Wedding Rehearsal and Day before wedding

 

Early on Friday all of the girls went to get pedicures and manicures before the wedding.  Here are 5 of us getting our pedicures.  Kelsie and Krista didn't get theirs at the same time as the rest of us because there were only 5 stations, so Kelsie was going around taking pictures of everyone.

Steph and I.

Here is Hannah and I.  We were sitting there smiling and posing because we thought Kelsie was taking pictures of us, and Hannah was especially doing it every time Kelsie pointed the camera at her.  After quite some time Kelsie goes...  "Oh I'm not taking pictures anymore I'm taking a video."  Hannah and I started cracking up because here we are on video actively talking about posing for pictures.  We asked her how long she had been recording for and she goes "Ohhh about 10 minutes"  It was hilarious!!  

Haha!  Here she is getting her pedicure.

I can't believe it... but this was BOTH of our moms first pedicures ever!!!  I can't believe neither one of them have ever gotten one.  They both liked it a lot and said that they would go back for another one.

 

Kelsie and Krista getting pedicures.

My mom getting her manicure.

Here I am getting my nails done.  My nails by far took the longest to do, but I had looked all over the internet and I found a design that I loved and I wanted them to do it.

 

In the end it was worth all of the time it took to get them done.  I absolutely loved how they turned out and I'm hoping they will last for a while.  Although life with fake nails isn't easy.  It's been hard adjusting to them, and it is especially hard to blog with them on.  I don't think that they scratch good so Cody doesn't really like them. But they sure are pretty!

Next we started getting ready for our rehearsal at Old Oak Bible Church.  Our nails took longer than we expected so the girls didn't have a whole lot of time to get ready.  Originally we were going to have Sam come over and do all of our hair and makeup, but there just wasn't time.  I did my own makeup and hair as soon as I got home and I was still barely on time at the church.  Krista had even less time because Davey got separated from the rest of the guys and she had to take him to get his tux picked up.  She still looked good at the rehearsal though!

Unfortunately a majority of my pictures from the church came out blurry.  My camera died and then my mom was using her phone.  Anyways, here is Laura, Old Oak Bible Church's wedding coordinator, instructing us on what we were going to do the day of our wedding.  We only had a half an hour rehearsal and we started a few minutes late. There was another rehearsal at 6pm so Laura really flew through the instructions of what we were supposed to do.  She was like "then you'll do this, then that, put your hand like this, pivot with your foot like that..."  and I was like holy crap someone should have taped this!  I felt like I had no clue what she had instructed us to do.  I actually felt extremely uncomfortable with what we were going to do on the wedding day.  She took us outside to line us up and have us walk in, and she barely instructed anyone on what to do.  I really thought that we'd do that and then take everything from the top... but nope...  I felt like we were rushed out.



Here is the only picture that I got of Cody and I.

Daddy and me

Davey and Rick watching...

Here we are running through everything.  I really feel like we needed more time to go through everything.  I was actually a little worried about it for the next couple days leading up to the wedding.  She ended our session saying, "and don't worry there are no mistakes on the wedding day" but after all the instructions she gave us it really didn't feel that way.  She also told us that we weren't allowed to bring any drinks into the bridal room... and I thought she meant alcohol at first which was understandable but then she said that we had to buy any pop or water from the church.  She also mentioned that the ceremony was a candle light procession so that meant that it was a formal ceremony and that no one could see the girls ahead of time and that we had to be tucked away before the ceremony.  I was nervous to tell her that we were doing our pictures before the ceremony, because I thought she might have a problem with it.  I figured if we all walked in on the wedding day together there wasn't much that she could do about it... so I decided to seek forgiveness rather than to ask permission, and I didn't tell her.

The girls and Cody.

All the guys

Next we went to Stancato's for our rehearsal dinner.  I had heard that Stancato's had good food and I was excited to eat there.  We had our own private room and it was nice.  They had fantastic garlic knots and different breads that they served us.

