We got Grandma settled eating lunch and went grocery shopping. She said, "Have a good time shopping."
Just like that. We're almost back to normal, folks! Mom called from Florida to see how we're doing and to report that "It's 75 and sunny and we just got back from a walk on the beach after visiting Kim and Stephen and holding Emma for a while." Sounds like a really rough trip to me. I'm not a fan of vacations just for vacations' sake, but visiting is an entirely different matter! Jenny came over for dinner tonight since it's a quiet and spooky house next door without even good old Muffin home anymore. She really misses her cat buddy. It feels kind of funny to all of us to not have Mom and Dad home, but we're all glad they get to be down with Kim and Stephen. And I'm sure we'll all survive the next week or two just fine. On a separate note, Ben has introduced me to a wonderful thing I've missed out on for a long time: banana peppers on pizza. WHY have I picked those off my pizza for so many years???? I like them so much I got them out to add to my portion of tonight's pizza casserole even though I didn't bake them in for fear other people might not appreciate my new-found fascination. My favorite part of eating McDonald's hamburgers has always been the pickle: and banana peppers on pizza have the same level of crunchy, tangy wonderfulness. Anyone who likes pickles on their hamburgers...give banana peppers on pizza try! You won't regret it. Seriously. Emma Elizabeth Izzo was born last night.
She is beautiful and squishy and plump and pink and has lots of dark hair and took her good ol' time moseying into this world, though apparently she wants to greet it face-first. She gave her mother a run for her money in labor, but she arrived safely to the relief of all family anxiously waiting by phones and computers for news. Grandpa Paul and Grandma Mary arrived for their scheduled visit just hours later and called this afternoon to say that Florida is warm, Kim is very sleepy, Emma is sleepy, and Stephen is trying to relay to Dad how to work the complicated TV system in the living room. Ben downloaded her picture first thing this morning and displayed it on the big monitor in the living room. Grandma Lila made her way into the kitchen for breakfast and gave such a beautiful reaction to the picture that I really, really wish we'd set Ben's MP3 player up to record it. She took one look and her whole face lit up and she almost squealed, "OH!!! OH!!!! LOOK, IT'S KIM! And the baby is beautiful - oh, she's just the most beautiful baby I ever saw! Look at her little mouth - oh, she's so pretty!" We had to unplug the laptop and put it on the table so she could keep looking at the picture or she wouldn't have eaten breakfast. She sat there and looked at it all the time she was eating and for a while afterward. Mom and Dad sent us some more that we'll have to show her tomorrow morning - she took a nap after dinner and then it was time for bed and she wanted to watch TV, so she didn't get a chance tonight. She did, however, call her family in Pennsylvania and spend about an hour on the phone telling her sisters about her beautiful new great-grandchild and telling them her name and how big she was (I wrote the statistics on the whiteboard for her). So Kim, if you get a chance to read this...Grandma Lila is extremely excited about Emma-Elizabeth, as she calls her. Today was pretty dull after yesterday's excitement, but I discovered one very special and important thing. Today, home felt like home. I don't know why today. Maybe it was because Grandma walked everywhere she needed to go today and it was like she was back to the Grandma I got to know and expected to live with. Maybe because Ben and I are gradually establishing routines that are ours. Maybe because at bedtime I made chamomile tea for Ben and peppermint for me and we sat together peacefully propped against pillows on our bed while Grandma was all tucked into bed and watching a documentary on TV at a nice quiet volume. It feels sort of familiar and normal finally. I've been waiting for that feeling and I'm savoring it now that it's here. Welcome again to the family, Emma. I'm thrilled to be your brand-new barely-in-the-family-myself aunt. May you have a long and blessed and joyful life and may the Lord smile when he looks at what he created in you. Item One: Kim is in labor. Baby Izzo will no longer be "Baby Izzo" by the end of today! We're all trying not to hope for too many updates because we know she and Stephen are pretty busy right now.
Item Two: Grandma has officially left the wheelchair. The physical therapist came this morning and said her legs have gotten strong enough to allow her knees to lock when she walks, so what she has to do now is just practice, practice, practice until she gets back to where she was. He said it'll take about two weeks, in his estimation. This means that Grandma has pretty much completely healed from her fracture and is on the verge of near-independence. This is wonderful, wonderful news! Item Three: Leah has not contracted chicken pox and the waiting period is over. We haven't seen her or Benjamin for about a month and I'm suffering severe sister-deprivation. Benjamin called up a little while ago and said they wanted to come over and did we want KFC or pad thai for supper? Both sound wonderful to me. But not as wonderful as being able to see Leah and Benjamin. And Ben and I took a walk in the WARM today because it was 50 whole degrees outside! It was really nice. Smelled a little like spring; which is quite a teaser when you figure we have all of February and most of March to go before we really get some true spring weather in. It turns out Ben and I are very easily entertained.
