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About Page Recap kandekisses

RECAP INDEX
Everything up until this point can be found in kandekisses, the online journal that I recorded my wedding plans and thoughts in...
Recap of Activites Before | Recap of Wedding Weekend | Recap of Wedding Day | Recap of Formal Pictures | Ceremony Recap | Reception Recap | Honeymoon Recap
You can click on any of the pictures to view a larger and more detailed version

Cast of Characters:

Kristine - the bride to be
Eric - the groom to be
Megan - the maid of honor, and Kristine's sister (and chauffeur!)
Craig - the best man, and Eric's brother
Lisa - a bridesmaid and Kristine's sister
Rina - a bridesmaid, Kristine's online planner, and person who came the furthest for the wedding
Bert and Greg - groomsmen who drove up from California
Leonard - usher and Kristine's brother
Matthew - junior escort and Kristine's brother
Gabe and Brian - wedding helpers who drove up with Bert and Greg from California
Larry and Lorna - Eric's parents
Len and Noralee - Kristine's parents

The final touches to a fairy tale...

Wednesday, the 2nd:
Eric took off work this morning and we went and got our marriage license. It took us longer to find a place to park than it did to apply for the license. LOL! They don't require you to have any ID to get the license in WA, and so we just put my birth certificate away with the marriage certificate in the freezer for the time being. :) (Hey, my parents have always used the freezer for their important documents. That way, if god-forbid, there's a fire, the freezer usually is saved because its sturdy and cold!)

We had a birthday party for my sister Lisa, and while we were there, my mom gave us their gift - they bought us our comforter from Bed, Bath, and Beyond! It's beautiful! They also gave us a little Minnie/Mickey wedding statuette, which we decided to put on the cake table.

Thursday the 3rd:
My sisters came over, and we put together the guest baskets for our out of town guests. Last weekend, we had found baskets for 50% off at Michaels and purchased 9 of them, and then went to Target across from Michaels and purchased most of the stuff to go in them at a discount by buying the quantities (ie, buy two boxes of ritz, get the third free..) In them, we included some of the following - a roll of ritz crackers, a roll of oreos, fruit snacks (Winnie the Pooh shapes!), hand sanitizer, deck of cards, little pads of paper (we forgot the pencils, oops!), bottled water for the number in the party, band-aids (Disney Princess shapes!), dum-dums, and the below newsletter. I printed out each persons name in our wedding font (ChaseCallasSH) and then taped those to the top of the handles. Then, we had found fake flowers in our colors at Michaels at less than a dollar each set - a stem with like 5 daisies and a stem with 1 lavender rose - and we placed these inside of the baskets and tied the handle of each with ribbon. I tried to use different ribbons and ways of putting the flowers in each because I just like being creative that way!!! If I find that my camera has pictures of this, I'll scan one in. :-)

Friday the 4th:
I put the finishing touches on my program/newsletter for the out of town guests. I made a very detailed newsletter that included the info about how we met, weekend info, a section to meet the friends and family helping out with the wedding, important phone numbers, some wedding trivia, great info about local places to see, a copy of the map to the church, and our favorite restraurant list. It went over really well!

Saturday the 5th:
Eric's parents arrived Friday evening, and we attended a family reunion with them today. We didn't stay super long, and the people I met were nice. We took the usual Kristine-route to the park it was at - which usually includes finding the places, but not until after you pass them. LOL! After the reunion, we stopped by Costco to get some food for our groomsmen and bridesmaids, who we knew would be eating with us a lot. Yummy Costco muffins! Then we came home and I worked on various things.