But overall... I won't lie... I wasn't completely happy with Stancato's.  Our bill ended up being twice as much as we expected it to be, and the contract was very misleading. The chicken that they served was good, but the beef selection wasn't what I was expecting them to serve.  They only served pasta and potatoes as the sides... I thought that we had picked out a vegetable as well but it wasn't served.  I also wasn't thrilled with the bar selections... it cost us money to set up the bar and then it was a cash bar and didn't have much on it.  If I had to do it over again... I'm not sure that we would have picked Stancato's as our rehearsal dinner location, but on a plus side it was fun to hang out with our bridal party.

Here is a shot of the private room and most everyone at the table.

My mom and dad.  They came straight from the rehearsal to the dinner along with Hannah, Steph, and Sam so they had been sitting there the longest. Everyone else stopped at my house to consolidate cars and grab a couple things.

Cody and I.

Deb and Neal

Tony and Erica

The Newman's

Sky

Amber, Chance, and Eric

Davey being cute!

The three amigas

Cousin love!

Cody and his mom

My parents and I.

My niece!

Eric and Chance

Cody and Kelsie

All the girls

All the guys

Cody and his dad at the bar

Finally a good picture of all four of them.  The last time we took pictures with Rick either it was only Cody and Chance or Cody and Krista.  Now we have one of the four of them.  Now that I think about it I'm not sure if we have one of the three of them and Deb...  next time we'll have to do that.

The next day on Saturday we had a cookout at our house and invited everyone in the wedding and from out of town to come over and hang out for the night.  We knew a lot of people wanted to see our house and that everyone didn't have things to do while they were in town.  Here is Amber and Eric were so cute in their matching outfits during the beginning of the day!!

The guys were all playing a Frisbee game called....  Slam Can?  Basically you through a frisbee at a target/can.  If you get it into the slot it's game over.  If you hit the can yourself on the fly you get two points,  if your partner taps the frisbee onto the can you get one point, or if the frisbee goes into the can then you get 3 points.  First to 21 exactly wins.  Cody and Davey were killing it all day long.

Eric was outside playing in his play pin while the girls watched the guys play.  It was more of a guy game than a girl game.

Aren't they cute!?!?

Dad and his girlfriend Elaine hanging out.

Uncle Ted manned the grill.  He made some awesome shrimp and scallops on the grill.  We had a ton of food for everyone. We made hamburgers, hot dogs, ribs, shrimps, and scallops before we even put the steaks on!

Cody and Robin.

Here is Kelsie and I being silly.  I had to run out to the store to get a sleeveless shirt so that I didn't get weird tan lines the day before the wedding.  I ended up leaving the party a little early to head to our hotel room for the night.  It seems like it took me forever to get everything together to leave. 

Here is my dress hanging up in my room ahead of time ready for the big day.

This was my something borrowed and old.  The ring was my grandma Barb's that I borrowed from my cousin, and the pendant was my other grandmothers.  I wanted to include them in the wedding so I pinned these tokens into my flower bouquet so they both walked down the aisle with me.

Here are all of the flowers laid out.  Since my grandma died before the wedding I realized that I had an extra corsage as I laid out all the flowers, and I wasn't sure what to do with it.  I later realized that I was short one boutonniere so we turned one of the corsages into a boutonniere.  So you might notice that my dad's flower was a little bigger and different than everyone else but I felt that was appropriate anyway.

Here is my bouquet, garter, six pence, and wedding jewelry.  My mom searched high and low for that six pence.  She went to a coin store to buy it.  She put it in my grandma's shoe and her shoe.  She wants me to hold onto it and pass it on to my children someday.

This was Kelsie's jewelry and flowers.  I noticed that Kelsie was sad that she didn't get a present with the rest of the girls so I let her in on a little surprise that I had for her.  I had something blue, something new, something old, something borrowed, and a two pence to go in her shoe.  Her earrings went with her dress and were two different colored blue crystals with a diamond row in the center.  I gave her a matching bracelet to the one that I wore on the wedding day.  And I let her borrow my anniversary necklace that Cody gave me.  I also had a two pence that I had from when I studied abroad for her.  I can not wait to see the pictures my photographer took of me explaining everything to her and showing her what everything was, because she lit up like a christmas tree... she was so excited.  I told her that since she was the flower girl she was special and got to match the bride, and that is why she had an identical bracelet as me.  I also told her that when Cody and I first started dating he bought me a necklace with one heart on it, but last year after we were engaged on our three year anniversary he bought me a new necklace with two hearts on it, because we were joining our lives together and our hearts were one together.  I told her that I wanted the necklace to be apart of the wedding, but that I couldn't wear it myself so I asked her if she would wear it for me.  She was SO excited about it.  Cody told me that when she first saw him she went up to him and told him that it was her honor to wear the necklace for the day and that she would take good care of it.  It was too cute and it made me so happy to see her so excited and happy.

