Extra Extra

Bear with me as I interrupt this blog of wedding news with other family news.

The Mommy of the Bride has just become the published  Mommy of the Bride.

If, while reading about the closer-than-ever nuptials,you have  strayed to the right margin of the blog and ventured to my website at http://www.laurabhayden.com/,  you are aware of the book I wrote – last year – about my family. One MOTB blog, in May,  spoke of the death of Emily’s father over ten years ago. Emily, her brother Conor, and I have come a long way through the years, adjusting to our daily lives without Larry.Yet his presence has really never vanished. Every day, what we say, what we do, what we think, triggers memories of his love and devotion to us.

I began writing the memoir about our life with Larry – and our life without him a few years ago. If you feel as if you have become part of my family by reading about Emily’s wedding, I invite you to become an even greater part of it by reading the memoir Staying Alive: A Love Story.You will find the first chapters  here for Kindle readers and here for Nook readers.  The paperback can be ordered here from Barnes and Noble and here from Amazon

Now, back to the busy-ness of planning a wonderful wedding.

A Shower - not a Hurricane

Em's bridal shower was supposed to be this coming weekend - but it got pushed back to last weekend. Thank goodness. Hurricane Irene would have crashed the party this week. The shower would have been torrential.



Thanks to bridesmaid Mary, the rest of these photos start to capture the wonder of the day.  




Linda's cake looked exactly like the invitatin

 



Nancy's decorations gave us a hint of what October will bring.






The bridal party gathers for a photo.

More photos to come

 

Getting Formal

My dining room has been invitation headquarters for a few days. The long oak table serves as a desk for a couple of laptops – my HP Pavilion , Em's  Mac – and a printer that came free with the HP a few years ago. An assembly line of the envelope inserts spreads across the surface too: invite, info card and reply postcard. The postcard will require its own stamp before stuffing.

I’ve taken on a variety of new roles during wedding planning. Last week I found myself punching out tiny flowers to decorate wedding favors. Paper crafting is new to me.  Proof that you can teach an old quilter new tricks. Seems what my generation did with cloth this generation is doing with card stock. (Totally random observation there.)

This week Em and I are printers, producing envelopes that give the official wedding invitations a classy look our handwritten addressing would lack. Easier said than done, but worth it in the end. Trouble was, the envelope size did not jive with Microsoft Word  choices, but  a click on Options. . . gave us some wiggle room on  return address margins - one-inch top, .7inch left. That could be saved as default. For some reason, the five-space  differentiation for a centered delivery address has to be manually set for each envelope.  More-miscalculations-than-I-would-like-to-admit later, we had our format and a pleasing font - .Andalus italics. Bold italics was a tad too heavy.

There’s actually been an evolution to this envelope-by-envelope print-out plan, all  phases steering clear of  handwriting. In March, the save-the-date reminders were mail-merged onto clear labels that gave  a nice, uniform look to the postal harbingers, but not nice enough for the Big Day invite.  I practiced printing one after the other addresses on the shower invites a few weeks ago, but the envelope size matched one of Word’s choices – so that was a cinch. This week, with the give and take Word allows, and the give and take of a Bride-to-Be and a Mommy-of-the-Bride, we are on our way to feeding those odd-sized envelopes through the HP Pavillion, but not before a trip to the Post Office for stamps . . .

Spinning in Place

The Mommy of the Bride doesn’t  know what direction to head in this week. She considered the  path to Em’s wedding  journey-enough, for now, especially with the bridal shower in a couple of weeks and just two months to go to the Big Day. .

 But a few weeks ago Em and Ry decided to move from an apartment five minutes away to one 55 minutes, by Google map measure. It will place him closer to his physician assistant intern rounds. And as if that isn’t flux enough for one month, Brother of the Bride moves to Boston tomorrow for a sports management internship. 

Good thing I have a GPS.   

I ‘ve been lucky to have my son and daughter living very close to me for the last two years . Not having them spontaneously pop in for dinner or to do a wash will take some getting used to.  I won’t get to walk Em and Ry’s dog as often.

But as much as I loved their close proximity, I know they have to choose their directions.

• What if my grandfather and grandmother remained close to their mothers in Quaglietti, Italy– and did not board a ship to America in the mid-1920s?
• What if my father and mother remained in Brooklyn, New York to be near their parents, 35 years later?
• What if Em and her brother remain here – because of me?  

Same answer for each. None of their lives would  have played out as they should have.

