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.

Royal Wedding Budget (408 Days to Go)

So with the Royal wedding less than 24 hours away and trying to work out my own wedding budget, it made me wonder what exactly went into the royal budget and how much different it was from the average American wedding cost.  Someone else put together a very, very basic breakdown of cost by comparing the royal wedding, to Chelsea Clinton's wedding, to the average American wedding. 

So for the overview budget, Kate Middleton and Prince William will have spent a whopping $32 million.  To put this into some more perspective, the Clintons dropped only a tenth of that amount on their own "princess" and in America, the typical "Daddy's girl princess" spends approximately $27,000--less than one hundredth of the British royal wedding's cost.  Already, I'm starting to feel like I'm not prepared to spend enough on my own wedding.

Going a little more in depth, next we'll look at the cost of the cake.  Around Pittsburgh, prices tend to run from $1.50 to $3.00 a slice for some really impressive looking and tasting cakes.  So, going with the highest price, and my relatively large guest list (250 people), I'd be looking at paying around $750.  Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor.  This is actually considered over the average price for a wedding cake in the U.S.  So I'll definitely keep looking to find a cake a little cheaper.  The Royals will be dropping somewhere around $80,000.  Divide that amongst the 300 guests and you're looking at $266 slices of cake.  Yikes!  That better be the most incredibly moist and delicious cake ever.

Kate Middleton's dress will cost somewhere in the ballpark of $434,000.  The average American "princess" will spend just a little over $1000.  I personally spent just under $700 on mine (after taxes) and I'm darn proud of that because I managed to get a designer gown.  I can only imagine what the average price will be of the royal wedding knock-off dresses that we can expect to start seeing in troves next month.

An astounding $800,000 will be spent on just the flowers for the big day.  This is just shy of half of what was spent for Chelsea Clinton's wedding.  But the average American bride will spend a little less than $2000 for her flowers.  It makes me wonder what the exact price of Kate's bouquet (which will be left on the tomb of the unknown soldier) will be.  I'm planning to try and spend not a penny more than $100 for my own bouquet if at all possible.

The engagement ring actually falls significantly less than an American celebrity's ring.  Chelsea Clinton's engagement ring cost a whopping $1 million dollars whereas Diana's ring which was passed on to Kate is valued at $136,000.  Still, this is a lot more than the average American's engagement ring which clocks in somewhere around $5000.  Out of respect for Jeff, I won't reveal how much mine is worth.  But for most of us girls, we care more about the thought our men put into the ring than how much it cost.  It means so much to me that Jeff had mine specially designed and kept in mind that I wanted a flat ring.

Next up are the wedding favors.  There's no exact price that's been listed, but the customized scarves that will be given out to the guests are made by a company, Centrex of Ludhiana, India, that at the high end makes scarves valued at 300 pounds (~$500).  Since these are custom scarves which will be offered in three different color schemes, I feel like this is probably a safe bet on the pricing.  Considering that most American brides aim to spend as little as possible on their favors, I'd say that this is at least a hundred times more than the average favor price.  In fact, I'm having my mom crochet small seashells as favors for minimal cost (before the manual labor of course) and having a photobooth with the money saved on favors.

But all of these costs broken down don't even come close to the cost on the British economy.  The royal wedding will more or less shut down the country for a day.  Estimates have been made that the national holiday could cost the economy $10 billion (which is the low estimate; the high estimate being $50 billion). Impressive considering that the average American wedding does nothing but boost local economies by putting vendors and their employees to work.  That and our guests are so wide spread throughout the region and businesses that even if they need to take a day or two off to attend the wedding (or merely recover from their hangover) it would do no great harm to the economy.  Granted, they have also calculated how much the wedding will help the economy with a surplus of around $1.5 billion from the sales of memorabilia.

So the next time that you and your family or fiance get into a fight over the wedding budget, try and keep in mind that it could be worse--or better depending on how you want to think about it.