Survival…with minimal battle damage.

We made it. Jon, Hannah, and I all made it through an insane weekend. It could possibly be termed the MOST insane weekend we have ever experienced. Thinking back…It would be difficult to surpass the time we had a wedding AND a trade show on the same weekend…while I was preganant…but this may have been even more insane than even that!

First of all…Bless, bless, BLESS our amazing family and friends as well as our phenomenal vendors for their support. We would not have survived without Lisa and BeQui, Bloomerang and Masterlab, and I mean that sincerely!

Jon worked most of the week…sleeping very little…trying to get projects finished for deadlines that were looming…all while processing selected prints for some very picky brides. Well…One bride…one bride that was both picky AND indecisive. It makes it difficult to send a final choice to the printer when she knows that she DOESN’T want one thing, but can’t decide how to get what she DOES want, and so keeps sending Jon photo choices to put different effects on until she pretty much just ran out of time and picked something that he had already photoshopped a week before. We were up two nights in a row until 3 a.m. waiting for her decisions on what was going to the printer for her smaller table prints, and Saturday morning we were still uploading to the Costco in her neighborhood for her display shots. Jon had one wedding to shoot for a very laid back bride on Friday before the other two weddings of insanity took over on Saturday!, so he has gone so far beyond exhausted this weekend, I can’t even describe it.

And, don’t even get me started on the chaos of choices when it came to the indecisive bride’s flowers. Let’s put it this way…the day she told me two weeks ago that they had decided to save some money and handle the centerpieces themselves?…happy day! I did still have to coordinate the bouquets, boutonnieres, and corsages for the wedding party, and she didn’t finalize all of that until exactly one week before the wedding. Luckily, I have a new wholesale florist that is not only less expensive, but they’re faster on the draw when it comes to orders (I can put in an order on Monday and pick it up on Thursday), and they also take email requests, so they’re just easier to work with all-around. And their flowers are fantastic! Gorgeous goodness. Whew!

After it all, I did have one small moral dilemma when this bride, we’ll call her Bride #1. Bride #1 asked me to order 48 hydrangeas for her centerpieces that they were doing without me (though using my sketches and design ideas). I originally quoted her a price from my old wholesaler, which was about $6 a head. Then I found out that my new wholesaler only costs $3.50 a head. Hmm. After all the drama, craziness, waffling, and indecision?…yes, I wrote her an email to let her know that I found her a great deal!…$5 each. And, the reason it was a dilemma…for those of you rolling your eyes at me and thinking, “I would have charged her $7!”…despite it all…she’s still really honestly and sincerely the sweetest and cutest girl you’ll ever meet. I swear! She’s a doll! Believe me…some brides I’ve worked with, it would have been no question when it came to charging more.

BUT!…we did get everything done for Bride #1 including extra pieces for their flowers that weren’t in the plan. I was happy to help them find what they needed, and there were a couple of other things that made it worth while, like making the mom cry when she saw the canvas gallery wrap of the print her daughter chose. (Yes, the one she chose on Thursday when her wedding was on Saturday and which Masterlab was able to crank out in so much of a rush for us that we are TOTALLY taking them a fruit basket!) And it was great that Jon was able to shoot their temple shots in the morning even though we had a previous wedding engagement for the afternoon. After everything, I think it worked out perfectly!

Now, Bride #2 was another story! Pretty much, Bride #2 is the exact opposite of bride #1. Bride #2 booked us a year ago, made her decisions on flowers THEN and didn’t waffle once on her order, and she had everything for the wedding as far as info and payments to me a week before the big day. She was ON IT! And, she had planned it all to the letter. Everything was tied together…the choices she made all fit and followed a theme, and she brought in every aspect of the wedding to mirror her style and choices. It started with the flower choices of citrus colored daisies all tied together with her favorite color of a neon lime green. As far back as October of last yer, she had an orange daisy in her hair at their engagement shoot while the groom wore a subtle orange shirt under his suit. Her wedding dress for her bridal photos had multiple underskirst lined with ribbon in her lime green color and she had shoes that even had green on the bottom. She also made sure to have a green daisy in her hair that matched the bouquet I’d made with the melon, lemon, and orange daisies too. Yes! and when it started to rain?…she pulled out a lime green umbrella! She was always, and in all things, completely aware of her choices, timeframes, and vendors. The wedding day brought in all the other colors too with the bridesmaids in the citrus colored dresses with a contrasting color or ribbon and underskirt. If the dress was orange, then the contrast was yellow. There was one girl in green with white accents and one in pink with orange and another in yellow with pink. And, if you had yellow accents, then your flowers were yellow, if your shoes were pink, so were your flowers. It was perfectly designed right down the line, and it made it really simple to coordinate it all! Amazing.

