(Yet Another) Change of Plans

If there is one thing I have learned throughout the process of planning our Disney wedding, it is that change is inevitable. No matter how well prepared I think I am, no matter how settled I think our plans are, things are going to change. It's been a while since I updated this blog (three weeks! How could I have abandoned you for so long?) but that doesn't mean we haven't been busy. No, it's been a flurry of wedding activity over the last several weeks, but due to the fact that I've been on some pretty hard deadlines at work I've had little time to update. So, over the next few days I'll be playing catchup, trying to put some more information out there about where we are in our planning process.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, Girl Scout Fiancée and I have set aside Wednesday nights as our dedicated night to work on wedding stuff. In that post I mentioned that we were also thinking of doing appetizers for our wedding guests following the reception, sort of a cocktail hour to keep them from wandering off. Unfortunately, that didn't really pan out. We got a quote back on what we asked about for a menu, and it was about what we expected. Sadly, though, in order to have those appetizers served outside at Sea Breeze Point, we were going to have to hit a food minimum that was almost three times what we had budgeted for appetizers! Our other option is to have the appetizers served indoors, in one of the conference rooms, but that wasn't really going to help us. We wanted to use the cocktail hour to get some photos of our friends and family around Sea Breeze Point, and neither of us were thrilled about picking up and moving the party into a conference room where we would no doubt have to pay to have decorated.

My, what a fabulous venue for wedding photo opportunities.

Since we weren't going to be able to have appetizers at Sea Breeze Point, that kind of took the wind out of our sails a bit. Not to be discouraged, though, we thought about the possibility of making a reservation for our wedding guests at Kouzzina, the Greek restaurant on the Boardwalk owned by celebrity chef Cat Cora. Girl Scout Fiancée and I both love Greek food, and Kouzzina comes with rave reviews from my parents. Our idea would be to make a reservation and then pre-order and pre-pay for some appetizers for our guests; that way, they could get a bite to eat, sit down for a while, and (if they want) get a drink, and still make it to the International Gateway entrance to Epcot an hour and a half after the wedding to head in for our dessert party. I called the group reservations line but got a recording, so I left a message. The next day at work I got a call back, so I explained my situation and our idea for the appetizers-only quick bite, and the lady said that she would have to speak to someone higher up to get the time we wanted. Then...nothing. No one called me back. I don't know who I spoke to (I was at work and had to duck into a conference room to take the call, and didn't get the lady's contact info), so I had no idea who to call back.

Kouzzina's group reservations line.

As it turns out, this was a blessing in disguise. Girl Scout Fiancée talked with her family a bit, discussed the idea, and discovered that it looked like the restaurant's menu wasn't going to be a good fit for their tastes after all! With a little further discussion, we decided and try and shift our plans from Kouzzina to Big River Grille. Though Big River is a chain (headquartered in my hometown of Chattanooga, TN, where my family still lives!) it's solid food and good beer. A tag-team effort between Girl Scout Fiancée and myself got me in touch with the restaurant's General Manager. I explained our idea (pre-order appetizers for a large party so they can have a bite, get to the dessert party on time, and not fill up on dinner when there are mounds of desserts to be eaten!) and he made the process easy for me. I've got the authorization forms I need, our reservation is in place, and now our wedding guests have some place to go for a quick bite after the wedding ceremony.

Also, this.

So, things didn't exactly pan out for us like we thought they would with post-ceremony food, but we adapted and I think this might end up being more to our guests' liking. Of course, these aren't the only changes of plans. For any other Disney World-bound grooms out there, let the next few paragraphs be an important lesson about the necessity of listening to your fiancée and being flexible with your plans.

We didn't have a lot of concrete plans in place for our arrival day, or the day before the wedding, and on purpose. We didn't want there to be a lot of pressure on us those days, since there would be plenty of time pressure coming up for the day of the wedding. Still, I booked us a couple of restaurant reservations for the night of our arrival (Kouzzina) and for the afternoon of the day before the wedding (Splitsville). These were sort of just-in-case reservations that I wanted to have in place so we would have something on the books in case we did feel like going to those places. This bit of planning, on my part, seems to be where I made my biggest mistake, and wasn't keeping Girl Scout Fiancée happy.