We had to go to the store this evening to get hydrogen peroxide. After weeks of messing around trying to heal some sores on Grandma's feet using the nurse's chosen method, we're finally reverting back to the method we used successfully on the giant one now healed on the bottom of her right foot - careful baths in hydrogen peroxide followed by generous usage of triple-antibiotic ointment and a donut cut out of moleskin to protect the sore itself. This is an aside to explain our sudden after-dinner-hydrogen-peroxide emergency. We don't get out much in the evenings these days, so when we had a few minutes to go to the store when we didn't actually NEED to do any other shopping, of course we treated it like a trip to the movies. We wandered down every aisle and looked at all kinds of things. 6-lb cans of chick peas, cereal, all the clearance sale items, birthday cards, and iced tea, among other things. We did buy a brownie mix and a bottle of Mash fruit drink to try (turns out it has Splenda in it - it would be really tasty stuff if it weren't for that because it combines my two favorite drink options: sparkling water and grapefruit), but mostly we just browsed. It occurred to us in the process that when we budgeted our monthly needs, we didn't include anything in the Entertainment categories. No movie tickets, no pizza nights, no eating out. Right now, "going out" means fitting in a visit to my family or to church or to the grocery store. It will probably be that way for quite a while. The funny thing is that even when we were "dating", we didn't do much for entertainment. Dating meant eating lunch with Grandma at assisted living or going to church together or eating dinner with our families or stopping at Wendy's when we had errands to run and we missed mealtime at either family's house. We went out to Metro Beach right after Leah and Benjamin's wedding and took a walk on the nature trail there and that was fun. I hope we can manage another walk or two like that this summer. But in the meantime, I'm very glad we started the way we did and that our entertainment requirements are as simple as they are. Because wandering around the grocery store is fun and that's what we do when we go out. Today is Ben's 34th birthday.
One year ago today, I met his family (except his sister Kim and her husband Stephen) for the first time. It was the second time he and I had gone anywhere together, and he'd only eaten dinner with my family once. We went over to the assisted living home where Grandma Lila was living and ate dinner in the Garden Room, played Wii bowling, and Ben and I drove Grandma Turner home to Dearborn afterward: which is when we discovered we very much enjoyed long car rides together. I remember sitting next to him on Grandma Turner's couch for the first time. That took a lot of guts for me to do because I've been a fairly reserved person in my life. Today is the two-month anniversary of our wedding. I guess it's safe to say that in some ways, I've become a much less reserved person over the past year. Ben seems much the same as he did then, though maybe more firmly settled in things he thinks are right and good and important. This past year has been quite a test for him in many ways, a test of his mind and will and character; and he has come through with shining colors. It was a very quiet day. We cleaned the house carefully since we were expecting planned dinner company for the first time. We got Ben's cake ready and finished the enchilada casserole. Ben got more dishes out of boxes because we only had five sets in use currently and we needed seven for dinner. We took a twenty-minute nap while Grandma practiced piano in the afternoon. Ben says it was the best birthday ever: the first one he's ever celebrated in his own house with a wife. That's pretty special. It's the first time I've ever celebrated my husband's birthday, though not the first time I've ever celebrated a birthday with Ben. It is truly amazing how many things changed in a year; and I have a feeling it's going to feel much the same next January. Wonder what comparisons we'll be making then? Since certain beloved sisters are stuck at home for various reasons, I figure it behooves me to update this blog more than normal. As I have just hit my late-afternoon crash-in-a-chair point, I think this is probably a good time to tell the Tale of the Early Bathrobe.