BeQui came on Friday for a couple of hours and helped me de-thorn and de-leaf all of the flowers for both weddings, and then I was up until 3 a.m. putting together as much as I could. I had to run to my old wholesaler at 8 a.m. to get some last minute things and some supplimentary flowers that my new wholesaler hadn’t been able to get at the last minute. Ahh…bless both my wholesalers! Everything turned out perfectly, and we were right on time for all our deliveries. I sent the orchid wedding flowers with Jon to the temple in a disposable ice cooler with the extra curly willow for their centerpieces and our little extras to hand off to the other camera we’d hired to be there. That’s another bless…bless Andrea for being such a fantastic photographer to be able to call on! Apparently, the temple was great and everything went swimmingly. Despite the constant debates that Jon has with Andrea about Canon vs. Nikon, it worked out well to have Andrea be first camera at that wedding with her Nikon when we had also invited Jason (a previous groom and groupie to Jon as Jason’s photo guru) as Andrea’s second camera, who also shoots Nikon. Apparently, they were having a blast shooting together, swapping cameras depending on locations and the lenses they wanted to use. YAY! It makes it so much easier when the equipment has no learning curve.

Once Jon was done at the temple he came home to find me cleaning up and loading the car with wedding #2’s flowers! Boom, baby! BeQui drove my car with her daughter Sarah in the back seat, a trunk full of vases, and six bouquets on the front seat. Jon’s intern Ryan drove his truck with all his equiptment and some more of the flowers in his covered back bed. Jon and I drove with Hannah in our other car with all of Jon’s equiptment, and it was quite the caravan up to Midway for a day of wedding fun.

As we arrived, the bride came down, looking lovely with hair and makeup done, veil in place, but wearing a sweat suit and a look of stress that comes from having coordinated it all, but being the bride at the same time. Control brides like that, hate it when time won’t permit them to do it all themselves, so they have to delegate. I can’t tell you how many times I saw a bridesmaid on the phone to Bride #2, asking her a question that only she knew the answer to. We took some orders from her quickly and then got right to work to ease that look from her face.

It was awesome to realized that all the bridesmaids were in citrus sweat suits while they were helping us to set up, and Jon got some great shots of all of them getting ready. It was so fun! Again…one more thing that meant all the choices Bride #2 made followed through in every detail. Our friend Michelle, the videographer, was also there with three cameras and her husband to help out. Jim didn’t have too much to do pre-wedding, so he was fantastic to help me erect an archway for the wedding and to carry various supplies to the back yard to the tables for dinner centerpieces. BeQui was everywhere I needed her to be, from carring bucket after bucket of water from the kitchen, tying flowers onto the arch, or sitting on the grass reading to Hannah while I finished working. AMAZING! The entire process took quite a while, but the bridesmaids were awesome to jump on the roses and pull all the petals off for their use in tossing or sprinkling on the isle. BeQui and I (with the help of Jim and Ryan as temporary muscle) decorated all the ceremony needs (arch, wagon for toddlers unable to walk, and BeQui made sure the deliveries of bouquets and boutonnieres were taken care of) and then we moved to the back and decorated all the tables with simple centerpieces. Whew! I believe I had just finished cleaning everything up as the exit music started playing. SCORE!

BeQui took off as soon as she could, and I love her love her love her for all the amazing things she’s done! Again…Worth every single freakin’ penny for the help and the diffused stress she brings! I can’t wait to cut her another check, and seriously look forward to needing her again because it makes big weddings so much easier when you have a competent assistant! I’ve already found out that she made it in time to hit date-night with her hubby of dinner and a movie that night, so I’m glad that her time helping me didn’t cut too far in to the social plans for her evening. Ahh…bless her again!

I loved looking around once the pressure was off, and I just grinned at the cake! Four-layers, the bottom layer in lime green frosting with white diamonds on it. Second layer in lemon yellow frosting with lacy heart-y-shaped icing lines all over it. Third layer, orange icing with big white spots all over. And, the little top layer a melon pink with tiny white polka dots! Perfect! We had the pleasure of seeing Jon’s engagement photos of the couple all over the location in lovely frames (seriously!…probably 30 prints, and the smallest one was an 8×10!) and the food was average, though still following the theme…melons for appetizers!…watermelon, honeydew, cantelope…add in some pineapple, strawberries, green grapes and some mango, and you get the idea. Fun stuff!