Since You Asked

“So when do we get to see this dress? The suspense is killing me,” a FB friend asked after the Dream (Gown) Come True post last week.

Expect a photo post October 9 – the day after the wedding. A bride is entitled to unprecedented entrance in an, as yet, unseen dress. By the groom, at least.

It is in this regard that the Mommy of the Bride almost blew it  three months ago, when she used a few too many details to describe the bridal gown in the Snip and Tuck post. . (Notice the MOTB has to write this in third person because it is still so difficult to admit). But, in her ever-so-slight defense, there was no picture. The MOTB is not that stupid. She just got carried away with details. She should have known the devil is in the details. 

Minutes after that very early morning post, the  MOTB received an e-mail from the ever-judicious Bride-to-be.

I think I'd feel better about the dress being as much as a surprise as possible (especially since in an earlier blog you mention that the dress should be a surprise to the readers.)

The Bride-to-be was correct. The MOTB  did write that,  ten months ago.

The now MMOTB (Mortified Mommy of the Bride) immediately reworked the tell-all paragraph and hoped the mental picture was not one  that would be easily processed – by a male brain. After all, could Prince William really envision how singularly beautiful his Kate would look after these details of the royal gown were published before their wedding?

A design of individual flowers, hand cut from lace and hand-engineered onto ivory silk tulle would be worked onto French Chantilly --  combined with English Cluny lace --  hand-worked in the Irish Carrickmacross needlework tradition, in a gown drawing on the fashions of the Renaissance with a touch of modernity, characteristic of the artistic vision of Alexander McQueen.

I hope not.

Dream (Gown) Come True

The saga of the dress continues. . .

The dress of Em’s dreams was larger than Em – much larger. Say, five sizes.

Seamstress #1 said the alteration could be done – but not by her – she was a costumer (from Em’s theatre group at college, about 100 miles away). But maybe  seamstress #2 – about 50 more miles away - could do it.

I was beginning to get worried. If seamstress #2 reneged, this must-have gown could have been headed for an eBay auction -not that I have anything against eBay! But that wasn’t the marry-tale ending I wanted for the dress of Em’s dreams. It had too much of a settling-for-second-best feel to it. Fine for, let’s say, a rent-a-car, but not the raiment of the bride.

Seamstress number # 2 recognized what was at stake.  Jenn couldn't wait to get her hands on the gown.

“Sometimes I get an idea and am up at three in the morning, pinning and sewing,” she said as cousin Rachel and I oohed and aahed  at her progress at yesterday’s fitting.  The gown will travel back from Lowell with us in a few weeks. From the looks of its perfect fit on Em, there’s just the hem to do.

Jenn's  middle-of-the-night comment led me to imagine her, in the wee hours of the night, restless, until she gets the picture in her head to appear on the headless mannequin form before her. The vision brought me back to a scene in Disney’s Cinderella, mice and birdies singing in a turret as they assemble Cinderella’s dress for the ball the way Jenn has reassembled Em’s dress for the wedding. Since, for the time being, I’m bound to secrecy on the picture-perfect image of Em’s gown, Cinderella's remake will have to do.

Heat Wave

Record-breaking heat in these parts lately.

103 degrees in the shade yesterday.

Really.

No stagnant air factor at work here. One that would make it feel hotter than it is - just like when a wind chill factor can make 19 degrees feel like 2 below. (I only added that part about the wind chill to try to make me feel cooler. Didn’t work.)

No, the 103 is a true blue – or should I say red hot - never-been-reached-in Connecticut -on- July 22 temperature. More of the same is expected today, July 23.

JULY 23!

 How can that be? Where is this summer (that didn’t feel like a summer till a couple of weeks ago – and now feels like a pizza oven) where is it going?

For me, there’s only one answer to that question. Day by day, it’s getting closer and closer to Em and Ry’s wedding, now only  77 days away.

I remember at just about 777 days, when they got engaged two years ago. That was the easy theoretical talking-wedding  stage.

                     It’ll be a country setting . There’s a horse farm they’re looking at.

At about 700 days a barn was reserved (sans horses). If you don’t book the barn of choice a couple of years in advance, you don’t get the barn of choice.  

Then the next couple of hundred days got us through no-pressure brainstorming and lots of conversations that ended with Oh but we don’t have to decide that now.

The next couple of hundred days we had to start deciding - wedding dress, seamstress, guest list …

The next couple - fare, guest accommodations, décor, photographer…

Now there is no next couple of hundred days. Not even 100.

And I find myself thinking – the heat is on.