Jacque, my bridesmaid from Connecticut, arrived at the airport only 20 minutes before my flight. This worked out perfectly because she was able to talk through a lot of the details of the next few days through with me while we picked up the rental car, dropped off some New York bagels for her sister-in-law (brilliant idea by the way!), and got some smoothies for lunch before I dropped her off to have some family time with her dad, mom, and brother. Ryan wasn't able to fly out until Thursday evening because he had a million things going on in preparation for opening up a new store.
After leaving Jacque, I went to my mom's for my final dress fitting. Luckily for me, my mom is an amazing seamstress and was able to take my dress in for me. Losing 22 pounds in the 20 weeks before the wedding made my dress a little loose in a couple of areas and in danger of slipping down if I lifted both arms at the same time! Her work was amazing and it was impossible to tell it was a full size too big the day before!
In between trying the dress on about 3 or 4 times to make sure it was perfect, I finished putting together the wedding party gifts, wrote the majority of our thank you notes for the wedding party and our family from out of town, finished writing and printing the questions for our reception game, and made sure I had everything together before heading out to Newport on Friday.
We had a few special friends stop by as well. Dani's good friend Katie swung by to get instructions for house and pet sitting and our good friend Misty came by to drop off Ryan's wedding gift. I asked her to make a quilt out of Ryan's college and fraternity t-shirts and the result was amazing! Ryan loves it! We've been using it at the beach house all week. He never even realized his shirts were missing for the last four months! Now he'll be able to use all of his favorite shirts every day while being reminded that he will never have to leave his past behind him.
Thursday evening, my dad came over after work and Dani's now-fiancé, Kevin, also joined us for a family sushi dinner and movie night. We watched a documentary about the worst commercial airplane crash in history- yes, a strange thing to watch while preparing for a wedding, but my dad, who was stationed in Germany at the time, was actually there after the crash for body recovery. It was one of those experiences he will never forget! The documentary answered a lot of questions about what caused the crash and it was incredibly interesting. It was great to spend some quality time with everyone. It was my last family dinner as an Arnold!
I was up at 3:30am on the east coast and didn't get to bed until 23 1/2 hours later! It was a long, exhausting and productive day!