After so full of a day, Hannah had a hard time sitting with me in the front yard taking apart the archway when there was so much ground that she wanted to cover. I had to stop what I was doing several times to go drag her back from a flower bed, fountain, or precipice. She finally tried to help me take the archway apart, and kept hitting me with one swinging piece till I told her to go play with the cast-off melon colored bridesmaids’ shoes. They’d traded the citrus high-heels for matching citrus flip-flops, so Hannah played with the heels and rode in the wagon just long enough for me to pull evrything apart and line it up on the sidewalk. My fingers are ripped to shreds now, but I kept smiling at her playing dress-up in the shoes. She just started doing that with my shoes about a week ago. Cute thing!

We had a little bit of dinner, but around 7:30 I got the keys from Jon and had the valet bring the car around. The clouds were threatening, and Hannah was fussing, so I decided to clean up and have the car ready at the gate in case the rain came down and I had to carry equiptment to the car as quickly as I could. I strapped Hannah into her seat and covered her bare little legs with a blanket. I loaded the pieces to the arch in the trunk an then smiled when Hannah passed out a few minutes before 8 just sitting in her car seat. I hung out in the quiet, knowing that the wedding party were having a blast, but sort of happy to just be sitting in the quiet warm car playing bubbles on my cell phone by myself.

Once the wedding ended, the bridesmaids and family were amazing to all pitch in again, and by the time I’d had the call from Jon to tell me that everyone was cleaning up and I could come get my vases, the tables had been stripped, all the accessories had been lined up on one table, and there was very little for me to do! Ryan and Jim helped again and we emptied water, boxed the vases back up, and loaded up the trunk. There was so little ground to cover this time when everything was grouped on one table, so it only took a few minutes. Jon’s equiptment went on the seat next to Hannah, and we said a goodnight to Ryan and thanked him for all his help. Jon brought me some cake, and then we drove down to the gully by the mill and Jon spent an hour or so hanging out with the party in front of a bonfire (more campfire sized) shooting pictures, laughing, and singing songs. What a great group of really fun people! Bride #2 was right there in her wedding dress singing at the top of her lungs and enjoying the company. What a fun way to end a summer wedding!

Finally, at around 10 o’clock, we drove home and took only the essentials in the door…we were too tired for anything else. Hannah woke up when I changed her into her jammies, but sat calmly watching a video as Jon and I passed out on the couch. She really is the best baby of all time. I woke up around 1 a.m. and told Hannah it was time to go to bed. She said no, of course, but didn’t fight me much when I dropped her in her crip. I woke Jon up, only to send both of us to bed. Ahh. I love bed.

Is the craziness over? NO!

Jon woke me up at 7:30 Sunday morning and told me that we had to be to a baby blessing at 9. No, nephew Spencer isn’t blessed until 1. No, not Spencer…this is the baby of friends of ours in American Fork. What?! Jon swears he told me about this one, and though I have absolutely NO memory of anything of the sort, I woke Hannah up and we all showered, dressed, and hit the road. I wasn’t feeling well…achy all over and SO tired. Jon was still exhausted too, but he somehow gets used to that feeling and just soldiers on. I work hard and get things done, but when my body is done, I can’t hide it well like he does. Hannah was tired and fussy too, but never actually took another nap. We ended up missing the blessing…Jon had it on his calendar for 8:30 but could have sworn that was just to get him out the door at 8:30 for a blessing at 9. Nope. Turns out 8:30 was the right time, though, I think that whomever gets to church on a Sunday at that hour gets a free pass in to heaven. We did stay and chat for a little while after the meeting, but then drove right back home to get a little bit of sleep before Spencer’s blessing at 1. I tried to get Hannah to sleep with me, but she wasn’t having it and we only snuck in about 15 minutes of zzzz’s before getting back up and getting Hannah fed before heading to another blessing.

Spencer’s blessing was lovely, and it was good to see the whole family. However, the last most stressful thing was still looming for me, so I dropped Jon and Hannah off at Spencer’s house and then bolted back to our church to fulfill my new calling…Nursery Chorister. Ugh. I love music and I love kids, but I was totally overwhelmed by the idea of teaching kids music. I’ve never had to do that before. I was also under a bit of pressure, because, come to find out, the leader before me sort of went her own way. There is a primary program every fall…usually in October, though ours falls on the first Sunday of November this year, and there are a handful of songs in the manual that the kids are supposed to learn to be able to perform at that program in November. Apparently, the director before me didn’t factor that in to her teaching. She used text, and only text to try and get the kids to sing (when only about 5 out of the 30 kids can read at that level) and some months she just decided to have them sing some other song she enjoyed, rather than what was suggested for the theme this year and as what was recommended for the program. Okay…pretty much, as long as I followed the program, then I’d be better than the girl before me, right? Well, I guess that of the six songs the kids are supposed to know, they only have two down, and I have only four months to teach them the rest! Then the president comes to me and lets me know that we will probably be asked to sing on Father’s Day too…two to three songs is average…so if I can have that practiced and ready to go, that would be great. UGH!

