Just Days Before 'I Do': Running Around Like Crazy People

The weekend before our wedding is when the madness started.

A bunch of it is a blur to me, partly because of the fact that I was only able to get 3 or 4 hours of sleep each night the weeks leading up to our wedding, but also partly because I felt like we were moving a thousand miles a minute. The Cola house was a flurry of activity, and we spent a good two full days doing nothing but cleaning our home.

I’m not even kidding, it was that bad. Paper scraps, ribbon pieces, cat fur—our house was a tornado of wedding crafting supplies and trash, and it was a huge amount of work to get it cleaned. But as stressful as it was, it had to be done, because some of our wedding party was coming to town Tuesday night and staying with us for a couple nights.

(Side note: if you can avoid it, I would recommend against having people stay at your house right before your wedding. Cleaning for and entertaining guests adds a huge amount of stress, especially if you’re the type of person who always strives to be a good hostess, like I am. We had a lot of fun with our friends once they got here, so I totally don’t regret it, but it was a lot of work and stress leading up to when they arrived. I may or may not have snapped at one of my bridesmaids, via text, while she was waiting to board her plane to fly here….something along the lines of “You’ve already had TWO WEDDINGS, you should know how stressed I am.” Yeah, not a proud moment. Luckily she was understanding and texted me back something along the lines of how they were ready to help with whatever we needed, and would be our “wedding ninjas.”)

Mr. Cola had to work the Monday and Tuesday before our wedding, while I continued to zip around in a crazed daze, calling and emailing a million people and vendors to re-re-re confirm things, spending about 4 hours ironing all the clothes we both would wear for the rest of the week, finalizing my vows, checking and re-checking my mile long lists, putting together my emergency bag and packing for our Thursday through Sunday hotel stay, getting our cars cleaned and detailed for ferrying people around, getting a facial and wax at a salon (which was supposed to be an excuse to de-stress, but I ended up just feeling like it was a waste of time, I was greasy and gross after the facial, and immediately went home and showered off), and having to take loads of garbage to Mr. C’s work dumpster because we had too much to fit in our garbage can.

So pretty much from the Saturday through Tuesday afternoon before our wedding I was a sweaty, stressed, sleep deprived mess. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a way around this either, most everything that could have done in advance had been done, but there were still just so many things that I couldn’t do until the week before when I finally had time off work.

Mr. C got off of work late Tuesday afternoon and spent some time finalizing his own vows while I started working on our favors. Back in October I’d decorated our favor boxes and made signs for the favors table, but since we were doing edible favors, the rest had to be left to the last minute. As a reminder, here is a picture of the mock up of our favor table I did last fall.

For our San Francisco White Cheddar Popcorn favor, we bought two big bags of the popcorn, and had to re-package it into small bags that would fit in our decorated boxes. I used a measuring cup to scoop out the popcorn, putting about 2 ½ cups in each favor bag.
(ZOMG, look, no cutting mat or other junk on our coffee table, and you can actually see the floor in our TV room!)

I also had made little stickers for the favor bags ahead of time by printing them out on sticker paper with my printer. I wanted to make sure people knew the popcorn was from San Francisco!

After stuffing 40 clear bags of popcorn, I had to put them in their pre-decorated boxes, which I sealed at the top using two punched flowers and a small brad.

By this time Mr. Cola had finished his vows (although I suspect he didn’t get choked up writing his like I did when writing mine!), and he kindly went and got us Arby’s sandwiches for dinner. Because yet again, I had forgotten to eat all day. After dinner he helped stuff our remaining favors, Ghiradelli Chocolates in gable boxes and San Francisco Cookie Company Chocolate Chip Cookies in square boxes.

After all the 120 favors were ready for our guests, we packed them in boxes and just as we were taping the boxes shut, three members of our wedding party arrived. They had great timing, although I only managed to hang out with them for an hour or so, I was falling asleep tired by 10pm and had to head to bed early! Wednesday was going to be a big day, with an early morning wake up call!