Ending the Reprieve (368 Days to Go)

It feels like it's been forever since I've blogged.  Oh, wait, it kind of has been.

Essentially I more or less had to completely remove myself from anything and everything wedding related for a little while or else I was going to turn Bride-zilla and never come back from the edge.

We finally found our venue, so I'm pretty ecstatic about that.  We're going to be having an outdoor ceremony lakeside at Penn Scenic View and then moving the reception indoors.  It even has a large balcony area overlooking the lake for cocktail hour.  Going to see the venue had been an experience all on it's own.  But that's what happens when you have three additional opinions and inane questions being asked.  Add to that major sleep deprivation and you have a cocktail so sour no one wants to take a sip.

To add to the hectic vibe of the day, I got a phone call two days earlier that my wedding dress had arrived more than four months earlier than expected.  I made arrangements to get to the shop just before closing the same day that we were looking at our wedding venue in order to try and save on gas.  Remember, three weeks ago, gas was at it's highest price ever.

Now since my fiance was going along to see the venue, we had to drive separately so that he could leave at that point of the day to go teach his class that also happened to be nearby.  But that still left me with two mothers and an 11-year-old niece in tow.  The moment we walked in the door, our niece started to whine about wanting to try on her bridesmaid dress.  When I explained that it hadn't been chosen yet, she insisted that she would choose.  I told her no.  Of course the two mothers insisted we might as well check some out.  Insert enormous eye roll here for getting unwanted opinions on something that doesn't directly pertain to these people.

I then listened to both mothers lecture on how bridesmaids have to be matchy-matchy and that it wouldn't be appropriate for half of my bridesmaids to wear their dresses with straps and the rest not to.  It didn't seem to matter to them that the bridesmaids (who like me) can't wear straps because of sloped shoulders would be a distraction every five minutes by adjusting their straps.  Or better yet, the busty ones forced to forego straps would be popping out mid ceremony.  I pretty much lost my cool and told them they both needed to shut up because it wasn't their decision and that bridesmaids dresses had moved on since either of them had last been married.  See the bride-zilla wanting to come out and snap?

Finally, my consultant was free to bring out my dress.  It was a perfect fit.  And I mean perfect.  My grandmother will only have to hem it by one inch and bustle it.  Talk about easy-peasy.  However, by the time I got my dress, my niece had been whining sufficiently long enough to convince my mother to go pick out some dresses for her.  Now keep in mind, she's eleven and just starting to wear juniors clothes and is approximately a size 5.  I am a size 10 and had to order a size 16 which turned out to be a perfect fit.

She tries on one dress and it doesn't quite zip up and she starts bawling about how fat she is.  And I mean bawling.  This kid has officially stolen the title of bride-zilla and she's only the junior bridesmaid.  I am now standing in my wedding dress and fielding glares from every other customer in the store.  And nothing can get her to stop crying!  She literally has a psychological problem in which she's convinced herself that she is so overweight to the point where she works out more than Richard Simmons.

When she finally does stop crying, she has adamantly decided that there is a dress she wants to wear for my wedding because it is literally a hot pink short skirted version of mine.  I glare at my mother for even pulling the dress off the rack and put my foot down.  Absolutely not.  First off because it's nearly three hundred dollars and I will not ask that of my bridesmaids.  Secondly, I am not going to have my bridesmaids look like me on my day.  Call me selfish, but I want to be a little unique aside from the fact that I'm the only one wearing white.  I certainly don't want my dress to be less awe inspiring just because the guests have already seen seven different colored versions of it walk down the aisle before me.  This puts her into another burst of tears.  And for once, I can't wait to get out of my wedding gown and out of the store.  I'm tired of getting glares that accuse me of being an evil wench just because my niece is psychotic and spoiled.