My first week was last week, and I was unaware of a lot of these things, going in blind, pretty much just hoping that my pianist was good and that we could do a selection of the kids’ favorites until I had been able to go through things and find my bearings. They were good with that, my pianist was great, but now, knowing what I know, I really have to buckle down. Unfortunately, there are going to be a few weeks this summer when I will be out of town over the weekend due to out of state weddings, and that lessens the number of weeks I have available to teach. How was I going to do it?! I fall back on doing personal things on my lunch break at work, but then, work has been so insane with month-end that I haven’t had moment-one to myself in two weeks there. I was starting to feel badly that I couldn’t get to it all, and Jon supported my rants and raves when my boss just kept leaving more things on my desk so that I had to work until 2 a.m. from home several nights in a row getting her work done as well as working on weddings and trying to be a passable mom during the few hours I get to play with my kid. BAH! TOO MUCH! Church just kept falling to the side, and I was freaking out that I wasn’t doing my job!

Last week, after ‘choose your favorite song’ week, I was at my sister Lisa’s house picking Hannah up from her day there. I was staring ahead at the three wedding weekend with no sleep in sight, not enough time to finish things for my boss, and the need to dive into the chorister stuff and teach these kids some songs. Again, how was I going to do it? Lisa asked me what my new calling was, and as soon as I told her, she blurted out, “DREAM CALLING!” Wha’?! She has begged for that call for years, I guess, and was so jealous that there I was staring at it blankly. Lisa is already in the Nursery leadership, and was at some major conference they had a couple of weeks ago. She asked if I wanted “stuff” and I just shook my head yes! She brought me a book written by the women that put together the children’s songbook. It is a manual on how to teach kids to sing, and it has a page for every song in the songbook with suggestions and ideas on how to teach THAT song. She handed me several pages on the song that was chosen to be taught to the kids for June, and a printout of some links for online resources for when I had time and brain enough back to do a little work on my own. While driving away from Lisa’s house, I burst into tears while telling Jon how much of an angel my sister was and that the Lord had completely saved me through her! I couldn’t believe it. The whole lesson laid out in front of me so that all I had to do was go through it all when I had some time. I took that time between games of bubbles on my phone at the Saturday night wedding to read everything I could, write some notes, and create my list of how to proceed.

Come Sunday afternoon, as I wrote the song out on the wite-board, including some pictures and a couple of tricks into my plan, I felt sort of ready, but with everything else taking up time and stressing me out, I wasn’t sure. Was this really what I was supposed to be doing? Would the kids really respond? Would they get it? It wasn’t until the Primary President gave me the nod that I was out of time that I realized I had been able to captivate the kids enough to teach them the first two lines completely with an overview of the rest of the song that was totally passable!…and I was further shocked that I’d had fun, I knew the kids had enjoyed it, and I didn’t dread taking more time or doing it again next week. Whew!

My pianist pulled me aside after the kids were gone, and told me a story about when she was a chorister, who was in way over her head simply because she couldn’t sing, but she swore that her enthusiam is what pulled her through. Apparently, the stake directors came to see her on a week she wasn’t aware of it, and told her later that hers was the best lesson they’d ever seen just because of her excitement and her involving the kids, explaining words to them, and telling them how smart they were! That’s what I’d done! My pianist said that if the stake had been there watching me teach that day, they would have said that my lesson was the best that THEY’D ever seen, and I was so relieved and touched that she thought that! As I gathered up my things to leave, the President said something similar in that she wished she’d had a pair of pom-poms in the back of the room to cheer me on because she loved what I was doing and was SO glad to have me there. She says that she’s totally my cheerleader! YAY me! Big ole pat on the back for that one! Whew! I’m SO blessed and glad to know that I just might be able to do this after all.

I drove happily back to pick up Jon and Hannah and FINALLY ate something that day. I still wasn’t feeling well, and Hannah still had not slept, so we left rather quickly, thanking Kirsten for her always amazing hostess skills, and went home to get some sleep! I think that collectively, we just couldn’t take any more. Hannah was out like a light before we’d left Kirsten and Scott’s neighborhood, and I took her right to bed with me once we got home. Jon joined us shortly after checking the progress on his computer, and we all slept from about 5 p.m. to 9! Ahh…the most awesome and much needed nap to recoup from the craziness of the whole weekend! We got up and I heated up leftovers for dinner…Hannah’s favorite…broccoli and rice. She wanted to watch her “monks”, so I put in the dvd of Chip and Dale’s adventures…an old Disney Classic, and we watched it through twice just because we couldn’t bring ourselves to do anything else while we hung out on the couch. Pretty soon, we got jammies on, and around midnight, Hannah and I went back to sleep while Jon ran down to finish up a couple of little things.

