An Extraordinary Saturday: Pull Harder, Mom

At the rehearsal, I’d handed out schedules to everyone.  Meticulous timelines of where everyone was supposed to be and when.  So leaving the hair salon half an hour late was not a good thing.  My plan had been to check in to the hotel at 12:30 and leave for pictures at 2. By the time I arrived at the hotel it was after 1:00.  That was not enough time.

I would have loved to have a few minutes to sit and relax, but even if I’d been right on schedule that wouldn’t really have happened.  If I had it to do again, would I do it differently?  Not really.  The tight schedule went all the way back to delivering flowers to the barn in the morning, before driving across the suburbs to my hairstylist.  The only way I could have crunched the time better would have been to hire a different stylist (mine doesn’t travel) to come to the hotel.  No guarantee that would have kept us on schedule, and it was weirdly important to me to have MY hairstylist put me together that day.

I put on my robe and the girls crammed into the bathroom with me to apply makeup.  I was trying not to be demanding of everyone else, because they needed to get pretty too. 

But I didn’t really know what to do with myself.  I couldn’t put on my dress without help, so I kind of fluttered around helplessly until Photographer Kim asked if I was planning on getting dressed, like, at all?      

My mom helped me into my dress.  I was still worried that it wouldn’t zip.  Strapless dresses need to be snug, or you spend all night tugging them back up.  But too snug, and you’re hugging the bedpost doing your best Scarlett O’Hara impression.  At my fittings it had been quite snug.  QUITE.

This is a good time to tell you that I stood on the scale that morning and discovered that I had lost a whole bunch of weight in September.  Not really on purpose, except that I was trying not to gain weight, and the wedding adrenaline combined with enjoying running (and halfheartedly journaling my meals) was a magic cocktail.  (For me, that month, probably never to be repeated, this is absolutely not diet advice - I honestly have no idea what happened.) 

I didn’t know where I’d lost it, or if it mattered to the fit of the dress, so I was bracing myself to encourage my mom to yank that dress HARDER, like you MEAN it- when I felt the zipper glide smoothly closed.  Oh my, my mom said.  It’s almost too big.  OH.  Okay then. 

Can you see the relief on my face?  All day everyone kept tellling me that I was glowing.  Relief plus excitement equals bridal glow, apparently.

Meanwhile, DJ and the boys were waiting in the hotel lobby.   Telling fish stories, from the looks of it.

All photos by Kim from Bow Tie Photography.