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Wedding Wrap-Up

March 31, 2008 By Jenny Ryan 2 Comments

The wedding festivities for my sister-in-law kicked off Friday morning with an event that can best be described as

Pre-Wedding Brunching With Engineers

It all started off innocently enough, with a brunch meant to welcome my husband’s uncle. He had recently arrived in town from Israel, which is the fourteenth country in which he’s lived.

He had called my sister-in-law earlier in the week to discuss his final travel arrangements, and she told him that at first she wasn’t sure she should take his call, since the number was so odd-looking on her caller ID.

Naturally this led right into a competition designed to see who could identify the most country codes, because if there is a better way to get into the mood for a wedding, I surely don’t know about it.

So different people (read: the three engineers) started calling out random questions for the rest of the group.

“What’s Israel’s country code?”

“What’s ours?”

“How about Italy’s?”

“Ah!” shouted The International Uncle, in the tone of someone who has just successfully squared the circle. “What’s Kosovo’s country code?!”

Shockingly, no one knew the answer to this question.

“Ha ha,” revealed The International Uncle, that trickster. “They don’t have one. They have to use Serbia’s. And, boy-are they miffed.”

(Yukking laughter from the three engineers, who frankly, could not possibly imagine anything more humorous than this.)

Me and the bride: (looking desperately at each other to communicate the urgent messages of “Please help me!”, and “How can we STOP THE INSANITY RIGHT NOW?!)

And so that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the weekend.

Eventually we did make it through the rest of that day, until finally it was time for

The Wedding Rehearsal

In the spirit of celebration, as well as the spirit of, “Well, I might have to wear a tux tomorrow, but tonight I can wear whatever I want, mwa ha ha ha ha!” my father-in-law, who plays the bagpipes, decided to adorn himself in full, bag piping attire. When I tell you that he is over six feet tall and was wearing a kilt the color of pumpkins, you will understand why that caused such a big stir.

As the rehearsal was winding down he came over to talk to me and my husband, which gave me the opportunity to ask him why he appeared to have a small purse strapped around his midsection.

“Is that where you keep your flask in case all of this wedding stuff gets to be too much?” I joked.

It turns out that it is something called a “sporran”, and while I suppose you could use it to store your flask, he was using his to store his wallet and his keys.

“Now there are some sporrans that are encrusted with gems, or that are covered in goat hair,” my father-in-law informed us. “So technically, mine is not actually an evening sporran.”

I’m pretty sure he was able to slide by on that one.

Filed Under: CFG And Family Affairs Tagged With: funny stories, weddings

My Brother’s Wedding, Part 2

June 6, 2006 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

There were many fun and “bloggable” moments from the wedding this past weekend, and in order to tell you about one of my favorites, I must first give you a little background from my own wedding.

When my husband and I got married 10 years ago, we lit a Unity candle as part of our ceremony. We asked his parents and my parents to light the side candles, to represent our two families coming together. What we said was, “Hey, would you guys light the candles for us to use in the ceremony?”, but what they heard was apparently something more along the lines of, “You must be in charge of FIRE, and if you make one single misstep you will ruin the wedding, and your families will shun you, and the church will burn down, and the city will be set aflame, and people will die!!” [Read more…] about My Brother’s Wedding, Part 2

Filed Under: CFG And Family Affairs, Holi-daze Tagged With: family, weddings

My Brother’s Wedding

June 5, 2006 By Jenny Ryan 1 Comment

So after sleeping for 16 hours, and then laying on the couch for the rest of the day after I got up and staring at the ceiling, I think I have finally recovered from the wedding. I know that as Americans we like to think we are on the leading edge of everything. But speaking as someone whose brother just married into a Polish family, when it comes to wedding receptions, we Americans have NOTHING on the rest of the world!

That was absolutely The Most Fun I have ever had at a wedding reception, and I only wish I had known just how much physical endurance it was going to require of me, so that I could have been preparing for it with a very strict training regimen over the past year.

By Hour Four of the reception the Americans had started to drop like flies. (This was also the time that the bride’s family announced that they were bringing in more food, and now I know why-they were only just getting started on their celebrating!) By Hour Five you could find us draped over various comfortable pieces of furniture in the lobby, or “The Recovery Room”, as we were then calling it.

me whooped

By Hour Seven And A Half (which, incidentally, is longer than I stayed at my own wedding reception) almost the only representatives left on the groom’s side were me, my husband, my mom, and my dad. At this point the bride came out to The Recovery Room to find us, because her new groom was out there recovering with us. As we watched in near-catatonic awe as the DJ cranked up the music and all the remaining guests began some seriously high-energy dancing, she began telling us about her cousin’s wedding reception, which apparently lasted for 12 hours and included breakfast at 4 am.

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that,” said my brother, massaging his temples. (He was already having to ice his knee, an injury sustained when he and my dad leaped into action to put out The Centerpiece Fire.)  Apparently there is a special name for the second day of a Polish wedding reception, and while no one could give us an exact translation, the general gist of it is something like, “Even better!”

The reception itself went well past Hour Eight (and that was after a 1 hour Blessing of the Couple ceremony, 1 hour of pictures at the church, and 1 hour of the actual wedding itself), but by that time my husband and I had reached The End Of Our Celebrating Abilities and were asleep. I’m not entirely sure just exactly how long the festivities lasted, but I do know that they had concluded by the time we all met for breakfast the next day at 8:30 am.

So we all went and had our own “Even Better” celebration at the Cracker Barrel. And while we were probably unsettling the balance of the Universe by having so many of our own manically-energized family members together in one physical location, that’s a story for another blog post.

Filed Under: CFG And Family Affairs, Holi-daze Tagged With: family, weddings

It’s So Not A Party Until I Get There

June 3, 2006 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

Today my husband and I drove from Atlanta up to Raleigh because my brother is getting married tomorrow (YAY!) We both have parts to play in the wedding, so we had to make sure we arrived in time to attend the rehearsal.

We had not been at the church for more than 10 or 15 minutes when I horrified my mother with the following exchange:

My grandfather: “So, how long did it take you to drive here?”
Me: ” A little under 6 hours.”
My grandfather: “And how many miles is that?”
Me: (not realizing that I hadn’t taken the time to switch over into Pretending I Know How To Act Like A Grownup Mode)  “An ass-load!”

Filed Under: CFG And Family Affairs, Oops...Do Over, The Naked Truth Tagged With: family, weddings

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