Aside from all of the birthday-celebrating and canal-viewing, the major purpose of the trip was to attend Kevin’s cousin’s wedding. Chris is about half a year older than Kevin and there are all sorts of childhood cousin stories (sliding down the stairs head-first at their grandparents house, etc), plus Chris and Brandy red-eyed out all the way from California to come to our wedding, so I was so happy to get to fly out to celebrate with them. Kevin was asked to be an usher and walk his grandmother down the aisle. 🙂 The church was so pretty (lots of stained glass and a pretty organ), and the wedding party was lovely – girls in dark blue, most of the guys in Marines uniforms, and bright autumn colors for the flowers. Chris and Brandy both looked so happy. We didn’t bring cameras to the church, so I don’t have any photos, unfortunately.
The reception was a few hours later, and closer to the hotel. Chris’ parents made wine, with labels that had the same photo and color theme as the save-the-dates. None of my photos came out, but I was so impressed. The cake was lovely, and they cut it with a Marines sword – wow.
It took people a little while after dinner to get excited about dancing, but once they started it was hard to tear people away. Here’s a partial family portrait – bunny ears courtesy of Kevin’s uncle Dan.
The room layout was quite clever – space for lots of tables and the a bar in the middle of the room (which you can see in the background ) that divided the entry from the dance floor. It was a pretty chilly night, but there were several french doors that led to patios, which would be lovely in the summer.
A great photo of Kevin’s parents:
Chris and Brandy did an amazing job of getting around the room to talk to everyone. I was so impressed. We meant to at our wedding and completely misjudged the time and only did a third of the room. Oops. Also in the category of things they did masterfully, their first dance:
So happy. 🙂 (In the photos of ours, I do think that you can see the clock ticking in my head – is 20 seconds enough first-dancing??) It’s so interesting to attend a wedding with still relatively recent experience in the whole thing – so many choices and it’s fun to see what other people decide to do. I’d only been to three weddings before ours (one when I was 6, one when I was eight, and one a month after we got engaged, so I think that total unfamiliarity was probably a large factor for me in our planning process. I was not necessarily the most opinionated bride out there, flowers and invitations aside (and I was frequently sort of horrified by the constant wedding buzz and all of the expectations around being a bride). And yet, I do love seeing other people’s weddings especially now that ours is past, and I can’t tell you how much I enjoy remembering “our way” of doing things. It’s such fun. I loved our wedding, our vows, and all of the people who came to celebrate it with us. Yay for such memorable occasions, and the family and friends that make them matter. 🙂