That day, Jeff and I also clarified with our mothers how the guest list would be split.  My mother was perfectly okay with the split.  His parents were very much not okay.  They felt as if we were shorting them.  Que extended pain and suffering due to guest list limitations for quite a while longer.  Eventually I learned that this stemmed from her feeling as though we'd be shorting ourselves on the available guest list for the bridal shower.  Insert large eyeroll here for a bunch of useless kitchen gadgets that would be triplicated with a bridal shower.  Jeff and I already have too many rolling pins and wooden spoons, thank you very much.

I spent the next week on the phone with everyone.  The venue manager (in order to obtain contracts for every cabin/lodge on the property), the caterer to finalize the date and location, the event planner, etc.  I signed away nearly every penny to my name in order to put down deposits and spread the joyful news to my bridesmaids and groomsmen that their lodging for the weekend would be all expenses paid.  I then put away everything wedding related and vowed to not give it a second thought for at least a few weeks.

Memorial Day weekend reopened a few of the wounds however.  Mostly due to the 11-year-old niece who spent a great deal of time again whining about her weight.  Combine that with the fact that she's missed her period for a couple of months and you have me greatly agitated that she won't listen when you tell her that she's working out too much and is now getting to be too thin.  Pretty soon, I'll be kidnapping her to put her in the hospital for eating disorder treatment.  But she was also complaining about how I'm not going to be including her in going to choose the bridesmaids dresses in a few months (in about August probably).  I explained as nicely as I could that I needed the time to be for big girls and that I could not be baby-sitting her.  I needed the freedom to be able to go out for dinner with my girlfriends who would be coming in from out of town and not feel like I have to say no because she can't go barhopping afterwards.  Also, she has too expensive of taste.  Top that off with eventually if she doesn't become anorexic, she'll outgrow her dress whereas the other girls will have their dressing hanging in their closets for a few years to come.  She doesn't seem to quite grasp that dresses cost money that the rest of us work hard for.  She merely sees it as grandma will be paying for it, so who cares about what those little numbers are following that weird "S" shaped symbol.

Once I finally got the wedding to be off topic for the weekend while we were camping, I still had to deal with her obsessive behavior on her weight.  And the multiple attempts on her 2-year-old sister's life due to stupidity.  And every time that you yell at the older girl to stop doing something, she turns it into, "Why do you hate me?!" and goes running off.  Personally, I don't think it's smart for a girl who can't tread water to be standing on the slick steps to a 30-foot quarry with her baby sister.  To complete that mental image, my fiance who uses those stairs almost as much as he does the ones we have at home, fell on them twice and neither girl had on a life jacket.  I about died when I saw them down there by themselves.  And when she ran off all upset that I hated her, she then tried to lie to her grandfather about why her baby sister was soaked up to her waist.  Adorable 2-year-old of course is telling her pappy all about standing in the water with the fishies.

I officially no longer want children.  For gosh sakes, they don't even wait to be teenagers anymore before they become pathological liars with eating disorders.  What the heck?!

Now you can understand why I haven't been writing for a while.  There's nothing like spending your time ranting on a kid.  I feel bad, but I don't know how to get through to her and it does nothing but stress me out to be around her all the time.  Jeff is actually the one who's dubbed her bride-zilla.  And when I really need some time away to get my head together and collected and calm, it really doesn't help when this girl insists on attaching herself to me all the time.  I appreciate that she wants to spend time with me, but I can't be her mother, especially when her mom wants to be her mom.  And I definitely cannot keep sacrificing time with my fiance in order to play happy family with her, especially if she's going to have more mood swings than I can manage in a month in the course of one evening.

Dinner Plans (433 Days to Go)

So today is a somewhat busy day.  I'm not sure why Jeff planned to have friends over for dinner two days after he had surgery, but that's what's up.

I'm starting off the afternoon teaching a knitting class at JoAnn's for what will be my record largest class thus far: four students.  So far they've all been one-on-one classes so I'm a little psyched to teach a class in which I actually don't make bad money.  After that I'll be making a mad dash to the Market District in order to pick up last second groceries for dinner and then it'll be time to head home and play sous chef to Jeff's head chef.  I'm still wondering what exactly he's got on the menu.