That night at the hotel Hannah, Steph, Hannah, and Sam came over.  We had a fun girly night.  My cousin just learned in school how to do facials... so she gave us all a really nice facial massage, then a hand and foot massage.  She even used the microwave to heat up towels to give us the full experience.  It was super awesome, and I loved the massages.  Sam set up a lip scrub with sugar and baking soda to make our lips smooth.  She then french braided my hair to sleep in over night to help it hold curls better the next day.  My cousin stayed with me all night but the other girls left around 11:30pm.  Hannah and I tried to go to bed but neither one of us could really sleep.  I had my eyes closed but I was just thinking about the next day too much.  I was too excited to sleep.  Around 2:15 I texted Cody and he was still up too.  We talked about a few things we needed to do the next day and about how the party went after I left for a little bit.  Then I tried to sleep again, but once again... my eyes were closed but my mind was open, and time really just flew by.  I was trying everything to fall asleep... even counting sheep so that I'd stop thinking about other things, because I knew the next day was going to be long. I went to look at the clock because I felt like it was probably 4am and I almost screamed when I saw that it was 7:15!!   I was like ohhh no!  I didn't sleep the whole night!!  Hannah woke up at the same time as me and said that she didn't sleep much either.  We decided to just get up and get breakfast.  Ironically... our room was 402 and Cody's mom was in 401.  What are the odds of that happening???  She checked in a day before us and just had a regular hotel room, and we had a suite and she ended up being in the room across the hall from us haha.  In the morning she came over with a bright red eye and said she thought she had pink eye and didn't know what to do because she couldn't miss her son's wedding.  She didn't have any pus or anything so I figured it was just allergies.  So I gave her one of my pills and her redness went right away, but it was wedding morning craziness! 

Let's get it started!

Thursday night was officially the start of the wedding weekend!  The family started to make it into town, and we started to give our first house tours to everyone.  For a little while everyone was at our house hanging out but then Deb, Neil, and Krista checked into a hotel, and went our to Cody's cousin's senior concert/performance at school. 

That left us some time to get to hang out with Chance, Amber, and Eric.  It was nice to get to spend the day with them.  Eric did really well and was really well behaved the whole day.  He's such a good happy baby.

 

Tony and Erica also made it in today.  They came over for a couple of hours and we all hung out together.  They have some fun plans to go to the football hall of fame while they are in town.

Sky came over to hang out with everyone too, and I think that the guys had a blast together all night.  We kept dinner simple ordered pizza and wings for the night.  We ordered 4 pizzas and snacked on it throughout the night. 

And then the beer pong competitions began.  It's 1:30am and the guys are still out there playing and having fun together.

Amber and I played with the guys for a while.  Amber is pretty good at beer pong... but I suck!  I've never really played it before, and I can't make a ball into a cup to save my life!  You'd think that my basketball days would come in handy for shooting a ball into a plastic cup... but either the skills aren't transferable or I'm really rusty!

Here are the guys playing their "baseball/home run" versions of beer pong, or whatever they were playing all night haha.

They started to make a beer can pyramid for the weekend... this is what it looked like around midnight on day 1.  We'll see how much more they add to it in the next couple of days.  I'm happy for Cody that he has his guys here and that he's able to hang out and have fun with them.  It's too bad that Chance doesn't live closer to us, because we always have fun when we hang out with them.

1 Week to go!

The count down to the wedding is fast approaching!!  We are almost to the wedding weekend!  :)  This last week has been full of a lot of final preparations... along with a really busy week at work.  We are getting ready to switch to a new business system at work, and Wednesday was our last day of work until Tuesday.  Which honestly works out great for me, because I am getting Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off without having to take any time off from work!  Yay!  But Wednesday night was a rough day at work because we had to finish up ALL of our work before we left for the night...  small price to pay I guess!

