Wedding Week!

This is your official warning: The time has come to write about The Wedding. I have so much to say (such a surprise!), so I’m breaking it all down into many posts over several days. If you typically come here for the running stuff (which has been mostly MIA since like 2012…) or the Crohn’s stuff (check back here the first week of December!), your time will come again soon. But for now, we’re talking All Things Team Cristiano. Buckle up, babes. It’s gonna be a long ride.

First up: a post I wrote the week of the wedding but never published because everything went from “totally ready” to “OMG all this last-minute stuff, where did it come from?” So just go ahead and pretend you’re reading this on September 23…

It is officially Wedding Week!

Never in my life have 10 months passed quite so fast. I loved being engaged to Brian. We spent the first three months of our engagement just staring at each other and smiling and giggling like sixth graders. Or maybe fourth graders. I feel like sixth graders these days are maybe less innocent and more slutty and doing insane things like snorting cinnamon. I don’t know. I was a good kid in sixth grade.

Anyway. Just as soon as I got used to calling Brian my fiancé, he’ll get a new title. Madness!

My last week as a Feller is proving to be an excitingly busy one. Here’s how it’s all gone down so far…

FRIDAY!

Brian came to November Project!

When we got engaged, I was super bossy and was like, “Brian, before we get married, you have to come to yoga and you have to come to November Project.” He did yoga with me in Bryant Park over the summer and then, on the final available Friday before our wedding, he came to NP! We rode our bikes to the workout downtown, and it was wonderful!

SATURDAY!

I did a “long run” and it was mostly terrible. I was hot, my stomach hurt, I had very little energy, and as soon as I decided I was done, I was like OMG I LOVE RUNNING THAT WAS GREAT CENTRAL PARK ON A SATURDAY IS AMAZING! Running is so stupid that way. It’s like, “Here, do an abusive amount of body-pounding cardio and feel like shit and then declare you love it.”

I smiled a lot along the way, though, because the next time I’m in Central Park on a Saturday, it’s to get married!

I came back from my run to receive the most amazing gift: monogrammed Ralph Lauren robes from my friend Burke, who NBD is a designer for Ralph Lauren. The problem with this gift is I refuse to take it off. That’s why I wore it to dinner and shopping and to the bodega down the block.

And then, Brian and I went apartment crazy. We live in this itty bitty square and it’s a wedding war zone right now. Gifts are all stacked and piled under the “dining room table” (AKA storage unit), and there are boxes on the other side of the “living room” with wedding-related things, like 200 pairs of gold sunglasses that had to be unwrapped and de-stickered.

So we gutted everything we could. We threw out and donated something like 18 bags of shit. Expired gross “food products” from my short-lived gluten-free phase two years ago, dresses from H&M with the tags still on, and lots of actual trash.

SUNDAY!

I jogged with friends out doing casual 18-mile training runs and rejoiced my decision not to run any fall races. I scooted along for five miles before riding to Van Cortlandt Park to hang out with Coach Cane.

Fun fact: Brian and I had spent the day in VCP filming those JackRabbit commercials back in 2011 — that was the day I learned who he was (not the caterer) and we flirted and a few hours later via Facebook message we decided to go on our first “date,” which lasted four years and counting.

So that was a fitting way to spend our Sunday. A literal trip down memory lane, via bicycle. I complained a lot because bike riding is so difficult for me and never gets easier despite doing it four whole times a year!

Now we’re in the home stretch! I feel surprisingly calm knowing I have stuff left on my to-do list, but that whatever isn’t done by Wednesday just isn’t getting done and that’s OK. The big stuff is in place, and I never could bring myself to care about what I saw as little things, like elaborate decorations or precious details everywhere like “How Well Do You Know the Bride and Groom?” quizzes.

MONDAY!

Yoga, REI to get a bag for the honeymoon, and to the jeweler to get my ring cleaned for the last time before a lot of people see it!

TUESDAY!

So much work. A final phone call with our DJ to make sure he knows how to pronounce all of the important names and to remind him that there is no limit on the number of Pitbull songs he can play. And then I half-assed writing and polka-dotting our rehearsal dinner place cards.

WEDNESDAY!

OMG NOVEMBER PROJECT. Today is the most special day of my life. Will Saturday compare? I don’t know.

Today, at the end of the NP workout, they threw me a little wedding. I got a veil with the NP tag on it, and I was instructed to walk through the group’s makeshift “aisle,” and they played Celine Dion while it happened, and everyone got Ring Pops and I cried and cried and cried. This is the happiest I have ever been.

Then I spent a lot of time baking loads of homemade granola for our hotel “Welcome Bags,” which was surprisingly not the worst project ever (it’s very easy and therefore soothing!). Everyone told me not to do it — “you will NOT want to add projects to your list the week of the wedding” — but I liked it. Suck it, everyone!

And at night: my final dress fitting! Very exciting! Except that suddenly my dress was much too big. File under “things I never ever ever ever thought would happen to me.” So the seamstress — she was none too pleased with me and insisted this “never happens” which I think is a lie because it happened to like 12 of my friends — was like, “Imma fix this right now, come back in three hours, after we close.”

Six cab rides later, I have my dress and I love it.

My parents will arrive tomorrow morning, at which point my “Out of Office” response goes up for the next, I don’t know, six months (JK JK JK I WISH), and everything starts happening.

I feel really super calm and excited!

Hahahaha.