Over the course of months of planning, Girl Scout Fiancée has casually mentioned things like, "Maybe we should get together with family on the night that we arrive" and "Maybe we could do something with our grandparents on the day before the wedding." My first mistake was assuming that these seemingly off-hand comments were just her thinking out loud. I should have interpreted these things as "Things Girl Scout Fiancée wants to happen but doesn't have a solid plan for just yet so you should work on making them happen." But, I didn't, and when no plans really materialized from her, I just assumed she'd let them fall by the wayside, and made my just-in-case plans instead. Over the course of the very same Wedding Wednesday where we finally faced the fact that our plans for a cocktail hour at Sea Breeze Point wasn't in the cards, I discovered that Girl Scout Fiancée was pretty unhappy by the state of our plans for arrival day and the day before the wedding. The last thing I want is an unhappy Girl Scout Fiancée, so we set about fixing my oversights and omissions immediately.

The first thing we did was cancel dinner at Kouzzina for arrival night (after all, we'd already learned that the menu was not a good match for her family), and instead are planning on having her family and mine meet at the Giordano's a few miles from Disney property. In addition to being one of my favorite pizza places ever and a must-eat place every time I go to Chicago, it's also relatively inexpensive, laid back, and likely to be able to accommodate a dozen people with relative ease. The next thing we did was cancel the Splitsville reservation and make a reservation for the Garden View Tea Room the day before the wedding. This is the activity to do with the grandmothers, and folks arriving that day. All in all, once the decisions were made, changing these plans couldn't be simpler. It was literally minutes of work in the dining reservations system of the MyDisneyExperience website, and I was happy to do it.

Robin and Raven explain the two biggest changes to our pre-wedding plans. I have no idea why this picture exists.

I think where all of these hangups really came from is that I was just blind and deaf to something that Girl Scout Fiancée wasn't actually coming out and saying directly, but was implying in the kinds of plans she wanted us to make. Namely, that the days leading up to the wedding are a really important few days for her to get to see and spend time with her family. I get to see my family once a year when my company flies me east for a convention in Indianapolis, but Girl Scout Fiancée will sometimes go two or more years at a time without seeing her family. My immediate family is also much smaller than hers, so it's easy for me to spend what time I do have with them. For Girl Scout Fiancée, the three days we'll be in Florida before the wedding are likely to be the only chance she has to see her family for the next year or more, whereas I have been focused mostly on planning out the things that she, and I, are going to be doing together on the honeymoon. For me, the days leading up to the wedding are just the prelude to the main event. I'll be glad to see my family, and hers, but I haven't been thinking in terms of engineering specific events to spend time with them. Girl Scout Fiancée, on the other hand, wants to have a lot of activities in place to spend time with her family: dinner with her family the night the arrive, taking her siblings to Universal, afternoon tea with her grandparents, dinner the night before the wedding with her family, a trip to Fantasia Mini-Golf as a group...these are all important events for Girl Scout Fiancée, whereas I've just been sort of assuming that we'd see our families as is convenient and hadn't been thinking in terms of plans to make that kind of thing happen

I'll admit, I'm also feeling a little bit of trepidation in walking the fine line of etiquette between organizing events and hosting events. Perhaps it is a legacy of my Southern upbringing, but matters of etiquette are both important and nerve-wracking to me. I'm constantly trying to figure out how to elegantly express concepts like, "We're going to go to this restaurant for dinner, we would love it if you would join us if you want to but don't feel any obligation to if you have other plans, and even though we're organizing the trip and making the reservations we're not actually hosting this dinner so you'll have to pay for yourself." Yeah. Take all that, and put it on a tiny little invitation card in a way that isn't immediately offensive to someone. Now, multiply that by five more events, and you can see why I haven't exactly been seizing the initiative in planning these activities.

"Good day, madam. Perhaps my gentleman companion and I could interest you in a rousing putt-putt match."

The good news is that it's all working out. We've adjusted our plans to have several events with our families leading up to the wedding, and now that the questions of, "What do our guests do while we have photos taken, and how do we make sure they both get a bite to eat and get to the dessert party on time?" have been resolved I'm feeling a lot more confident that the hardest parts of the planning are coming to a close.