It’s Fun Being Married

It’s pretty fun being married.  It’s a lot of work so far – we’ve had two hard-working weekends.  Things should start slowing down now, since in those weekends we’ve managed to incorporate all of our gifts into the house, spend all our gift money, clean out the shed, and organize our returns and exchanges.  We also bought a beautiful new dining room set from an antique store, earmarked for purchase a jam and jelly cabinet that we’ll use to display our china and other nice gifts, and set up the guest room (which until now has been the wedding room, where everything wedding was tossed without order).  Work is still crazy – it was all week, and promises to be next week as well – but it’s kind of exhilarating.  I don’t mind it.

Anyway, I’ll continue on the wedding breakdown, most of which I have forgotten about already given it was two weeks ago (feels like longer), but I’ll do my best.

I think when I last left this blog we were finishing up our home cooked dinner and getting ourselves ready to go out on the town.  Unfortunately I had to leave my baby sister behind because of her age, though it turns out she could have come because no one checked IDs and it was sort of a restaurant/bar anyway.  My oldest sister was tired, so she stayed home, but the middle two siblings (sister C and brother R) came out with us.  C, R, and I headed downtown and picked up my old friend Tracy, a girl I went to grad school with in England.  She is a lot of fun, pretty wild, and from LA.  Whenever I talk to her I sound like a valley girl.  Anyway, we put her in the car and drove across the street to the hotel with everyone else in it – everyone else being my sister-in-law and her husband and my “saviors” E and Jay.  We piled in the car and headed down to a surprisingly hoppin’ bar in the sleepy town, where a really good band was playing.  We all pulled some tables together and chattered.  I was about as happy as I get – my friends were surrounding me, two of the siblings I get to see the least were with me, and I was getting married in two days!

We spent the evening there – we got some drinks bought for us in celebration of the upcoming marriage, and had a good time.  Afterwards, half the crew went straight to the hotel, and a few of us went to Waffle House, which Tracy found completely fascinating.  She took pictures with the grill cooks.  We had a final nightcap in the hotel, and then my brother (the DD, conveniently underage!) drove C and I home.

Friday morning, I woke early again.  I was excited the instant I woke up.  I slipped into the room where my sisters were sharing a double bed, and shimmied up in between them.  They groaned good-naturedly, but shifted over and made room.  Amanda made her way upstairs and piled on with us, and then I wiggled out and ran downstairs to get my mom.  It was a girls morning.  We all laid there in a happy pile and just talked to each other for an hour or so.  It’s times like that where I realize how lucky I am to have so many sisters.

We finished up a couple of small things that morning before getting ready to go into town for our nail appointment.  My mother and Amanda had to go pick up a cousin from the airport, so Dad dropped the other girls and I off in town with a cooler full of picnic lunch.  We met the other bridesmaids at the nail place and sat down.  We each got our things done – my mother had her first ever mani and pedi, and she just loved it.  We got lots of pictures.  We ate picnic sandwiches under a tree in the parking lot.  It was fun.  After, my sisters and I had to run to the florist and look over what she’d done so far.  I loved it all – and got a bit absorbed in it – and unfortunately, I underestimated the length of the drive home.  We had a nanosecond to get ready before we had to turn around and come back to town for the rehearsal.  Literally, I think we had ten minutes.  Our rehearsal dinner was formal . . . I had to use stick-em-on bra things . . . my hair needed washing . . . I was freaking out. . .