wedding belles

We're back again - absolutely exhausted. The hotel was nice - we had a two bed apartment, which in theory meant we could put the kids to bed in the early evening, and still stay up chatting/watching TV/being adults on Friday night.

Of course, in practise, the flight was delayed, so we didn't get to the hotel till bed time, then we had to sort out food with Sister S & cousin G, and my cousin her hubby & baby J, by which time the kids were so over tired and over excited that getting them all to sleep in one room was a com plete impossibility! Finally, after I had threatened, cajoled, yelled and contemplated gagging them, we separated them into different rooms and they dropped off about 10pm. We then had to wait a while before putting them all back into the one room. And even then, one or another of them woke up fairly regularly through the night. Combined with the fact that I never sleep that well in a starnge bed, and that the hotel had left th heating on all day so it was sweltering, I was pretty knackered by Saturday morning.

The wedding went well. Sister A looked beautiful (of course), my mother cried (of course), the kids all behaved really well (amazingly) and everything went pretty much to plan. The ceremony itself was oly a few seconds really. They have taken out nearly all the legal stuff that used to be in the civil marriage vows, and as they did not add in much of their own stuff, it basically went "Do you want to get married?" "yes" "your married" Done! It's good that the civil ceremony no longer includes half the christian marriage vows as it did back when we did it (we were one of the earliest secular weddings outside of registry offices), but it seemed a bit of a let down after all the organisation to only say a few dozen words. We wrote 2 pages of vows, and it still seemed a bit quick:-)

Here's a rare chance to see a picture of me (and others) with the bride & groom, and the rest of the family. It was taken by a 9 year old child, so i think he did rather well - even though the bouquet seems to feature rather prominently:-0

Then there was a lot of hanging around, and a lot of photo's and a lot of hanging around and a lot of drinking. The official photo's are not ready yet (obviously), but I've posted some of our own to give you an idea of the day. The girls looked georgous - although LMD would not pose for any of the official pictures:-( And Mstr A was a cutie in his little waistcoat. He did pose for two photo's and then said he had done that, and disappeared for the rest of the time! Here's LMB, LMD and Cousin G looking away from camera! It was terribly difficult to get all three of them to stay in one place, and look at the camera AND smile all at the same time!

Next we had the meal - we were on the childrens table! OK, most of the children were ours..... but we also got sister S & cousin G, and the groom's son (a little older than Mstr A), which was a lot of kids for only three adults to keep an eye on. Of course, it did mean that we had all that wine for just three of us....... Actually, it went rather well. Clever sister A had given each child a little box of toys and games and bubbles etc which kept them fairly occupied, and we found a spacious corner for them to play in so they were not stuck sitting down through the speaches and stuff.

Then, finally, after a bit more hanging around, the disco started and the kids finally realised that weddings were fun:-) Here they all are bopping away - you can just about see baby J at the back tooThey had a lovely time dancing & sliding arund the dance floor until they pretty much dropped where they stood - here is LMB and cousin G asleep under the table:-)

Aggie took them back and put them to bed, and I carried on dancing till about midnight. That's pretty late for me nowadays - especially after little sleep the night before and even more so after drinking! We did get a lie in till 8am - but I'm feeling just a litle fragile now. I'm looking forward to an early night in my own bed - and rather surprisingly to getting back to work properly. It's been a month since i did a full week at work for various reasons, and it will be nice to settle back into normality again.

Although, it's Aggies birthday on Friday, so we've got another party weekend coming up..... ;-)