But I'm looking forward to dinner too.  It'll be the first time that I'll get to meet his friend Will and his girlfriend, Emily, and considering that Will is going to be a groomsman, I'm extremely glad that we're meeting now and not a  year from now.  I'm also a little nervous as I am meeting anyone for the first time in Jeff's life.  I always dread the fact that my lack of a filter will cause me to say something horribly offensive.  Take for instance, last Tuesday night while we were at Red Robin, a little kid (maybe three) tripped and fell right next to our table.  Immediately I start to laugh because that is our reaction to our two-year-old niece falling.  We have her completely convinced to laugh at falls instead of starting to wail.  Well, the little kid's slightly older sibling gives me a look that plainly stated, "WTF?" while Jeff rightfully slapped my hand.  Immediately I realized my faux pas and apologized to Jeff loud enough for the kids parents to hear that I had done it based on instinct because of our niece and forgot that not every family utilizes that method.  The parents quirked a small smile so at least they didn't want to kill me but the five-year-old was still giving me the WTF look the entire way out the door.

As you can see, there is no filter between my brain and my mouth.  I wish that was the worst of my social awkwardness but I know there have been far worse incidences.  Usually dropping the f-bomb in the vicinity of my FFIL while discussing my supervisor causes there to be some crickets chirping.  So here's me crossing my fingers that I can avoid any social awkwardness tonight.  Wish me luck!

Choosing the Ladies and Gents (440 Days to Go)

One of the first things that Jeff and I did in the wedding planning process was to pick the folks we wanted to stand beside us.  I didn't have a hard time coming up with my list of girls that I wanted to stand beside me and I knew that I couldn't settle for just one maid of honor.  But I had another problem, I had several male friends from college that I just couldn't imagine not being included.  Bridesmen perhaps?

That suggestion was shot down really fast.  Apparently my future family to be didn't like the idea of a slightly non-traditional lineup despite the fact that it is becoming increasingly more common.  My fiance and I decided that we would each get to pick four of our own gender and two of the opposite.  Therefore of the six bridesmaids, four are my choice and two are his and the opposite holds true of the groomsmen.  Of all the people that I wanted to ask, half of them weren't even close by and those that were, well, we're all incredibly busy and we're lucky to see each other every few months sometimes.  So phone calls it had to be for me.

I first called up my best friend from high school, Sara, who at the time was living in the northern part of the state.  She was thrilled to be a co-maid of honor and refused to be a balance to my other co-maid of honor, Kansas.  So unfortunately, my plan of having the to MOHs balance each other out fell through.  Luckily for all the craziness that I can count on them coming up with, I know that they're the most supportive girls I know.  Sara was always the person I could count on picking up the phone and calling, night or day and listening to me.  I have called her in near panic attacks at times and she's put up with it.  I only hope that I have done equal service to her though out the years.  I also hope that I can be as good a bridesmaid to her as I know she'll be a MOH to me.  Now that she's living in Arkansas with her wonderful beau, she's joined the list of my friends working on their wedding plans.  It's funny, I'd hoped someone would go first so I could watch and learn and instead we're all getting married within about a year and basically acting as a support group instead.

Kansas I called next and she was equally excited.  She's always been a bridesmaid and never a MOH but always stuck filling in the duties of the MOH.  Kansas and I became really good friends in college partially through our major (we were one year apart and she'll graduate this May) and partially because I became an honorary commuter (via my ex) and eventually became a full fledged commuter when I moved off campus into my own apartment.  You have to understand that at Duquesne University being a commuter is a way of life and it takes a special kind of people to survive the lounge.  Kansas is incredibly special to me because she is the person who took me from being vanilla to being chocolate chip.  I have a feeling after the bachelorette party she may have me bumped up to cookies in cream.  But she has done so much to help bring me out of my shell and not be afraid of anything.  Which has been extraordinarily helpful when it came to trying on dresses.  I couldn't believe how much time I spent standing around in my skivvies!

