Wedding Diary
Backup plans help avoid stress

Wedding Diary is a column by Nu'uanu residents Connie Soga, 30, and Bret Moore, 27. The periodic report tracks the couple's progress as they near their Nov. 3 wedding, with about 300 guests, at the Sheraton Waikiki.

By Connie Soga and Bret Moore

Bret Moore and fiancee, Connie Soga, right, sample wedding cakes by Leigh Heggie, center, of Tiers of Joy wedding cake company. Deborah Booker The Honolulu Advertiser

State of mind: It's a huge relief that our biggest wedding expenses are paid off two months before the wedding. There were times over the last eight months when I didn't think we would have enough money to make all the payments, but we did. For the first time all year, I feel like I can now start focusing on the day of the wedding instead of the road leading up to it.

One of the big things I am worried about is rain. I guess that's a chance you take when you do something big outdoors. However, we are glad that our hotel has a nice backup plan for an indoor ceremony.

I'm also starting to get nervous because all of a sudden, I don't have months and months of time to prepare and plan like I once had. It's 11 weeks away!

Good and bad experiences: We had a terrific experience with our cake artist, Leigh Heggie of Tiers of Joy. With about 300 people coming, we didn't want this six-story giant cake at our wedding. So we went with a small, three-tier wedding cake and then bought two more cakes for the rest of our guests to enjoy. This way, everyone gets a piece of our cake, but we don't compromise on what we want aesthetically.

After a cake order is placed, Leigh will make cake samples periodically over the months and call her customers to sample them. This is a very rare but helpful service some cake designers provide to their customers. Bret finally decided on the winning flavor, a vanilla cake with lemon and blackberry filling and vanilla butter cream frosting. He picked a great cake combination.

Lessons learned: Our friends and family have been really great in stressing the importance of making this "our day" and not anyone else's. I need to really believe that because it's been hard for me to put the attention on us and me and not on everyone else.

Bret's whole family is coming to the wedding, and on my side, I have relatives from Japan I haven't seen in 10 years, plus my parents and some friends from five different states. How do you spend quality time with so many different people in a short span of a week? You don't. And you don't pretend that you can. The worst moment for quality time is the week before your wedding. And knowing this, a part of me was somehow still trying to plan out every day of that week so we could do something with everybody. How insane is that?

But yet another sign that I'm marrying the right person is that Bret has also wanted to push back our honeymoon so we can stay here with the families and enjoy the week following the wedding — a less-hectic week with more quality time to go around. We've got the rest of our lives together to take a trip, but the moment to spend with our families is now, while they are all here for us.

Bret speaks on his ...

State of mind: I am not really worried about much. I only hope that, like everyone on their wedding day, everything goes as planned. I want everything to be perfect. We want it to be as close to our dream as possible.

I am also hoping that with all the families in town and their meeting for the first time, I hope things go well with them and that we can spend some quality time with our respective families.

Good and bad experiences: The planning and booking of the rehearsal dinner have gone smoothly. We have decided to hold our rehearsal dinner at the Oceanarium in the Pacific Beach Hotel. We love the location because many of our family and friends who are coming in from the Mainland have never seen a salt-water aquarium like this.

Another positive is that today I finally got the groomsmen, ushers and fathers their gifts. That was a huge load off my shoulders. I wanted something that had a local flair but yet was practical. I won't say what we picked, to keep it a surprise, but I am happy with the way this all turned out.

Connie and I have had little to argue about when it comes to the planning. When she asks, she usually gets the "whatever you want, dear" response.æIf she finds something she likes and I am not too happy about it, she drags me through the mall for a few more hours until she gets the "Yes, if that's what you want ... I wanna go home" response.

Lessons learned: I am learning that if you are going to ask friends to be in the wedding party, you have to plan, plan and plan some more. Getting them fitted for the tuxes and having them follow a schedule is crucial. It's really not something that can wait until the last minute.

I've also learned that no matter how much planning you do, there will always be last-minute changes. My parents couldn't get the flight schedule they wanted. So after booking and putting down payments on the hotel rooms four months ago, I had to reschedule.

The last thing I learned is that you should always be ready to compromise. There will always be things you cannot control and things that are not going to go the way you want. Better to have backup plans that never materialize than no backup plan at all.