Brad's birthday is a traditional post-Christmas drunken celebration which I have attended almost every year for the past ten or so. Due to timing constraints and the very logical thought that it was a bad idea to be drunk out of your mind two days in a row two days before your wedding, his birthday was combined with his stag this year. Since the boys were out at the stag, the girls went out to Julio's for margaritas before meeting the boys at Sapphire. Liz, the bride, who isn't really into the bar thing came out to hang with us for a bit at Julio's.

Being the way we are, the girls set out to find out what specifically was stressing out the bride and what we could do to help. Soon she had run through her to-so list, which we casually decimated. She was left with a very short list and most of us ended up with an assignment of some kind. Go us!

This very much made me think back to the week before my wedding. I'm a bit of a control freak and I have a lot of trouble asking for help. The main person that I wanted to help me was Paul and he was pretty darn busy too. To top it all off I was horribly sick the week before the wedding (and actually for a couple of weeks after, too).

My friends did the same thing as we did for Liz. Sarah would force me to list what I still needed to do and then she would calmly identify things that I didn't actually need to do myself and assign them to herself or others of our friends. Not only that but I was able to put together a sizeable set-up crew, tear-down crew, and a few volunteers to get up early on the morning after the wedding to help my mom so that she didn't have a breakdown preparing for the open house. I was moved beyond words at the warm hearted helpfulness of my friends, who not only did everything I asked for help with, but did it perfectly and cheerfully and then turned around and gave us amazing wedding gifts on top of it all, when just their assistance was gift enough.

It's times like this that make me realize what an amazing group we are; not all groups of friends are like this. My bridesmaids and the groomsmen (and groomsmaid and bridesguy) helped but none of them were driven to exhaustion or near bankruptcy by the tasks given (or at least I'm pretty sure they were fine, we were very careful about this.) While I can get cranky with almost any of them, I realize that I am so lucky and very blessed to have such amazing friends, and I hope to never take them for granted.