I find it helpful to do things as soon as I can, rather than push them off. My thinking is that more things are always coming up, and it’s unlikely there will be a better time than right now to do what needs to be done. I very consciously planned to leave this week’s schedule as empty as possible, since it’s the week prior to the wedding and as I just said, things always come up.

On Sunday, I drove my daughter to Jerusalem with all of her stuff to move into her new home. We picked up an additional load of her things from the place she lives in Jerusalem. Her host mother came out to talk to me and asked me how wedding plans were going. ‘Fine, good,’ I told her.

‘What about Shabbos?’ This is a question that comes from a mother who has married off all her children and understands the work involved for the mother of the bride regarding hosting Shabbos sheva brachos for a large group. People who haven’t been in that situation wouldn’t know how intense it can be!

Personally I feel making sheva brachos is just as much work as the wedding, but in a different way. Some people go away to a hotel-like setting where the sleeping and meal arrangements are taken care of, which is expensive but obviously eliminates a lot of the work. In our case I’m self-catering, so that doesn’t eliminate a lot of the work. 🙂

I told the host mother that it had been a huge issue and I spent hours working it all out, but thankfully we knew where the meals would be held and where all the guests would stay, and since that was the hardest part, it was going well.

Well, sometimes you just have to laugh because two minutes after I finished that conversation, I got a call from a person who had offered to let us use their home for that Shabbos. Since they have a very large dining room, this is where we were going to have all the meals in addition to using three bedrooms to host guests. She asked us, if it wouldn’t be too much pressure, to please find somewhere else since their plans had changed.

In the end this will be better for everyone and it’s good that we’re making the changes. However, it meant a week before the wedding completely redoing every single aspect of my plans for sheva brachos, including the timing and structure of the meals. So much for trying to think ahead and plan ahead so I’m not dealing with things at the last minute! I still don’t have the location for meals set up – there are aspects that make the arrangements complicated – but I trust everything will work out.

My mother-in-law arrived from the US today, and went straight to Jerusalem to stay with my married daughter. This will be my daughter’s last Shabbos before the wedding. She’ll join them for Shabbos lunch (and have one meal with friends, and a third meal will be her Shabbos kallah). All of our single sons over the age of 13 (ie 20, 16, 15, 13) will be spending Shabbos together with them. The boys will pack up everything they need for the wedding, and go from there to the wedding on Sunday.

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I’ve been having increasing pain when standing and walking, and had gotten to the point that I had to sit or lay down after fifteen or thirty minutes of standing. It was making it very challenging to get things done efficiently. (And it didn’t help that our youngest two boys were home sick this week.) I was feeling concerned about how I would manage to stand for wedding pictures, let alone dance at the wedding.

My husband made an appointment for me yesterday with the osteopath that he and our sons have gone to, and he was excellent. It was a very important wedding prep! I was really impressed. He explained that my pelvis had slipped out of alignment, which caused my leg joints to be affected (hence the pain standing), and also caused the lower back and neck pain that I was having. It’s the domino effect – one very small shift happens and it keeps triggering more and more symptoms until you address the core issue.

Though it takes up to a week for the body to release the tension it had been holding, I felt immediate improvement as he was working on me. As soon as I got home, I was able to work in the kitchen for several hours straight, standing the entire time. My lower back was very painful for the first afternoon and all through the last two nights, but that has started releasing as well. It still hurts a lot and it’s hard to sleep with so much back pain, but I’m definitely doing better and I’m super grateful.

It’s hard to believe that there’s hardly any time left until the wedding….our children grow up so fast.

Avivah