Wedding, part one: wedding planning ninja

It's been a month now since the wedding, so I figured it's about time that I wrote up a wedding recap. Unlike a lot of my friends that I've spoken to, I oddly remember quite a bit about my wedding, probably because I was so heavily involved in planning it, and because many of my friends blogged or Twittered the details, so they're on the internets for all eternity to help jog my memory. In any case, I start with part one: wedding planning ninja.

I'm a planner. I love planning things and being really organized, so when I set out to plan a 150-guest wedding in NYC in 5 months' time, I really didn't think it would be much of a challenge. And some parts of it weren't - in fact, most of the actual wedding stuff was easy as pie. It was coordinating the travel of a large percentage of the guests that took a lot of time and effort. I'd estimate that 75% of our guest list was coming from out of town, and a good portion of those had never been to the city before. I ended up negotiating and helping many of them book their hotel and travel reservations (again, something I love to do, as I am a travel ninja, but it was very time-consuming).

In the days leading up to the wedding, everything was running smoothly. Our friends had started to arrive - first, my daughter and her parents, then my best friend/bridesman and one of Atom's best friends. We had a full house for part of the week, and even though we had some last-minute things to do, we were still able to relax and spend time with our friends and family leading up to the wedding, which was nice and took my mind off the fact that American Airlines had grounded 300 of its planes, canceling hundreds of flights a few days before my wedding. Luckily, though almost every single one of our out-of-town guests who flew in flew on American, only a handful of the flights were affected. Unluckily, the people who were affected were my mother, my grandmother (who was slated to walk me down the aisle), my uncle (who was the minister officiating the wedding), and his son (who was the "team captain" of the ring bearers). So, you know. Awesome!

So, while I was busy being distracted from the fact that I was going to be wearing tiny handcuffs in less than 48 hours by the plane cancellations, I still managed to get things done. After rerouting my mother's canceled flights, we went out for drinks and snacks with our friends Wil and Anne, we dropped off gift bags for our guests at their hotels, we picked up my dresses (yes, I was a two-dress bride) at their respective tailors, and I took my henchmaids to our manicure & pedicure appointments. Mind you, while I was getting a manicure I got another cancellation notification for my mother's flight, called AA's Executive Platinum desk, had her rebooked on an earlier flight and comped into the Admiral's Club at the airport. You try doing that with freshly-polished nails. (Told you I was a travel ninja.)

We packed up all our houseguests for their respective hotels on Friday afternoon and had our rehearsal on Friday night. My mom was still in air transit hell, but everyone else was there, and we had a great time hanging out with everyone. My uncle had managed to make it there despite the cancellations, and we went over the ceremony. At the rehearsal, we told my grandmother that she'd drop me off at the front, take a seat, we'd say a few words, and then we could all start drinking. She responded very enthusiastically, which set the tone for the rest of the weekend.

To be continued in part two: The Final Countdown.