NOW the craziness is over, right? NOPE!

At around 3 in the morning, I could hear Hannah coughing and crying. I let her cry for a few minutes, but she didn’t fall right back to sleep like she normally does, and she just kept stopping for this sad little cough. I figured that she must be thirsty, so I could go give her some water and put her back to sleep. I filled her sippy, and walked into her dark room to give her the water. She just lifted up her arms and gave a wrenching little wail that made me pick her right up. Something didn’t smell right, so I figured that a dirty diaper needed to be changed before sleeping again was an option. I kissed her cheek, and my lips came away wet, and the smell was stronger. Ut-oh! Hannah, did you throw up?! She cried harder, like I was accusing her and it made her sad. Oh! Honey! I’m so sorry you threw up!

I threw the lights on, and I started cleaning while trying to calm her down. Broccoli everywhere. she got cleaned up, and then we just sat on the floor for a while until she was calm again. Once she was alright with it, we moved to a chair and just sat in the rocker being calm. She started leaning in, a bit heavier to my shoulder, so I thought she was still tired and falling back to sleep, but I still needed to clean up the crib. I asked if she could sit with her big soft Elmo book (thank you again, Grandma!…she loves that thing!), which she did. She just sat there with a sort of blank expression on her face, watching me work. I stripped the bed and made sure all the stuffed animals were clean or ready to join the sheets for a wash. I remade the bed, added back animals, and put Hannah in the crib at the end. She didn’t want any water after all, so I put the sippie aside and then told her she could go back to sleep if she wanted to. She sat there for a second and gave me a little wave of her fingers and then rolled over and closed her eyes. Och! Best baby ever!

I threw the dirty things in the laundry and stopped in Jon’s office to tell him all about it. His schedule is so wacky at this point that he was still up working on pictures, and feeling fine. He emailed me this morning to say that Hannah had slept late, but that when he did go in to get her up, she’d thrown up again. He said it was dried, so she must have thrown up again in the night and then just slept through it, poor thing! And I thought my weekend was stressed! Hannah’s stress is visible in another way, I suppose. Jon is such a good daddy!…he says that he repeated my routine from the night before and cleaned Hannah up, then left her sitting on the chair clutching her sippie next to the big Elmo book. He asked if it was alright for him to clean evrything up, and she just gave him a little wave of her fingers and sat there glassy-eyed watching him work. Sweetest thing! Apparently, she’s had some peaches and some milk this morning and is keeping that down, so that’s good, but there’s no sign as to why she had such a hard night! No fever, no fussing…just that she’s been a bit tired. Something must not have sat well on her stomach, and I hope that nothing else comes back up to distress her anymore. If it weren’t for the moment when I was explaining things to Jon last night and he had a total flash of that exact thing happening in a dream before we were married, I’d have thought it was weird….okay…I still think it’s weird, but I think Hannah will be fine, and I always enjoy a good de-ja-vu.

The last and final bit of craziness, I swear!, is that I have thrown out my back. No idea how. I just got Hannah back to bed last night after the vomit, and went back to sleep myself by about 4:00 a.m. I tried to turn over several times in my sleep and woke up in pain. Ut-oh, I thought….and then went back to sleep. By the time my alarm went off this morning and I tried to roll out of bed, I couldn’t do it. I had to wake Jon up to push me, literally, so that I didn’t have to use the same muscles that were in so much pain. If he pushed and I left my elbow down, then the rolling worked without as much pain as trying it on my own. Once I was up and walking, things were a little bit better, but I’ve been hobbling around like some old crippled woman all day. The Iburprofen didn’t work at 9 a.m., but the Tylenol at 11 seems to be helping. I can endure sitting at my desk now. Of course, the most inglorious and difficult thing is just trying to get your pants up. When they’re right there aroud your knees, it’s the most in-accessible angle for your back. Try it! When you’re fully bent and touching your toes, not so bad. When you’re hunched a bit, but upright and zipping up, also okay. But that half bend when your muscles are screaming?…that’s tough.

So now, it’s about time to go home. I have some more work to do before I leave, but at least I know that even if I have a dirty house, loads of laundry waiting, and no dinner plans per se…those are the only things I need to worry about tonight, and the rest can wait until another weekend. Thank heavens for craziness ended and wonderful family and friends who bring blessings to our lives. We love you all!

~ by bylorena on June 8, 2009.