It's the commuter lounge where the three of my other choices came from as well.  Kim, who was my ex's ex (gotta love it when the girls stick together like that), was also a commuter and from New Jersey originally but is now working in Maryland.  So she too had to be a phone call.  This one turned out to be a little tricky as she'd just gotten engaged about a month earlier than me and we both liked the same time of year for our weddings.  We'll see how it plays out but last I checked we were planning our weddings about two weeks apart. So I'm crossing my fingers that logistically it all works out so that she can be there fore me and I can be there for her too!  But she is my zen bridesmaid.  I know when everything else is starting to go crazy, she's the one who will keep the calm.

Next on my list was my buddy, Joe.  Joe is in a word: loud.  He pretty much sums up exactly what you'd expect of a Western PA kinda guy.  Don't get me wrong, he's an amazing guy and I can't count the number of times he's been a good shoulder to lean on.  His first reaction when I asked him was to congratulate me.  His second was to ask when the bachelor party would be.  There's a reason I couldn't possibly imagine celebrating my big day with him.

The last commuter was my friend Dom.  My masters year in college, we got dubbed as the mom and dad of the lounge because we were the final remnants of what had been a relatively tight knit group--of Blockus players.  But Blockus was just one aspect of that group's foundation.  We had everything from History channel marathons to video gaming to heated debates about anything and everything.  The group became known as the circle.  There were four arm chairs that sat in a circle around an end table where we would play Blockus.  And on any given day, the circle would grow by people sitting on the arms, pulling up other chairs or just standing on the edges.  The circle would flux by the hour as people came and went to class and as the years would pass and graduates would leave for good. I can't count the number of hours I sat in that circle with Dom and Joe and thus, Dom was the guy I called up and asked to give me away.  It felt right that my last friend in college would help me make that ceremonial parting with my old life.  When Jeff and I couldn't pick an extra guy to be a groomsman, we decided that Dom would just shift down to the end of the line and be a groomsman as well.

Last but certainly not least (she just didn't fit into the category of commuter) is my friend Becca who is now a med student in Erie.  We met through the fact that at one point we were both working for residence life and we shared one terrible class of immunology together.  We bonded over our hatred for one of the co-professors of the class and our love for the other professor.  And there were times where when she worked late night shifts, I'd stay up all night with her either working through her physics homework or watching comedy sketches on You Tube.  She's been engaged for almost as long as I've known her and I can't wait to stand beside her this coming December when she finally ties the knot.

Jeff's picks were all friends of his from high school and/or growing up in his neighborhood.  So far, I've fallen head over heels for at least two of his picks that we've been able to spend a decent amount of time hanging out with and am incredibly thankful for Nicole who is a multiple time bridesmaid.  Between her and Kansas, I think the rest of my friends who are all brides-to-be themselves and myself will learn a lot about how to get through this coming year without too many attacks of bride-zilla.  Nicole has also been a bit of a lifesaver for me too.  As I mentioned above, most of my bridesmaids are all out of town with the exception of Kansas.  So it'll be nice to have a second girl around to go do things with--such as pedis.

Aaron is one of the groomsmen he picked and I love his laid back attitude.  He's one of those guys that you can just go chill and hang out with or go beat some little kids at laser tag with.  And he's also joined the growing list of people bound for the alter that are in our wedding party.

Jeff's other picks include his cousin, Shayna, who from the few times we've met I'm getting a good feeling for her.  As with the other groomsmen, I just wish I could hang out with them more often so I could get to know them better.  I've still got a little bit of that anxious feeling that I might do or say something wrong at some point.  The guys are Rich, Will, and James (Nicole's brother) but I have met Rich and James only a very few times and not really had a chance to hang out at all; and I haven't had the chance to meet Will at all yet.

But there is plenty of time to meet all of them in the future and I cannot wait to have all these fantastic people standing up for us on our big day.  They've all had such important influences over Jeff and I's lives and helped to make us who we are that I know even those I haven't gotten to really meet yet that I will love them in the long run because of how amazing Jeff is.