Wedding Outfits (Mothers)

When I spoke to Brenda last week, we also got to talking about wedding outfits. Not for the bridal party, which we are planning separately, but for the family. Grab a cuppa whilst we flick through the catalogue together.

Brenda mentioned a tradition she encountered when attending a wedding of her close family friends: the mother of the bride wears blue, and the mother of the groom wears pink, and asked if there was anything like that in England that she should be aware of when she came to get her own outfit. I'd never heard of the above tradition -- that wedding had a bride from "the South" (of the USA). It's kind of its own country, in the way that "the North" of England is kind of its own country too. But no, there's nothing like that here.

My Mum has already bought her outfit - the full outfit. Shoes, bag, fascinator, the lot. This is because, before we had a wedding date, we had thought that maybe, once we got a date, we would move really quickly -- 6 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks maximum, kind of timing. So we were laying the plans in rough draft so they were all ready to go-go-go when the time came.

So Mum has bought her outfit, and it looks lovely. I haven't seen it on yet, but it looks good on the hanger. I hope she won't mind me telling you, it's cream with black accenting. She didn't have the fascinator yet when Brenda and I spoke.

Brenda was asking me about the dress code. Obviously it's a wedding, so "fancy" is appropriate. She asked about hats and fascinators. Mum really does not have a hat face, which is why I thought she'd get a fascinator. She'd been trying different ones on in a few different places, but I think Brenda will get a hat. Maybe a big hat. I didn't tell her this, but I think a blue will look great on Brenda. I hope she finds something great!

(Sidebar: family friends of my own once had to fly to Italy for their daughter's wedding, and she -- Mother -- had a massive hat that needed its own seat. The Italian airport on the way back was actually considerably less perplexed by the idea of paying for an extra seat for the hat, than the British airport were for the journey out there.)

Oh, and Mum bought her fascinator the day after this conversation; she walked past a stall in the shopping centre that she'd never seen before and they had the EXACT fascinator she wants, right there. The EXACT same shade of cream as the shoes (that are just a smidgeon lighter than the dress), it was cream edged in black and not black edged in cream, like she needed, and was of the clippy variety, seeing as Mum had tried various headband styles and found they hurt her ears.

Things like that happen to Mum a lot. She grabbed a scarf and paid for it quickly in a shop in Amsterdam when they were on a river cruise and her coat let in a draught. They only had a few minutes before the boat left again, and she couldn't have picked a colour closer to the colour of her coat if she'd spent three months looking. When she and my stepdad were getting married, the first cake shop they went into had the exact cake that she wanted as one of the displays. They tried to offer to change the shape of the cake, the number of tiers, the shape or colour of the protruding decorations, and it took five times to tell them that she wanted a copy of that cake, exactly as it was.

We finally also set a date for the four-way calling, so I wonder if Mum will show Brenda her outfit then?

Follow-up Friday -- The One Where The Menu Plan Changed

I realise the TBT post yesterday was lacking. Note to self: work on establishing a rhythm for blogging. Maybe start keeping a list of ideas. Write tbt posts in advance and schedule them if you need to.

Given, though, that's the kind of person I am, Follow-up Friday will likely be a permanent feature around here.

Make-a-plan-Monday went well. I finished all of the laundry. We have been sticking to the menu-plan too. Well, in a manner of speaking; there was a time this week where we changed the menu plan 13 times in 24 hours*. But apart from that it's worked out really well. And we actually changed the plan and wrote a new one, rather than going off-piste. That's all I could hope for, really.

*This started because as I was prepping for sausage casserole in the slow cooker on Tuesday night for Wednesday's dinner, I realised that if I intended to throw the leftover bolognaise into it, as I had been planning to, I had enough with just some extra veg. without even doing the sausages at all. Then I had to find a spot for the sausages before they went off. Then we served the casserole just with bread, not with mashed potatoes, as we'd planned (needed to get dinner on the table in a hurry that day), so then I had to make a plan to use the potatoes I'd pre-chopped and ended up bumping everything back a day. But we STILL had loads of casserole left, so I intended to add either paprika, to make goulash of sorts, or chilli powder to make chilli, but we had no room in either the fridge or the freezer to store it so then that got thrown out and we reverted to whatever we'd established in it's place... I took inventory of the fridge and added a few items on for next week, and then rearranged the order of them... these things happen sometimes! However, it is actually a great feeling to have that moment of, "We've got too much food we need to use up, we'll have to cancel the day we were planning to get takeout! (Don't look at me like that, both your wallet and your waistline will thank me for it!)"





Goodnight, friends.