THE Wedding of 2011 . . .

. . . (until November 5 . . .) (when my other sister gets married, of course!)

So, I’m not going to tease you.  I’ll go ahead and start this post with a picture of the beautiful bride, because I know that’s what you all want to see.

Oh wait.  I meant this.

Thus ends my youth.  My baby, my FIRST baby, is all wed and stuff.  Yes, I’m drunk on red wine whilst typing this post.  How else does one dull the pain of being ancient and decrepit, in the face of such youth and beauty?  I feel compelled to remind you that she is of my generation.  We share the same parentage, though you’d never guess it to look at us.  (The other four of us look like our paternal grandfather.  She looks like our paternal grandmother.  My poor maternal mother got very little aesthetic gene representation out of her five children.  Some of us have her hair, her teeth, her inability to smile normally in photos **ME ME ME**, but none of us have her face.)

When I was 10 years and 351 days old, I woke up and walked out to the front room, then sat on our La-Z-Boy chair.  It was soaking wet.  I did not bring this up in my Matron of Honor speech, but it was AMNIOTIC FLUID FROM THIS HERE BRIDE that I was sitting in.  Is that gross?  Indeed.  Welcome to motherhood.  Or rather, Big Eleven Year Old Sisterhood.  Which is nothing like motherhood, but actually is something like motherhood, in that you spend the bulk of your days covered in gross baby-related bodily fluid.  You also change a lot of diapers, fold a lot of clothes, make a lot of baby food, and wake up when the baby cries (the fundamental difference in this case being: the Big Sister gets to roll over and fall back asleep, whilst the Actual Mother has to deal with the baby’s Issues.)  Fast forward for three point oh five seconds, and suddenly the baby spitup is replaced by spending a hundred bucks on a bridesmaid dress and also pinning on a goddammed veil, for heaven’s sake, I’m only thirty-two, stop the hourglass.

On Sunday, July seventeenth, midday, I broke my back.  On Monday evening, my husband came home from his trip defending his dissertation (and, oh yeah, becoming a doctor and stuff.  Doctor of philosophy, which is to say, PhD rather than MD, but nevertheless, you must call him Dr. Professor nowadays.  I’ve kinda glossed over that in the blog, though I did crow on facebook.)  On Tuesday, I sat on a couch with an icepack pressed to the lower left quadrant of my back, and also took a lot of Lortabs and tried to fend off my children, who were suddenly desperate to poke their elbows and knees and Giant Toddler Heads into the aforementioned, deeply tender and very broken lower left quadrant of my back.  And then on Wednesday, we drove ten or so hours to Nash-Vegas.  Sisters, sisters, never were there such devoted sisters!

We were there Wednesday evening.  It is a testament to my ancientness, previously addressed in this blog post, that I cannot remember Wednesday evening.  So we’ll glide right over that day, and on into Thursday, which I remember vividly as a day of grilling burgers and dogs for an assorted crowd of wedding guests (before I lived in North Carolina and was corrected, I would have called this a barbecue).  After lunch, we booted the bride and her friends out to explore Nashville.

We sisters stayed behind and napped — er — decorated the house for her bachelorette party.

We had a throwdown involving lots of cute drinks and a personal pizza bar.  Those are all the details that I may release to the public.  It was very top secret and fun.

The next day was Friday, and the sister on the far left in the above picture (I can’t remember if she has a pseudonym on this blog, or if I call her by her name, so we’ll call her Awesome Relaxation Pool Girl) offered her apartment complex’s pool, for the purposes of frolicking, relaxing, and ruining bridesmaid picture aesthetics with crappy day-before-wedding tan lines.

I had to drag Jack from the pool mid-afternoon in order to go and try on his tux (he was the ring-bearer!)  He was tired enough to be completely compliant, and we got it all sorted and paid for toot sweet.  Then we headed to the rehearsal at the wee clapboard church on the Tennessee hill.  My children . . . were not at their best.  After our fabulous day at the pool, during which both of them were passed around from person to person, swimming and playing and enjoying their little toddler lives to the hilt . . . neither one of them got a nap.  Needless to say, their performance at the rehearsal was less than excellent.  Jack may have knocked over some candelabra.  The reverend officiant may have asked if he was “going to be cool” during the actual ceremony.  I tried to emanate waves of “It’s all going to be fine.”  The Professor and I made the executive decision that we would not even attempt the rehearsal dinner with these boys, and all three of them went home for a good solid bedtime routine, to be followed the next day with a good solid naptime routine.  This allowed me to attend and enjoy the rehearsal dinner alone.

I went to bed that night, well fed and ready for the next day.

The Wedding Day of this wee baby, and her wee baby husband.