Otherwise titled "I should have listened to Keegan's mother in the first place"
When we first started discussing what we'd do for our rehearsal dinner, Keegan's mom, Ann, wanted to invite all of our out of town guests. When I first heard this idea, red flags went up in my head and I was totally against the idea. Why? I don't honestly know. I guess I had visions of an intimate dinner with just our families and wedding party. I'd give out the wedding parties' gifts, someone would make a toast and we'd be on our way. I really wanted to hold the rehearsal dinner at Shakespeare's, Columbia's best pizza joint. I wanted something laid back and not stressful, especially since it would be the night before the wedding.
After politely telling this to Keegan's mom, (well having Keegan break the news to his mom,) Ann went and called a bunch of restaurants, including Shakespeare's, to see if they could hold our 25 person wedding party. Unfortunately Shakespeare's wasn't willing to hold their party room on a Friday night for us and all of the other restaurants Ann spoke to didn't have a big enough room to hold us all. This drawback made me re-think what our rehearsal dinner should be.
Another thing that made me re-think our rehearsal dinner was actually our guests. A lot of our guests (I'd say about 90%) are going to be coming from out of town. The majority of Keegan's father's family is from Kansas City; his mom's side is scattered all over the place. All of my extended family (aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents) live in Canada. Almost all of our friends have moved away after college. At first I didn't think anyone would come, especially my family from Canada. I just couldn't see them driving or flying down for just a weekend. However, after we sent out our save the dates, word got back to us that a lot of our friends and family are hoping to make it down.
After hearing this news, I all of a sudden wanted to spend more time with our guests, especially the ones who took so much time out of their lives to come to our wedding. I threw out the idea of having a get together with our guests after the rehearsal dinner, but Keegan reminded me that we're doing our bachelor/bachelorette parties afterwards. I really wanted to hang out with our friends and families for more than just a few hours during the weekend so I threw out the idea of having a large family gathering instead of a more intimate rehearsal dinner.
Keegan looked at me and said, "You know that's what my mom wanted to do in the first place, right?"
Yeah. I know. I explained that I didn't know why I was against it in the first place, but I've slowly come around to the idea. Keegan called his mom (again) and basically told her that his fiancee is crazy and that we should go back to trying to plan a family gathering.
We threw out ideas of trying to get our (almost) caterer to bring food over to the hotel our guests will be staying in, but Ann told us that they didn't have a room big enough to hold a party our size. All of a sudden a light bulb came on over my head. Idea! Why don't we rent out our reception venue for Friday night and have the gathering there? It's large enough to hold all of our guests (hopefully,) it has a play place for the kids, and having our guests come there the night before will ensure they know where the venue is. The current food idea is to bring in hotdogs, burgers and other foods and basically have a pot luck.
Renting the venue out for Friday will also allow us to do some preliminary set up for the big day on Saturday. Before, we would have had to get the keys at 8 a.m. on Saturday, set everything up (while making sure Keegan doesn't see me,) get ready and then be back at the venue by 4 to do pictures. It would have been do-able, but stressful; something I don't want to be on my wedding day.
Ann still has to call and make sure the venue is open on Friday (if it's not, I'm not sure what we're going to do,) but I'm excited again. After trying to figure out the logistics of having a 25 person wedding party and who would pay for what, our rehearsal dinner was becoming one big headache. Now I'm excited to spend some more time with our friends and families who are going to take time out of their busy schedules to be with us on one of the most important days of our lives.
I guess the old saying is right. "Momma (or your soon-to-be husband's momma) knows best."
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