Sunday the 6th:
We ended up waiting for E's parents to come back from some things they were doing, and then met up in Clackamas to puchase the vegetarian lunch meat we needed for the wedding. Eric and my main goal for the day was to get presents for our parents, and so even though E's parents wanted to go to the mall, we just split up and found what we needed. We searched quite a bit - I'm too picky and wanted something special. After this, we went to the Spaghetti Factory with E's parents for dinner, and they gave us our gifts - they had purchased a bunch of our Pfaltzgraff items from the registry :-) We split up after dinner and Eric and I went grocery shopping at Safeway because we needed some more food before the onslaught of guests. <g>

Monday the 7th:
During work this day, Megan and I confirmed with as many vendors as we could for the wedding day. That's definately something I would suggest for the beginning of the week before - see if you can get as many payments for things made beforehand, then you don't have to be the picker-upper!
I had so many things to do this night I had planned to make some paper products that we'd need (basic place cards, food tags, signs for the doors in the church, etc.), but my sisters needed to go school shopping and I went along thinking we'd get some wedding stuff done, too. I ended up buying some lingerie and Eric's gift, and that was very productive, but I got home late and didn't get anything else done. <g> Isn't that how it goes?! My sisters got some really nice clothes and it was fun to just be out with them. I had a hard time not stressing this night because I knew how much I should have been doing, and I wasn't getting it done, but the girls tried to distract me. :-)

Tuesday the 8th:
I printed the remainer of the program insides today - we didn't quite get all of them printed that we needed, but we had the printer going the whole morning trying! Eric had already finished printing the program covers at work in small amounts on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Monday on a glossy paper in color. We loaded all of these things up in the car to take with us so we'd be able to work on them later.
Megan, Lisa, and I left work right after lunch and headed out to do some housesitting activies Megan had to do for a friend and stopped at CAA (Megan's high school, about 35 minutes from home!) to try and get a key for the cooler because we were using the kitchen and cooler for arranging the flowers on friday. The retards who were at the school knew nothing about it because the people Megan had talked to were on lunch break and told us that we'd have to come back. This made Megan pretty furious because we had taken the time to drive out there and she had called earlier in the day to check about it -- Mrs. Hendrickson just wasn't there! So, we left after the maintenance man promised that he'd let us in when we needed to get in if necessary (Moron! We just want the keys!).
Then we headed over to the airport. Rina's (best friend from online - also referred to as Shelley at various times over the weekend) flight was delayed because she was flying United out of Chicago, and there's been some major strikes of pilots coming out of that airport, but it worked out fine. We got there about 20 minutes before her flight came in, and got to sit and watch a cute guy wait for his person/girlfriend? to come off the plane with flowers. :-) We parked on the top level of the parking garage and had a terrific view of Mt. Hood, and I felt compelled to take a picture. I got to the point where I was always carrying around a disposable camera just in case during these last few weeks!!! We took Rina home with us, got her stuff dropped off at Megan's room - we decided that I didn't really need a house guest the entire time and that it would be better for her to stay on Meg's couch - and then drove back here to get started on the programs.

Programs weren't totally worked out until this evening. I had all of the examples, but I hadn't made lines on where to cut and stuff until now. I had to do a giant search for my little hole punch and finally found it. Lisa helped me engineer the programs, and once they got started mass producing pieces of them, I went to work making my veil. That didn't actually take me very long, considering how long I had put off doing it LOL! After I did it, I realized I should have attached it to the other side of the comb, but it worked anyhow, so I didn't take it out :-) The programs were in full swing by this time - we had several other friends come over to help, and we even got Eric threading ribbons through. During the middle of program folding, we found the perfect mix of koolaids :-) We took Blue Ice Kool-aid and put a round ice cube made out of tropical punch in it, and as it melted, it turned a beautiful lavender color and tasted really good! So then we modified from there to put some of the raspberry sorbet in there, and some sprite, and that tasted yummy and had almost the same effect for not as much work (the red koolaid cubes would have taken a while to freeze and transporting them would probably kill them...) so we found our punch recipe! Want it?

1 package blue ice Kool-aid
3/4 cup sugar
1 can of sprite
Fill container up to 2 qt line with water
Add nice scoops of raspberry sorbet

Voila!
Well, when the girls started looking tired, I sent them home. I needed to go to bed too :-)

