Just this last weekend I drove down to California with the boys so I could help my mom with the flowers for a final wedding. This is the last one, seriously. My lovely sister-in-law, Liz, watched the kids for me all weekend long!! I am so grateful for her!
When I left her on Friday morning things were going great! I left early and I arrived at the event house earlier than planned. My mom was so happy to see me and we started right away prepping the flowers we had and waited for the roses to come via Fed Ex. When they came this is what we got.
Salmon pink and Orange roses when we ordered LIGHT PINK!! We could not believe it and the wedding was tomorrow!! At this time it was 10:30 in the morning on Friday. This is what color the roses were supposed to be:
So we called the mother of the bride and told her what happened. Then we returned the flowers at Costco (they were from Costco.com and we have NEVER had a problem with them) and got our money back. Then we hit up every Costco and grocery store we could find to find pink roses!! We didn't care that they were all different pinks just so long as they blend well together. We wasted about 3 hours running around town. We finally got back to the house around 1pm to start our flower arranging projects with the flowers we got:
Things were going well and we starting our arranging. My mom was so tired she even let me do things all by myself!! Here is my finished project:
And some of the bouquets:
They were turning out really well even though we had a fiasco in the morning :)
We thought the worst was behind us. Not quite. We were still waiting on the carnations for the kissing balls. When they came this is what we got:
This is $93 worth?!? Come to find out she added wrong. We has 36 carnations that were not even opened all the way to do 3 kissing balls that took about 30 carnations a piece to do. So the running around commenced again. 2 hours later we gather all the carnations we could find from florists, grocery stores, etc. We had to improvise and we bought some white carnations too. After we finished all of the arrangements (8 huge arrangements) we started on the kissing balls. It was 8:40pm when ran out of ribbon for the balls so the sister and sister-in-law of the bride ran to Michael's before it closed at 9pm. The reason we ran out of ribbon is because the bide came in while we were doing her bouquet and wanted the stems wrapped all the way down the stems. We started on the kissing ball around 9:15 and didn't finish until about 11pm. We were so delirious by this time.
When we got home we went straight to bed. In the morning my mom was asking me for the keys to my car because I had the roses in there for the corsages. I could not find my keys anywhere!! We looked around the house for about 45 minutes and they were no where to be found. I thought perhaps I locked the keys in the trunk of my car. We called AAA and had guy come out to unlock my car so I could open the trunk and guess what?? They were not in my car anywhere!! I ended up finding them about 30 minutes later tucked away in the top if my suitcase where the handle pulls out. Grrrr.
Then we had an eventful morning putting together 5 corsages.
Then we enjoyed a yummy lunch at BJ's Brewery with the bridal party and guests. This was the highlight of the day. Then we headed over to the house to get it all set up for the reception that night. This wedding was supposed to be the easiest wedding to do but because of all the problems we had it was the worst!!
The centerpieces turned out better than imagined:
Decorating the cake:
Here is a pic of the happy family greeting guests:
This is the groom
We got to spend the rest of the night enjoying ourselves and relaxing. The wedding was perfect and no one could tell there were any problems.
My mom doesn't know how to use my camera so this is the best shot we got of me and the sparklers. The bride and groom left through a tunnel of sparklers and they even had fireworks while they were getting in the limo.
SUNDAY:
We were so ready to go home by this point because it had been the weekend from you know where. We picked up the kids at Liz's house and all was well, thank goodness. The only mishap was lost shoes and I think I can live with that after all that has happened this weekend.
We got he kids loaded and we caravanned it up to Utah because my mom was driving my Grandpa's Volvo up to Utah for him. We stopped in Las Vegas for lunch and my mom told be the air conditioning had stopped working!! Then we stopped in St. George for another potty break and to fill up with gas. I heard the Volvo making a funny noise while it was idling that sounded like nuts and bolts in a blender. My mom said you couldn't hear it when you got going so I went with it. We took off and about 30 miles north of St. George my mom decided to pass me. I thought nothing of it and followed her instead. Not even 6 miles later all the Volvo's dash lights came on and the car died. I was right behind her to so I was able to pull off quickly too.
We were just after ranch exit 36. You can see we are in between the on ramp and the freeway. We had to wait a little more than an hour for the tow truck to come:
This was the cherry on top. :)
Our tow truck guy was Jeff. He was awesome.
Then just as he was ready to go I started my car but my battery was dead!! I had drained it keeping the air going and having a movie on for the kids. Jeff jumped my car for free. :) Then we drove back to St. George because we knew a mechanic there we could trust. By the time we got everything settled it was almost 6pm. We stopped at Ihop to have an ice cream sundae and get cool.
We got on the road at got back to my house at 10:30pm. We did it. We made it back home. I slept for 2 days to recover from the disaster of a weekend but it made for some fun memories. Moral of the story is: Don't ever do any favors for anyone.
