This weekend has been the busiest planning weekend yet!

On Saturday we travelled across to Essex and had meetings with a couple of suppliers that are helping us on the big day.  On Sunday we went to Le Talbooth near Colchester to taste the dishes that we have chosen for our wedding breakfast.  Then today we had our official planning meeting at the venue, where we went through the whole day in major detail, noting the exact schedule and timings for everything!  The wedding planner at the venue, Gill, was really helpful, and it's good someone as much of a 'control-freak' as myself is getting married at a venue as organised as Spains Hall!

The bridesmaids' shoes have finally arrived!  So they just need to be tried on to make sure they fit!

For the day after the wedding, we have decided to spend the afternoon at a pub called The Swan in Thaxted, which is actually where a number of guests are staying!  We stopped off there for lunch today, and decided that would be the easiest and best place for us to go, in case anyone wishes to join us for part of the afternoon before heading home!  We will be there ourselves from around 11.30am for the majority of the afternoon, and it would be great to see people, even if it's just for a quick drink.

You might also be interested to know we've finally updated Matt's information on the 'About Us' page, which you can see here!

Finally, I've got round to updating the website with more specific wedding details, such as the gift lists, taxi numbers and other important guest information.  Please click on the links at the top of the page to find out more!

We have decided to offer two options of gift lists for any guests that wish to buy us a gift for our wedding day (we would be most grateful for any gifts, though obviously the most important to us is for everyone to be able to attend our big day!).  If anyone would like to put some spending money towards our honeymoon, there will be a locked post-box at our wedding reception.  We have also listed some of the activities we will be taking part in on the Gift Lists page, so if the money is to go toward a specific element of the honeymoon, please let us know!

We have also formed a list at Debenhams, which we completed yesterday, and it was great fun walking round the store with the 'zapper'!  There is currently a sale on at Debenhams, and almost all the items we chose to put on the list were in the sale, so if anyone is thinking of getting a gift from Debenhams it might be an idea to get it soon at the sale price!  (You can order gifts online or in store, and the best way to search for our list is by the Bride's surname:  Laskowski).  Again, more information is on the Gift Lists page.

We are getting there with the invitations, so they should be ready to post in about a week or so, although with the current volcano ash covering the country it may take a while for the invitations to be delivered!  Even though we've designed and printed them completely at home by ourselves, we're actually really pleased with how they're looking.

The only problem we seem to be having at the moment is with the Bridesmaids' shoes!  We ordered them a couple of weeks ago now and they still haven't arrived.  Apparently they keep getting 'lost in the post' so hopefully they'll reach us eventually.

In other news, I have now reduced my hours in London to three days a week, so I have two days a week to work on Aqua Rose (my own wedding business).  It's doing well so far this year and I've taken plenty of bookings for the Summer.  Last weekend, Matt's parents and my Mum and Stepdad came to visit and put up a new fence for us, take down one of the trees and generally do some work in the garden so it's now all ready for the Summer!  

The weather's getting better, so finally it seems Summer has arrived, drumming it into us even more that it's really not that long till the wedding day!