It begins not so very long ago (or very far away), when my wonderful husband determined that he was going to take over the late night/early morning visits to the bedroom next door to assist our grandmother when she rang her bell. Actually, at first he was assisting when she would call, but we learned something about having her call us. Because she is a little hard of hearing, when she calls she knows she has to wake us up, so she calls very loudly to make sure we can hear her. When you wake up in the middle of the night because someone is shouting your name, it tends to make for an adrenaline rush akin to stomping on the brakes because that big semi is drifting over into your lane. No, I don't think I'm exaggerating. Much. At any rate, Ben decided to give Grandma a little silver bell and encouraged her to ring it because he said he'd have no problem hearing it and it wouldn't be the same as a shout in the middle of the night. The very first night she rang, he leaped straight out of bed because he wanted to get over there very quickly to reassure her that ringing the bell was a very good idea and he would hear immediately when she rang. The problem was, he was in his underclothes. Now, ordinarily it wasn't that big of a deal to him. He'd gotten in the habit of leaving a pair of jeans at the end of the bed and throwing those on before going next door to help Grandma. That night, however, he'd forgotten and put his pants in the wash (which we've been keeping in a nice laundry basket under the bathroom sink since there's no good place for it in our room). So a 3:00, after leaping out of bed with his eyes still closed, he flipped on the light and then went racing around the bedroom searching desperately for a pair of pants while shouting, "Coming! I'm coming, Grandma!" Grandma can't hear us even when we shout from the other room, but I think Ben was hoping she'd at least hear his voice and know he was awake. After finally locating a pair of pants (and hopping out the door putting them on), he helped Grandma and then came back to flop on the bed and say, "I really don't feel so good." He'd gotten up so fast and run around so much that his heart was racing and he was all sort of clammy and feeling sick to his stomach, the usual reaction when your blood has been rudely re-routed and given a hefty dose of adrenaline. He was finally able to catch his breath and relax enough to go back to sleep, but it was about 4:30 before I think we were both sleeping soundly again. The next day, my sister Elizabeth came over and she took me out for a quick shopping trip to the local Meijer while Ben was at work. I'd been planning to go out birthday shopping, but it seemed to me a crucial necessity in Ben's life had become a bathrobe. We found one fairly quickly, but then I had to make a decision... To give early, or not to give early. I sort of debated with myself about this the rest of the day. Because I knew if I gave it to him right away, I wouldn't have anything for him to open on his birthday and I really love giving people gifts on their birthday. On the other hand, if I didn't give it to him, he had the potential to spend another two weeks or so leaping out of bed and trying to get dressed before helping Grandma. So I hid it in the closet and kept debating. That night we were getting ready for bed and just as Ben was getting undressed, Grandma called him to help her with some problem she was having with her TV remote. Ben put his clothes back on and went to help and I thought, "This is just ridiculous. I'm going to feel guilty hiding that bathrobe every single time he has to get up for two weeks. It's not worth it just to have a package for him to open on his birthday!" So I dug the brand new robe out of the closet and spread it out over the end of the bed. And it was worth it to see his face light up when he came back in and said, "What's this? How'd you manage to go get this?!" He's been using it every single night. At first for some reason it attracted a lot of static electricity and he would snap, crackle, and pop with little sparks when he would come walking in while it was dark; but that seems to have worn off, sadly. It was kind of fun calling him Static Man. I'm very glad he's had it the past few weeks. Maybe I can just think up something else for him to open Saturday... When we moved our stuff into the house the week of our wedding, we realized we had a slight problem. There wasn't enough room in our closet or bedroom for both our collections of clothing.
Now, part of this problem was not having a dresser and that was easily solved when my family gave us one. But the closet was still pretty small and we had boxes of clothing to unpack. When Ben moved home in September, we just packed up his clothes without sorting them; and though I'd sorted mine, it'd only been a quick job before everything was folded away in boxes and brought over. We initially put the boxes and tubs in Grandma's room; but as soon as she came home those had to go somewhere and that "somewhere" ended up being our bedroom. It was actually kind of funny because our bed looked like an island of settled neatness in the middle of a storage space. Over the past week, it's become my mission to get rid of all the boxes in our room; and not only get rid of them, but have everything in them have a place. We bought an interesting device from Walmart that hangs on the original clothes hangar in our closet and extends down with another rod beneath so that our closet space is doubled for short things like pants and shirts and skirts. Then I started unpacking and sorting one box at a time. We had Ben's old dresser downstairs and decided to fold up and store all our summer clothes, since rotating seasonal clothing would save at least half our space. I ruthlessly went through and got rid of things that were too big or too small or never worn or even (in the case of a pile of Ben's socks!) missing parts. We filled a large tub with things to donate, made some choices on what should get folded in drawers and what should get hung in the closet, utilized the clothes' storage rack that had a lot of Grandma's things in it downstairs, and finally got everything taken care of. I unpacked the last box yesterday. The way our days have been going, any project like this usually takes days to accomplish but I feel really good when it's done. Order is gradually emerging from the piles of things that were lying around the house and things are more and more under control. This is important, because with all the changes it was sort of like the straw that broke the camel's back to have no place to put things away that they really belonged in! Not to mention having to climb over piles of boxes to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I was just waiting to really take a tumble over one of those. Next on my mental list: I REALLY want to get all the doorjambs in the hallway painted. Some are new and some are heavily patched and repaired, but all of them need finishing. Right now they still give the impression that things are unfinished and out-at-elbows. And the more settled and finished things are, the more like home this house becomes and the more peaceful everything feels. Last night there was a full moon.
