Thursday, November 15, 2007
one year in the making
"tingnan mo, yung pinaghirapan nyo ng isang taon, mabilis lang matatapos..." this was what one of the suppliers told me as the wedding ceremony was about to start. i then started to sink in that the day we've all been waiting was already there. while i have been extremely busy preparing for the event, the questions that kept bugging my mind were "did we miss out on anything?" or "what else should we do?" or "who should be followed up?", it was only minutes before the wedding did i realize that this was "the day."
last sunday (11 november 2007), my brother ron got married to his fiance-now-wife arlene. we (both of them, my 2 cousins lelyn and grace, and myself) have been preparing for this event since october or november of 2006. since day 1 of the preparations, i sort of placed "unneccessary" pressure upon myself to make sure that everything would turn out great on the big day. i relied much on the thought that lelyn and i were so used to organizing activities back in college. but at the back of my mind, i knew that this was not "any activity." it was a "real" event and it couldn't get more real. for the love of god, it is my brother's wedding. more pressure. so we got ourselves together and summoned all our seemingly-rusty event-organizing skills and started to prepare everything. from project plans to calendars to checklists, name it, we've go it.
the yearlong preparations (in between my law classes, lelyn's masters classes and her teaching job, and grace's nursing classes and hospital duties) really went by fast (as with everything), but not without the countless coffee-shop hopping for late-night meetings (as lelyn and/or i were only available after class hours), endless laughter, (my) rare flare-ups, occasional meetings with suppliers, and late nights in front of the computer to satisfy my obsessive-compulsive nature (either encoding stuff or having art attacks). not to forget, the staple orange clear folder and lelyn's pink notebook with the minutes and deadlines. plus the (bonus) tagaytay-batangas summer trip which was for pictorials but we made it a convenient excuse to go out of town for a much-needed summer vacation.
the day before the wedding, we checked-in the hotel and instantly turned the hotel room into a war room of sorts. what with the laptop and printer set up and all the labeled paper bags neatly piled in different corners of the room and the papers and post-its on the wall. it was quite a sight. haha! it was a sleepless night, maybe because of excitement or the caffeine fix we had at the last minute. (yes, i badly needed to go to starbucks to do some last-minute unwinding.)
funny how i kinda put a time in the schedule for everything that we had to do on the wedding day. grace made sure that we were on time with the scheduled activities for the day. (note, we even had time to take a 20- or 30-minute dip into the pool that morning. to relax for a long day, as grace puts it). and to cater to my vanity needs, i had to ensure that i would look good in the photos, i had to rush to the salon that same morning to have my haircut. hehe! then everything commenced. church. back at hotel. check preparations for the reception. checking sounds, etc. then the reception proper (which i call pistang-bayan, with the number of guests). good thing, we had very able and efficient coordinators for the day so weren't as ngarag that day. (much thanks jen, cathy, mich, tina, and... i didn't catch his name. hehe!)
the following morning, i found myself in the jacuzzi after breakfast. i was busy relaxing that i sort of intentionally didn't attend to any phone calls or SMS that morning.
the wedding went well, i think. or at the very least, none of the minor problems that came up were left unresolved. despite the sleepless nights, countless cups of coffee (and frapps), the pressure, high emotions, inggitera bitches who didn't (or we're not willing to) help out (even with simple things like putting cheesecakes into the fridge), food binges and diets, seemingly endless phonecalls and text messages, and everything in between, i could say that the wedding went well.
to our suppliers, we couldn't thank you enough for making our lives (or at least the preparations) much easier.
to my co-organizers lelyn and grace, congrats to us! we nailed this one down! hehe!
and of course, to ron & arlene, congratulations to you both. we are so happy for you! god bless! :)
the "first event" is done. on monday, i go back to law school...
[more pictures to follow]
