A Woodside Wedding: Rehearsal Dinner Under The Trees

After the scramble to get everything set up for our rehearsal dinner, we could finally relax as our guests started arriving. Since we had invited all of our out of town guests, and knew not everyone was familiar with the area, we’d planned to have drinks and appetizers from 6:30-7:15pm, to make sure anyone running late didn’t miss dinner.

This time to mingle was a great opportunity for both of our families to meet each other. Our parents had met once over dinner about 6 years ago, but hadn’t seen each other since. And I’d hardly met any of Mr. Cola’s family before our rehearsal dinner, since most live on the east coast.


At 7:15 our buffet dinner from Armadillo Willy’s BBQ was set up, my signs were put out, and everything was ready to eat, so Mr. Cola and I gave a quick thanks to everyone for joining us, and let everyone know it was time to eat. And then I had to repeat it all again, because apparently only half our guests could hear me the first time!


Once everyone had helped themselves to the food, Mr. Cola and I had a chance to sit down and eat ourselves. I was terrified of getting BBQ sauce on my white rehearsal dress, so I opted to eat with a very fashionable napkin tucked in the front of my dress.


The rest of the evening was spent chatting with our guests as the sun went down behind the trees. At some point our groomsmen passed out Its Its ice cream sandwiches for dessert, which were a big hit for everyone not on a diet!


Toward the end of the night I was starting to get a sore throat from talking so much, so I had to switch from wine to Sprite. At about 9:30pm we started to wrap things up, and our wedding party was wonderful enough to help with the tear down and loading the décor back into our cars. And then some of the groomsmen were nice enough to load the speaker system into our Uhaul truck back at the hotel, and help me move the after party supplies from my car to our hotel room, since my feet and throat were killing me. Mainly the after party supplies were just a whole lot of liquor, beer and mixers, so after it was brought up to our room, it didn’t take Mr. Cola and I very long to set it all up for the next evening.

For the rest of the night, I’m not sure what everyone else did, I think they hung around the lobby bar, or in their hotel rooms. Mr. Cola spent some time with his groomsmen, promising to wrap things up and be back in our suite by midnight or so. I took the opportunity to take a really long, super steamy shower, drink some more Sprite, and give myself a French manicure.

I’m not sure what time Mr. C fell asleep the night before our wedding, but it was definitely before I did. The last time I remember looking at the clock it was 2:30 in the morning, and I was still tossing and turning, and hoping my sore throat would go away before the big day.

How early do you plan to get to sleep the night before your wedding?

Miss any wedding week details? Catch up here:

- I packed an emergency bag that saved my dress
- We had a crazy 4 days prepping for house guests and stuffing favors
- Shopping for a ton of wedding flowers to arrange ourselves
- Mr. Cola drinks a 40 and I have a night out on the town for our low-key bach parties
- A day of DIY'ing flower arrangements
- I kicked off our official recaps with my #1 wedding tip
- We began the weekend festivities with a sunset cruise for our wedding party
- We rehearsed our quick and easy ceremony
- I panicked, but we got our rehearsal dinner decorations set up just in time

(All pictures in this post are personal photos, taken by myself, my family or our wedding party)

A Woodside Wedding: Decorating for the Rehearsal Dinner

With our ceremony rehearsed, and after killing a couple hours at the hotel, we headed out to go set up for our Friday night rehearsal dinner.

I was in my car by myself, and after swinging by my mom’s house to pick up the Its Its ice cream sandwiches we would be serving for dessert, I arrived at our RD venue, the San Mateo Garden Center right at our rental start time of 5pm. Unfortunately (or luckily, at least they weren’t late), the guy who was delivering the speaker system we were using for the weekend through my work hook up was there already. And I was there, by myself.

I started to panic a bit, because for one, uh, I was there by myself for the first half hour of our rental time, and didn't know where everyone else was. And this AV tech guy was trying to tell me stuff about things I know nothing about, and my sister’s boyfriend (who would be running the AV equipment) wasn’t there yet to get the instructions. To make matters worse, I had very little of the rehearsal dinner décor in my car to be able to start setting up; I had mostly just the after party stuff.

