T minus 31 Days.

Bouquets
My mom got put in charge of the bm bouquets after having Edith do a demo for her. Their bouquets are going to be all white (and perhaps some green leaves) using white peonies and stephanotis. Their holders will be wrapped with a red satin ribbon that will hopefully not clash with the red of their dresses.
My bouquet was originally a cascading design done by Edith using white gardenias and pink cherry blossoms. Unfortunately, I ended up having to redo it. A lot of the pieces fell out and I couldn't figure out how to put them back in the right places. Also, my mom thought it was too big for me and made me look wider when I was holding it. Instead of trying to recreate the cascade, I ended up making it a round design with the gardenias and framed them by bending the cherry blossom branches to create a sort of halo behind the gardenias. Really sucks though because I know Edith spent a lot of time and energy on it, and I can't bring myself to tell her that I had to redo it. She was just so busy with another April bride that I didn't want to bother her. It also seemed like she really didn't care to work with fake flowers.

Bridesmaids Dresses.
Dresses have arrived. Now we all just need to get alterations done. It's been a struggle to meet with Alex to give her the dress. I may just need to drop it off to her some night and have her figure out alterations herself.

Centerpieces.
We finally decided on a design based on something that Yubo and I saw in Michael's. It's in something more like a glass bowl with moss and river rocks with a big lotus and two branches of cherry blossoms. It'll look really nice. My mom's been having a little trouble finding the lotus though.

Ceremony details.
We're going in for our final premarital session with Pastor Wayne on Thursday. We'll get to then talk about the details of the ceremony... what happens in what order and all that stuff. We have the music picked out for the more obvious first part of the ceremony, and now we get to wait to see how much more music we need to choose for the rest of it.

We also need to decide if we're gonna do the unity candle or sand or whatever.

I have my portion of the vows written. Yubo needs to write his so I can send them to Akemi to get translated.

We still need to memorize the song we're going to sing.

First Dance and Song.
Yubo's younger brother was awesome enough to re-record the song we want to use for our first dance. He's supposed to get the track completely done before Yubo's parents come up this weekend. The reason why they're coming up is so Yubo's mom can teach us our first dance. I think the dance will be more traditional than I was hoping, but oh well.

Bachelor/Bachelorette Party.
I'm not planning to have a bachelorette party of any sort (because I'm boring like that), and for quite a long time I was under the impression that he wasn't going to do anything special either. WELL, there has been much miscommunication over this whole thing, and it has created quite a bit of drama.

So, this all started when I was telling someone that the rehearsal was going to be on the Thursday before at 6p. His reaction told me that he didn't know that (even though I was pretty darn sure that I told him). He then told me that was when his guys wanted to "kidnap" him for his party. I thought there would still be plenty of time for his party, so I didn't understand what the problem was. It wasn't until a while later that he broke it to me that they wanted to take him to Vegas. OH. Well then. Most people know just how much I hate Vegas. But Yubo was actually really looking forward to going, and he had simply assumed that the rehearsal was on Friday, the day before the wedding, as it's done at most other churches. (This is why it's bad to assume, guys, especially when it comes to schedule details for your wedding.)

Since this whole thing happened a few months ago, there's still tension whenever we have to talk about it. He's set on trying to reschedule the rehearsal to make things work for his Vegas trip and seems to refuse to figure out something else to do if we can't reschedule.

We had a talk over breakfast today that he was making it seem like there was absolutely no other thing to do but go to Vegas, and if he couldn't go he'd be upset. I pointed out to him that the way he was reacting to possibly not being able to go to Vegas would taint the whole experience of the wedding. I don't want to take any fun away from him, but I don't understand why he can't have a Plan B (or Plan C, really) that doesn't require a 6hr drive. The more details he was giving me about what they planned for the Vegas trip, the more I thought it was a bad idea. But I told him that whenever he leaves for whatever it is they end up doing, I have nothing else to do but to trust that he will arrive right on time at 9am at my parents' house well-rested, sober, teeth brushed, tux clean, etc etc, and ready to endure the ridiculously long day that Saturday will be.

Invitations.
Invitations have been sent. FINALLY! So everyone that I had on my list with a complete address had their invitation put into the mail yesterday. And of course, suddenly Yubo is all, "Oh, did you get one out to so-and-so?" and I'm like, "No, because you never gave me their address," and he's like, "Oh, I have their address in an e-mail."

Anyway, even those super last minute ones got sent out... and I'm expecting to suddenly find more people that were supposed to get an invite that didn't give me their address. I may just end up adding them to the Evite I have set up. =P But I do have, like 14 more stamps that I can use... and we have extra invites that we can give to people that might want to keep one for whatever reason. Apparently some people actually do that. Not a surprise though. I still have Eric's invite to his wedding reception.

Flights and Hotel Reservations.
So I booked our flights through cheaptickets.com. Bad idea, I'm starting to think. Our itinerary has changed three times, once for each flight. Now we have, like, a 7hr layover in Honolulu instead of just hanging out for 3hrs before heading off to Lihue. Bah. We're gonna try to see if we can hop onto an earlier flight when we get there, but I'm gonna try to get us to pack super duper light so we don't have to fuss with luggage for 7hrs if we want to hit the beach or something else while we wait.
Most of our hotel reservations are through timeshare accounts. We have two nights at an Anaheim resort for Saturday and Sunday night using our WorldMark account. The week in Kauai is a gift to us from Yubo's parents using their timeshare. Then I got us two nights in Honolulu using our WorldMark. Just need to find a cheap room for one night in Honolulu, unless the room we're on the waiting list for comes through. Man... I'm so glad we got our WorldMark account.

Bridal Gown.
I still don't know what my gown looks like. I will not have an idea until I go in for some sort of fitting on April 1st. Yup! Just 9 days before the wedding. Yikes!
I'm really hoping that it looks good. My Plan B is to rent, so I'm really hoping I don't have to.

Favors.
Another area of tension between me and my parents. Sort of. We all wanted to do something a little different. My dad came up with the idea to give address books, since nearly everyone uses weddings as a sort of reunion. So in case there are some people that don't use their cell phones or smart phones or whatever to store all their contact information, they can use the address book we give them.

More miscommunication. I thought my dad was going to China to get one specially made for me with a nice red cover. What he came back with was something that was brown and grey with uneven stitching between the two mismatched colors and "My Friends Address Book" printed on in an uneven flakey gold. When my mom showed me, I was gonna start crying.

We finally got to where they're gonna order different ones that are just black with gold print, something that people won't be embarrassed to have in their possession.

The latest snag is what kind of pen to pair with it. I was originally going to get a personalized pen,
but my mom was convinced that no one would use a pen that had our names on it. I disagreed, but found some that could come blank. My dad, of course, had his own idea of what would work. His choice happened to be something that's probably ridiculously cheap. It was a pack of pens that were different colors, but were a good size in proportion to the address book. I found something that is plastic but looks metal, sleek design that looks good and professional, but might be a little too big for the address book. I told my sister that people probably wouldn't care about the size of the pen because they won't always have it paired with the address book, so she's trying to sell my dad on my choice.


And that's about all I can think of right now. It's really coming together. Just a little frustrating that so many things are so last minute.