Bridesmaids and Registries and Hotels, Oh My!

Things are really starting to get rolling with the whole wedding thing! First things first, the exciting stuff...I've finally gotten my bridesmaids all lined up!

• My matron of honor is going to be Geri, whose wedding Mike and I met at. We've been friends since I lived in Vermont, and stayed close even as she moved to Pennsylvania and I moved to Rhode Island, then Massachusetts. Her husband Nick is going to be Mike's best man.

• My sister, Nikki, is going to be a bridesmaid. Though she and I had some trouble getting along when we were younger, we've gotten much closer once we stopped living under the same roof. :)
  

• Lisa, who has been a friend of our family for over 15 years, is going to be a bridesmaid. She and her husband have been a big part of my life for years, including a summer where I lived with them and worked at her high school. Mike and I consider them to be good friends.

• Last, but not least, Jana, who I met when I started working at Barnes and Noble, is going to be a bridesmaid as well. We don't get to spend as much time together as either of us would like, but hopefully that will change once school lets up!

Next up: registering! Mike and I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond on Sunday to get our registry put together. We were paired up with a bridal consultant who walked around the whole store with us, and helped come up with things we wouldn't have thought of on our own. We didn't have to pay for it, and they don't work on commission, so it was a pretty neat thing. On the downside, it did take us almost four hours, and I was hungry and tired by the end, so I wasn't on my best behavior. It's done, though, and once we go through the registry tonight to get rid of the things we don't actually want (after a while, you just start scanning EVERYTHING), we're going to update our wedding website and send out virtual save-the-dates.

Finally, we're trying to get a block set aside in the hotel that is across the street from Old Sturbridge Village. Mike called them yesterday (how awesome is he, right?) to find out what the deal was, and it turns out that if we don't book 80% of the rooms in our block, we have to pay the difference. There was a lot of "What the heck??" response on my end to that. So we're trying to figure out how many rooms to set aside, so that we have enough (they're almost completely booked for Friday night already, and we're worried people won't get rooms if our block is filled), and so that we don't have so many that we end up paying for them. Any thoughts from people who have done the "block" thing in a hotel? We would prefer not to go to another hotel, since the next closest nice hotel is a couple miles away, and the same room rate.

So next steps are save-the-dates, photographer, and florist!