wedding busyness?

This is a question for anyone who has thrown a big "event" reception, particularly weddings/commitment ceremonies.

I have heard numerous people refer to how super-busy they were the week before their wedding - "all the running around they had to do", how exhausted they were after the wedding such that they just wanted to sleep for two days, etc.

As a wedding planning novice, it is not obvious to me what tasks will need to be performed in the days before the wedding. Surely we'll have long since had all our vendors booked, etc, and I assume most of the Stuff we want (food, tables, cake, etc) will be delivered directly to the site day-of. My mother has suggested she might show up "several days in advance to help out" - it's not clear what she would be helping with, and I had assumed I would work a normal schedule that week. I'm probably being hopelessly naive, but I'm afraid I'm missing so much information that I can't even figure out what my bad assumptions are here. Can anyone who has recently planned a wedding-type event give me a list of the errands you ran in the week or so before the wedding? If you don't remember every single errand, can you give me a sense of what sorts of things you had to deal with? (Maybe I'm wrong in assuming most things can be delivered directly, and you had to personally transport and store things?)

(no subject)

Thank you very much to everyone who replied to my last message; it's really interesting to see behind the scenes of people's weddings, and what they ended up doing when. It hadn't even occurred to me that one might have pre-wedding socializing as a thing taking up time. "Nobody but the groom sees the bride before the wedding" might be more my style. ::grin:: I like the suggestion about spreadsheets, and the point about certified checks is useful. I'm sure I'll refer back to these comments as we work on planning, to see if we're forgetting something. ::grin::