**Pause for a few minutes of a bride-to-be pulling out her hair**

So where was everyone else? Well, Mr. Cola and a couple of the groomsmen had to stop by Safeway to pick up ice and our appetizer trays. But because Quiznos had refused to let us place our Sunday luncheon food order in advance, and weren’t returning my calls earlier that afternoon, he had to take time to put in a new order with Safeway for Sunday’s food. Unfortunately this took a while longer than it should have, and he happened to have almost all the RD décor in his car….so I was panicking about the set up happening in time, and franticly texting him and everyone else.

Luckily, around 5:30pm Mr. C and the rest of our wedding party showed up, and we scrambled to get the drinks on ice and all the décor set up (have I mentioned already how much I love our wedding party for all the set up help? 'Cause I do!). And it all turned out pretty nicely, if I do say so myself! Everything looked pretty dang close to these Photoshopped mock ups I’d done last fall.


And once the sun set later in the evening you could better see the paper bag luminaries that Mr. Cola decorated, as well as my DIY centerpieces.


With only a few minutes to spare before everyone else arrived for our 6:30pm rehearsal dinner, I could finally relax with a glass of wine, try not to look too sweaty from the set up scramble, and get ready to meet most of Mr. Cola’s family for the first time!

(Ahhh, a much needed glass of Gewurztraminer!)

Miss any wedding week details? Catch up here:

- I packed an emergency bag that saved my dress
- We had a crazy 4 days prepping for house guests and stuffing favors
- Shopping for a ton of wedding flowers to arrange ourselves
- Mr. Cola drinks a 40 and I have a night out on the town for our low-key bach parties
- A day of DIY'ing flower arrangements
- I kicked off our official recaps with my #1 wedding tip
- We began the weekend festivities with a sunset cruise for our wedding party
- We rehearsed our quick and easy ceremony

(All pictures in this post are personal photos, taken by myself, my family or our wedding party)

Rehearsal Dinner Tasting!

Pretty much everything has been ready for our rehearsal dinner for a while now. We have a great location, centerpieces are made, linens, plates and napkins have been purchased, and Mr. Cola worked on the lighting/decorations.

The only thing left has been to nail down the food we'll be serving, for which we HAD TO* do a tasting!

*Not really. We've had their food before. But it was a nice excuse to go out to dinner on a Friday and stuff ourselves full!

So last Friday, we headed over to Armadillo Willy's for some yummy BBQ. We were both going to order the giant 3-Meat Plate, since we're going to be serving three kinds of meat at our rehearsal dinner (and because leftovers are awesome), but at the last minute Mr. Cola chickened (ribbed?) out and ordered just a big plate of ribs.

This was the Brisket, Chicken and Ribs plate:
I am SO ready to eat!
Mr. C's plate of ribs:

Fast forward a half hour or so and then....

I didn't do so well with my 3-Meat plate, but Mr. C obliterated his rib plate! And now we were ready to make our rehearsal dinner selections. We get to choose three meats and three sides, and it's a good thing we did a tasting after all, because we changed up the selection of sides we were anticipating on getting.

We were thinking that baked beans would definitely be one of our choices, but they were actually pretty disappointing and watery. So we're going with potato salad, mixed green salad and corn bread muffins for our sides, and the three meats I tried, brisket (my favorite, obviously from the gaping hole on my plate!), BBQ chicken and BBQ ribs.

After all of that, I was in a meat coma! Hopefully our rehearsal dinner guests will be similarly stuffed of BBQ.

But of course, a BBQ buffet dinner wouldn't be complete without some buffet signs, so I whipped some up. It was a nice change to work with our blue, white and chocolate brown rehearsal dinner color scheme!
If anyone is curious, I used a font on these called Brandywine, free from HighFonts. To make them stand up on the buffet tables, I just folded card stock in half, cut out triangles, and glued them to the back of the signs.
(All pictures in this post are personal photos)

Did you do a tasting before selecting your rehearsal dinner menu?