no way I could be super detail oriented and put everything together in the three weeks I was home. This meant that my only real urgent task for the week (at least at the beginning) was to assemble our favours.

The main part of our wedding favours were dice we'd had custom engraved from chessex.com. This was an idea I had gotten from offbeatbride.com almost a year before the wedding and I am thrilled with how they turned out. David collects unusual dice, and uses them when he RPGs with his friends, so it was a great way of incorporating one of his hobbies into the wedding.

I knew I wanted to wrap them up with candy, so John and I browsed the bulk candy section at Extra Foods to find options and decided the jelly bellies would work best. In the end I think I used over 2kg of candy! Making the favour bags was simple—Sue gave me a bunch of leftover tulle, which I cut into squares, filled with candy and a die, and tied with bright ribbon. I created my own assembly station and did it in spare moments. My only bit of trouble was in curling ribbon—fortunately this is one of my brother's hidden talents so he was able to show me how. Then when everything was done I just arranged them in one of the wicker baskets we had and made a sign. You can see I was really going with the outdoor picnic idea here. Fortunately it looked just as bright and cheerful indoors!

As the week drew to a close I had to put wedding tasks aside. Saturday afternoon we were having a large surprise party for my mum's 60^th birthday, and at night a bunch of my brother's friends were coming on a surprise visit to see his baptism the next day. I was busy trying to ensure mum and John didn't make plans that conflicted with their surprises—like my brother's instance that we spend another day at Tofino, which I had to convince them to change to Rathtrevor as I knew there was no way we could lose a whole day of travel. Saturday came, insanely busy but everything went off well—mum loved her party, my dad treated everyone to dinner so I didn't have to worry about cooking that night, and John was more surprised than he's ever been in his life when 8 of his friends appeared at his bedroom door at midnight.

Sunday was another full day. I went to my parents' church that morning in order to see my brother get baptised, and then in the afternoon I was back at the church for my church bridal shower.

It really meant a lot to me to be able to have a bridal shower at Arrowsmith Baptist. I had grown up in the church and when I converted to Catholicism the hardest thing was thinking that I was placing myself outside of that community. To be able to have a bridal shower at the church really was a childhood wedding dream come true, and it is thanks to the hard & loving work of my wonderful bridesmaid Tara, Gail, and Sue that it came about. I had a really lovely time and felt really blessed by the time spent with the women there.

On that wonderful note I entered into my last week as an unmarried woman.