where do i begin?

to tell the story of how i crammed my wedding preps? well, i didn't really cram. we attended to the major wedding suppliers as early as february this year by visitng them or visiting their offices and asking for quotations and other info. then we booked the reception, church, caterer, photo/video and couturier by june. so that wasn't really much of a problem.

ricky and i opened a business, a convenience store to be exact. we started june and opened on september 28. so we sort of stopped the wedding preps because it's not a joke to open a business. contractors, renovation, suppliers, merchandising and human resource concerns took over the space in our brains and lives intended for the wedding. i was thinking, okay naman, naibook na ang major, we can pick-up from where we left off a couple of months before the wedding.

so, a couple of weeks prior to dec. 30, i started going back to preps. first on the list, church req'ts. little did i know that the checklist that was given to me in june/july was the wrong one! and the person who gave it to me resigned from the parish office already. so imagine the look on the faces of the secretaries in the parish office when i submitted some papers! to their dismay, and mine as well, there were still some documents that we needed to secure. and these weren't processed in a day. so we had to rush to get our CENOMAR (Certificate of No Marriage Record) from the NSO, post our wedding banns, attend the marriage counselling session provided by the parish (held every last friday of the month only - buti na lang umabot sa nov. sched, yikes!) and attend to bridal and ento fittings in between. whew! now i firmly believe that wedding preps are a preparation for marriage. ricky and i had to divide and conquer. since he's normally running about town in the mornings, he took care of going to NSO, filing the requests and going to the churches to file the banns. i on the otherhand, since it's imperative that i open gotcha in the morning, did all the phone calls, coordination & letters. then, if need be, i'd go out in the p.m. when dong is at the store. speaking of dong, he was a great help to us when we had to attend seminars or interviews; he'd come to gotcha earlier so that i/we could leave... (thank you dong!)

we managed to get all the documents in and we attended a canonical interview on the morning of the 29th! imagine if the priest who interviewed us didn't give us a go-signal? wow, i'd still be single...