This week is just crazy!

It actually started during Holy Week - the wedding preparations seem to be taking over our entire lives. Although we’ve prepared well for the wedding, now it’s time to tie up all the loose ends, meet with key suppliers to finalize details, and turn over everything to our wonderful coordinator, Liza. It’s been taking up all of our time the past few days and it really is tiring!

This part of the preparations are the hardest - the wedding is coming up so quickly, and you just can’t wait for it to arrive already! As we’re preparing the turnover though, the stress fades and it starts turning into real excitement - part of us still can’t believe that this day is really about the both of us, and that is the main reason why roughly 150 of our loved ones, family, friends, and associates are traveling out of town, just to see us celebrate our vows. It’s a great feeling, and we feel very humbled because of it. We’ll see the fruits of our preparation soon enough, and we hope that you will truly enjoy the wedding!

I’ve always wanted to have a personalized wedding, complete with all the tiny little details that make the experience more special. For the past days, this is what i’ve been trying to achieve with my do-it-yourself kit. I’ve been cutting, pasting, measuring and printing stuff. I’ve have also commissioned household help to form an assembly line of sorts to help me with this project. Namecards, menu cards, table labels, napkin holders, etc are all products of this cottage industry of ours.

It would’ve been easy to just outsource this and spend the time to do other “more important things”. But this is something that i really enjoy doing (apart from being a good way to save up on costs :)). It is important to me because it allows me to concretely bring a part of myself into this wedding celebration. And besides, it’s not everyday that you get a chance to be crafty.

Happy Easter, everyone! Now that Holy Week draws to a close, we’re down to our final week before the wedding. We spent our Holy Week mostly at home, although we visited Anvaya with my parents on Wednesday to get a final ocular before the event. The rest of the days were spent preparing for the wedding.

Speaking of the wedding, we’d like to thank a few more friends whose contributions helped to make this wedding extra special:

Jenny Infante-Reyes and Jake de Guzman for our AVP: Jake is a real whiz when it comes to making videos, and we’re very lucky that they’re making the AVP for our wedding, despite such short notice. Thanks so much, Jen and Jake!

Dax Tee - Dax designed the Manila to Morocco wedding site using a modified Wordpress theme. If you’d like to use his services for your website, you can contact him via www.daxtee.com

Donny and Christine, our hosts - our original host and Rockeoke conspirator JC had to beg out because of a family trip to Macau. Boo-hoo! Fortunately, we have a couple of friends who have willingly stepped up to do the hosting duties during the evening. Thanks so much, you two!

Indra Manahan of CakeBiz - our wedding cake is extra special - a two-layer peanut butter cake with embedded Reese’s pieces. All thank to Ku, who have been feeding us with our favorite cakes since high school. Thanks, Ku!

And last but not least, Genn Dizon-Garcia and her family, who made sure that we got the perfect venue for our wedding.

Say it with me: “and I get by with a little help from my friends…”

I got a text message from my boss this evening asking me to start taking it slow at work since my wedding is just ‘round the corner. This simple message gave me a strong jolt to reality that yes, I only have 22 days before our wedding on March 29. I guess every working bride gets to a point when she has to make that deliberate decision to let go of the reins at work and start funneling her energy on making the wedding of her dreams possible. I guess, I was just a bit late in making this resolution J

Maybe working day in and day out handling events has caused me to treat our wedding as just another event. In my line of work, it is easy to get caught in the routine of frantic and hectic juggling of the intricate details that get into a show or event. The energy is always high and our little nook at the office always seem to be abuzz with crazy activity. Along the way, our wedding got entangled in the frenzy J

So now I have revisited our wedding file, carefully updated all entries, painstakingly laid down my wedding to-do-list, sat down with our coordinator and drafted next steps for the next couple of weeks. This has proven to be effective in clearing my mind from all the cobwebs of worries on whether I missed something out or forgot to include an important budget entry (oh no, I forgot to include drinks in the food budget? J). It has also brought some semblance of order to the planning of a chaotic-organized, go-with-the-flow type of couple that we are.

So with my boss’ blessings, I shall start taking a back seat at work for now so I can ride the frenzied wave of my last minute wedding preparations….. so much for taking it slow!

Unlike some couples, we’re not particularly close to any priest, so we didn’t have any idea on whom to get to officiate our wedding ceremony. We asked one of our sponsors, Tita Clemence to ask any of the three priests that officiated the wedding of her son and my good friend, Lennard. Unfortunately, all three were already booked on March 29 and Tita Clemence had mentioned that she had booked them 8 months in advance of Lennard’s wedding. With some panic, we asked some people on both sides to help find us a willing priest for our church ceremony. Tita Clemence agreed to keep on looking for us also.

A few days later, Tita Clemence called back to say that she had found a priest through Tita Ollie, a good friend of hers. The priest’s name was Father Steven Tynan, an Australian priest based out of Don Antonio Heights in Quezon City. On the same day, Mench’s officemate Nori told her that she had found a priest for us. But the priest could not be sure about agreeing to our wedding, because he had another wedding in Subic on March 29 at 2:30pm.

Of course, what are the chances of that happening?! We did a little digging and found out that the priest being recommended by someone on my side and Mench’s side were the same person! So we figured it was meant to be, and happily met up with Fr. Steven in Don Antonio for a short chat. He’s really a cool, non-traditional priest, which really fits the whole theme of our wedding. And because he’s Australian, he really doesn’t mind having some Pinoy traditions absent in the mass, including *gasp* all the duties of the primary sponsors. Yep, there’s no veil, cord, or that “traditional Filipino hoo-ha”, as Fr. Steven told us.

He told us that as long as we didn’t mess with his liturgies, took our wedding vows seriously, and didn’t use any swear words, we’d be fine. And with that, he just gave us the license to pull off the kind of church wedding that we wanted.

What exactly will be in the church ceremony? You’ll find out on March 29!