Wednesday the 9th:
When Rina and Lisa woke up, they headed over to the house to finish up programs. By the time I got home from work, they had finished them all - I brought a few more over for them to work on (I made waaaaay too many!). They were hungry when I came home at lunch time (I wasn't getting anything done at work anyhow). I did my ultimate stress relief trick - make homemade macaroni and cheese - from white sauce to the pan, its delicious! They worked on the programs for a while, and we headed out to the bridal salon so we could have the girls try on their dresses for the last time. Megan's had stitches in the alterations falling out if you looked closely - I was not very happy and complained. Emma said she'd see what she could do about it... (nothing was done on Friday, but we didn't have time to worry about it then). But we gave them Rina's dress so that they could steam it with my pile for Friday, so that was accomplished. Oh, we went to Mr. Formal so I could sign the credit card receipt this night, too - and found that they hadn't received my dad or my brothers measurements. I almost flipped out here because I had emailed in my dad's the same way as the rest of the out of town guys, so I hadn't anticipated a problem. And my brother had already been over there twice, and I was afraid that he'd say he wasn't going to come to my wedding if he had to be measured again! So I think I stopped breathing for a few seconds in the store, and the lady tried to assure me that it wasn't a big deal, just to call in my dad's measurements straight to the store, and try to see if my brother knew if they actually took his measurements or if he kept the paper with the info. We stopped at Red Robin and sat and looked over lists and drank Cherry Coke and shared a mile-high mud pie. That was fun, but I was really stressed about little things like where my dress was going to go on friday and stuff :-)

Thursday the 10th:
We found that Leonard had kept the measurements in his wallet for Mr. Formal, so Megan called his and dads in this morning. They said the tuxes still should be ready with the rest of the groups on friday night. Phew!
I was getting a little more flusted and a little more flustered, and being at work was stupid because I wasn't getting anything done. My sister was plotting for the bachlorette party this evening, and I was a little nervous about that.... my house wasn't cleaned for this yet, and that was stressing me out.... Eric wasn't coming home tonight, and he's my stress reliever - whenever I get too stressed, I go lay in bed and he comes and sits with me, and I knew that tonight, I couldn't do that.... So I tried to get some things done at work, when dad decided he wanted to have lunch with me while I was still single. I was confused about his reasoning, I guess, and we went to dinner and didn't really talk, so it was bizarre. On our way home, he stopped and got my rental insurance for me. I had been putting it off because I didn't know what the people were talking about. We had it figured out in less than 15 minutes and I was covered from that point on. Phew!
I went back to work,and found that Megan had gone home. Mom told me that I wasn't supposed to go home, so I sat at my desk and stressed for a while. I worked on somethings that had to get done before my honeymoon, and made some calls to vendors. It took me quite a while to get my hotel reservations straightened out this afternoon because some of the names were mixed with others and so I had to dig around and find all of my confirmation numbers in order to get them straightened out. I was almost to the point of tears because this was so frustrating, and I wished that I had double checked them before (actually, I had, so I wasn't sure why they were still having problems with the names). Megan finally called me, and mom had messed up the message. Meg just had wanted me to call her before I came home so they could finish what they were doing. She came and got me, and they sat me down in the kitchen after hiding things they didn't want me to see. They had decorated and cleaned the house for me :-) There are still streamers in my kitchen - they used lavender and white streamers and yellow curly ribbon and then had balloons everywhere :-) And they had a delicious smelling cake baking in the oven. They sat me down to a Cherry Coke complete with real grenadine. :-) The party started from that point on :-) My good friend Karen showed up earlier than I thought she would (probably because the girls needed her to run some errands before I came :-) ) and since my sisters, Rina, and my "sister" Kellie were very involved in their preparations, Karen asked me if I had errands to run. That was really cool because I really had needed to do some things earlier in the day, and with dad's trip to lunch, I had gotten sidetracked from my schedule. So we went to Safeway and paid for as much of the food as we could, the cake, and found some nail polish that we needed :-) And I really needed to get my ring cleaned, so we ran down to Runyans and stopped to look in the window of the bridal store next door because they had my exact same dress in the window!!! I had seen it when we went to get our rings, but I couldn't share with Eric because he hadn't seen it yet :-)

So after that, Karen brought me back home, and said she had some errands to run on her own, so I went back to the party, and did some more calling to the hotel about the guys rooms again, which *still* weren't set up right. After that, I laid down for a little while because I really didn't want to be that stressed for my bachlorette party. The party started after this, we played games, ate cake, and watched American Pie :-) It was a fun night, and we were all pretty tired and happy when we fell asleep :-)

The Wedding Weekend - continue....

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