Wedding tasks accomplished this week:

• I made a pretty thorough wedding day timeline that broke down each day in the wedding weekend.  I worked on this and tried to make it look pretty.  I included the time, name of the place, reason for going, and the address of the place for the wedding weekend festivities.  I then sent it out to everyone.  Cody's mom was pretty excited about it!!
•  I called our wedding photographer to confirm everything for the wedding and she also liked the wedding timeline that I emailed her.  She said that she felt like she was all set and is planning on meeting the girls at our hair salon at 10:30am on Sunday morning.
• Cody and I also selected our entrance song!  I'll let it be a surprise for everyone though...  I also called the DJ and talked through all the songs that we wanted to be played and our general wedding day timeline.  I can't believe how many different songs that we had to pick out for stuff.  There is the cake cutting song, the anniversary song, the garter retrieval song, the bouquet toss song, the garter toss song, the money dance song, and etc...  I was on the phone with the DJ selecting this stuff for over an hour.  Honestly, I really didn't care/know what songs should be played for the different events during the wedding and I mostly asked for recommendations and then picked the one that I liked the most from that.  I really hope that I told the DJ how to pronounce everyone's name right!  There were a few last names that I wasn't completely sure on how to pronounce.  They guaranteed me that they would confirm with everyone.  Also... I kind of didn't like that the DJ couldn't give me a really good timeline.  The DJ just kept telling me that they would play it by ear around dinner and just see how things fall.  I'm a pretty analytic, detail oriented person, and I would have liked a more concrete schedule.  I know that a lot of DJ's that we talked to at the IX Bridal Show told us that they would give us a detailed step by step plan for the day, and I thought that the DJ that we booked was one of those DJ's... but apparently not.  We talked to over 15 DJ's at the event so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I just assumed that they did it, because most DJ's we talked to told me that they did when I asked.  But oh well...  I'm sure that it will work out.  It's not like I would be staring at the schedule all night anyway, but I just like to have a general idea and a plan to work with.  I'm just glad that is settled and that we figured out the important songs that we wanted to have played at the wedding.
• I went to Carrie Cerino's to see how my backdrop would look hung up.  And.... yeah....  I didn't like how it looked.  As I looked at the room I decided that I didn't even want to worry about having a backdrop at all.  So we are scrapping that idea.
• I finished up wrapping all of the bridesmaid's and groomsmen presents, and I packed up our wedding favors into a box.
• I separated all of the wedding items into categories of where they needed to go...  for example our hotel room, the church, or the reception.  So now everything is ready to go and is waiting to be dropped off.
• I spent a lot of time cleaning this week too.  I know that there are going to be a lot of people seeing our house for the first time, and I was trying to make sure that everything looked good.  Our house wasn't really dirty, but I still needed to do a lot of dusting and vacuuming.  The worst part about having 4 bathrooms is having to clean 4 bathrooms!  But the cleaning is  not really a bad thing...  I like doing a deep clean of the house every so often anyway.
• I went to our jeweler and got my ring cleaned too!!  Ahhh I love how my ring looks right after it has been cleaned!  It sparkles and looks so beautiful.  When she gave it back to me I was honestly stunned for a second, because it looked so good!!  :)  I guess that means that I need to get it cleaned more often.  I'll have to look into some type of at home cleaner.
• We also started to get our first wedding cards.  Both my work and Cody's work gave us a card.  It was really nice of the people we work with to remember us on our wedding... even though most of them won't be at the wedding.
• I feel like most of our wedding tasks are pretty much done.  I'm not really stressing out too much about it, and I feel like we've spaced everything out pretty well.  I keep doing a lot of little tasks...  like today I got drinks for the limo ride and at some point I need to pick up a 5X7 picture up to put in our card box...  but really almost everything is ready.  In the next day or so I'm going to start packing up our hotel night bag.  :)  Overall, I'm pretty excited and I really can't believe that our wedding weekend is approaching so soon!!

