I am sick over my flowers. Not sick of them, not sick of looking at the bouquet, but sick over them. This story starts Tuesday night...

Shaun and I were leaving the mall, happy to have chosen his shoes and belt for the wedding. He's a picky shopper, but we got our mission accomplished. I got a call from the friend-of-a-friend who was going to do my wedding flowers, but decided not to take it at that moment. I called her back later that evening, and...she can't do it. Please note that Tuesday was May 18th, so just over two months until the wedding. At first, I processed the news well. No worries, I thought. We'll make it work, I thought. So, I jumped on the website which carried the flowers I was going to order to see what other packages they had. I initially planned to order a bulk package of several varieties, and this woman was going to design them for me. I wanted to peruse the other packages to find something more 'put together' that I could order for a quick solution. Not only did they not have anything I liked, but they had discontinued the initial package! Yikes.

So, I did what any desperate person does when they're in a corner and can't see a solution: I asked for help. To shorten a story that could be longer than it's going to be, I got help. A friend recommended another website (with better variety and prices!) and another offered to put together my bouquets and boutonnieres.

As a result, I am no longer sick over the cancellation. It was one of those things that, in the back of my mind, I knew was too good to be true. A person I've only spoken to over the phone is going to drive four hours and do an incredible service for me...on the cheap? She cancelled for a legitimate reason, but I still probably should have known.

What I'm sick over now is the flowers themselves. The picture is the bouquet that I want. I have a few things I plan to alter: mine will have stargazer lilies instead of sunflowers, and hot pink and orange spray roses rather than off-white ones. I have a couple of reasons for these differentiations: 1) it's my wedding and I'd prefer if my flowers weren't an exact carbon copy of someone else's, and 2) the wedding's in July and the bouquet is a little more 'fall-y' than I want. But that was not a simple conclusion. I started perusing weddingflowersofamerica.com on Tuesday, and found a couple other options. I liked them, but my heart was truly set on this bouquet. The other options would have been slightly less expensive, but it took me a long time to settle on this bouquet as a muse in the first place, and I really do love it. So, on Wednesday I decided to scrap the lesser options and go with my heart on this one. I spent most of my free time on Wednesday and Thursday breaking down exactly how many flowers I need...so I determined how many blooms I want in my bouquet, how many in my party's bouquets, how many in the boutonnieres, how many on the tables...you get the idea. At this point, I was planning to use sunflowers and pink dahlias (rather than the orange in the picture). As it turns out, though, I need between 500-600 blooms. I put all that in my shopping cart on the website, saw the total, and promptly began to consider my lesser options again.

My lesser option that I liked the best was this:

I was going to use tiger lilies to add some interest, and for the boutonnieres. In perusing the lily section of the site, I clicked on stargazers, a favorite of mine and a component in the first package I was going to use. When I looked at the price, I realized that it would actually be more cost effective to replace either the dahlias or the sunflowers with stargazer lilies. That decision wasn't hard; I adore dahlias, so I scrapped the sunflowers and the idea of using this (stupid) bouquet.

That being settled, I started to think a little more about the boutonnieres, of which we need 25. I planned to use the orange and hot pink spray roses, and each bout would have one of each color of flower, as well as a sprig of lavender and a sprig of rosemary. Again, I looked at cost and blanched. My solution? Use two flowers for Shaun, his party, and our parents. Rather than 50 flowers, I would need 35...not a huge difference, but it made a significant enough cut to the cost that I decided it would be best. However, as I clearly cannot make up my mind, it occurred to me that maybe spray roses wouldn't be big enough to make nice bouts. I went back to the website and picked out Ambiance roses, which are a beautiful bi-color or a peachy-yellow tipped with pink. Those were going to make up the bouts, along with one spray rose, lavender, and rosemary. But wait! If I paired the large rose with either orange or hot pink, that wouldn't work so well! Instead, I'll use white spray roses and knock out the orange ones altogether, even though I like orange more than white. Whew, okay, solved.

Until I was looking through online wedding albums today. In the course of a couple of hours, I went from hypericum berry/lavender boutonnieres to fiddle fern/hypericum berry boutonnieres to lavender/rosemary boutonnieres. And I can't settle on a choice. And I need to place my order, soon.