Bachelorette Party

My Bachelorette Party was on 5/16/15... about a week before the wedding.  It was a night all about the 3 Amigas!  My girls, Hannah and Steph took me out for a fabulously fun night!  Hannah didn't give me any details ahead of time but she asked me for my dinner choice of chicken, prime rib, or fish ahead of time.  That was all that I knew going into it. 

Here is Hannah pinning on my shash.  :)

Here we are in the car ride on our way to downtown Cleveland.  Kyle was our chauffeur for the night.  Thanks Kyle!

I couldn't believe it!  Hannah found a Bachelorette's Gone Homicidal murder mystery!  Basically it was supposed to be a girls bachelorette party and then turned into a murder mystery.  It was SO much fun!!  I was soooo excited!  I have been wanting to go to a murder mystery FOREVER!  

Here are the actresses singing.  They had a part where they asked people to come up and do karaoke.  Of course we went up there!!  We sang "I've had the time of my life" from dirty dancing.  Now... I have to say we weren't the worst group, but...  we did have a little bit of a timing issue haha.  I had the microphone and I was singing the words and not necessarily waiting for the right pauses.  It was a lot of fun though!!  Our group name was the 3 Amigas!  Good thinking on that name Steph!  A lot of people were up there and didn't know the words at all to their songs... at least we knew all of the words!  And we were up there shaking it and giving a little bit of a show.  About halfway into the song, Hannah took the mic because I kept messing up and she was like "I got this!"  lol!

The food was actually really good too.  We all really enjoyed our meals.  Steph and I got the prime rib and Hannah got chicken. I think we all loved the mashed potatoes!  Yummy!!  I also got a new drink called a barrel of monkeys.  It was caramel vodka and rootbeer!  YUM!  So good!  I really liked that drink a lot!

The show was so much fun!  It was really interactive and it had a pretty good storyline.  I would love to go to another murder mystery again!   I was the only bachelorette at our table, but there were probably 5 or 6 other bachelorette parties at the show too.  We were at a table with probably 12 people at it, and I was the "foreman" or captain at our table to write our ballet. Our group was divided between two bridesmaids for who did it.  My side of the table thought one and the other half thought the other...  Well... I ended up writing down the one that my half of the table thought did it.... and we were WRONG!  It was the girl that the other half of the table thought of.  I think that they pretty much hated us after that haha.  Oops!!   At least it was at the end of the show haha.

Here we are with one of the stars from the show!  He made a comment that he looked like a pedophile in this picture...  we weren't exactly sure how to take that haha.

Afterwards we walked across the street to the Chocolate Bar!  I've always wanted to go to the chocolate bar and I've never been!!  I think that all of the bachelorette  parties had the same idea because most of them came there too hahaha.

Here I am!  We were all snapping like crazy!  I'm pretty sure Sam's phone was blowing up haha. 

I got a reese peanut butter cup martini, Hannah got a chocolate pretzel, and Steph got a smores.  They were a lot stronger than I thought they would be, but it was still good!!

We were on our way to West 6th, and we were passing the Horseshoe Casino, and Hannah had to run to the bathroom.  So we went in and I saw the machine that I have always wanted to play was open!  I swear I've never seen this game open before... so I hopped on and played it.  I did hit a bonus, but I didn't win much.  The woman next to me won over $350!!  Darn it!  I ended up losing $20 but oh well!

Then we went down to West 6th street.  We did a shot in the Velvet Dog and then we got a drink at the Barley House.  We all realized pretty quickly that "clubbing" really isn't our thing anymore.  We finished our drinks pretty quick and went to Bar Louie to hang out and chat while we waited for Kyle to come pick us up.  As we were waiting outside for him to get there an Italian guy came up to us and started talking about some pretty racy things...  He ended with saying "I feel bad for your husband, because for the rest of your life you're going to be thinking about me."  Hahaha!!    He ended up stumbling away and then Kyle picked us up.   We had the BEST night!  It was so much fun!  I got to do so many things that I've always wanted to do.  My girls are the best!!  The murder mystery show was even better than what I thought that we were going to do.  I thought we'd be going out to dinner downtown and then to a comedy show or something.  This was perfect!  Love my girls!!