This doesn't really mean a whole lot in and of itself, other than we noted it was shining really brightly through our bedroom window. At around 2 AM, however, we both woke up when two very loud bangs went off somewhere in the near vicinity. Now, there's nothing quite like starting wide awake while it is still pitch dark outside except for the really bright moon. Even with the two of us here together, there's just something inherently spooky about that. And on top of it, those loud bangs sure sounded like gunshots. Yeah, we've heard cars backfiring and firecrackers and other loud noises that sort of sound like gunshots too, but these ones REALLY did. We were then faced with a dilemma, however. So let's say it really was a pair of gunshots: now what? It was 2 AM on a Sunday morning and all we had was a couple of loud noises possibly somewhere in our area. It's not like we can don a cape and run off to see what the commotion is about. All we could do was say, "What was that?!!!" and begin speculating. Dark nights with full moons are apparently conducive to this, because we both had very strange dreams all the rest of the night. So this morning we decided to investigate. Being children of the computer age, however, "investigation" did not mean driving around the neighborhood looking to see if anything was amiss. Instead, we hopped on the computer and tried to find out if there was any breaking news. "Police standoff at a local gas station" would've done nicely. Instead, we found articles on a lady suing a car dealership because she insisted her new used car had once held a dead body and another article about how a local man jumped to his death in the Clinton River for unknown reasons earlier this week. Nothing about mysterious gunshots in the middle of a quiet Sunday morning...during a full moon (which eclipsed last night)...at about the time bars let out...during the notoriously chaotic Christmas Season. So we are left wondering....what exactly did we hear last night? Some mysteries just might have to remain unsolved. My Nana (Dad's mom) had surgery on her pancreas this week. Ben and I wanted to be there, but most of my family was already there and we decided to wait until today to visit. This afternoon we made the trek out to Royal Oak Beaumont to visit her.
Royal Oak Beaumont is a hospital that’s so big it should have it’s own zip code. Seriously. You park in a parking structure without a couple thousand other cars and walk about six miles to get wherever you’re going, relying on the complicated maze of signs to navigate your way to the actual floor and room number you need to reach. When my youngest brother Jonathan was there, he spent most of his first three months of life on the third floor of the South Tower; but Nana was ensconced up on the fifth floor of the South Tower, so I didn’t know how to get there any more than Ben did. We got there just in time to greet Nana and start telling her about the gifts we opened before her surgeon came in to have a little talk with her. The lab work had come back from the tests done on the part of her pancreas they’d removed. “The report says they found cancer,” he said. Nana has insisted for three months that she has pancreatic cancer. Multiple tests haven’t shown any evidence of cancer; and indeed, what they found were scattered cells not yet collected enough to become a tumor. But still. The words “pancreatic” and “cancer” combined are one of Nana’s worst nightmares. It grieved me that she had to hear it. I’m so glad we were there with her when she heard it, though, because otherwise she would’ve been alone. She was very upset that we had to be exposed to such a thing while we’re “just newlyweds” and I wasn’t sure how to convince her that just because we’re newly married doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be exposed to normal life. There are things that are part of normal life: some are weddings, some are births, some are sicknesses, some are death. To face any one or possibility of one is simply…what people do every day. I love Nana dearly. In many ways, she’s probably the person I’m the most like in natural personality. I hope she has many more years to live. I want her to see our children and be at more weddings and see Jonathan finally start talking and celebrate her 95th birthday. But if not all those things are possible, I am never going to regret being there with her in the moment she reached out and took my hand while the doctor was talking to her; and I would always regret that I was too busy being a newlywed to be with her in that moment if we had not gone. I just hope I can convince her of that. People have asked us for a long time what we were going to do for a honeymoon. In July, we agreed a good honeymoon would be going home and turning off the phone and not leaving for a month. By August we knew we’d never get away with a month, so we switched to two weeks. By September it was one. After Grandma Lila fell and we realized she was going to be coming home even sooner than previously anticipating, we started saying, “We’re hoping to get Tuesday off.”
Today is Tuesday, which means today is officially our honeymoon. I can’t possibly imagine having gone anywhere interesting to spend the day. It’s been pretty much a day of naps between sleep. Somewhere around 3:00 we figured we’d better eat something, so we poked around in all the bags of groceries (one of our wedding presents!) and made some Malt-o-Meal (Ben’s new favorite food discovery) before going back to sleep. I knew we were tired, but I didn’t realize how much the past few weeks had taken out of us. I kind of hope we can still rest the next few days because I think it’s going to take that long before we stop doing artistic impressions of bumps on a log. Yesterday was the best wedding day ever. I’m going to preface my description by saying that whoever came up with the tradition of not having the bride and groom see each other until the bride walks down the aisle was nuts. Out of all the traditions we ended up ignoring yesterday, losing this one gave us the most joy. It started with decorating the hall in the morning. Ben and I had carefully planned some details of the day, but there were others we’d been a little foggy about when it had come to specifics. On Sunday, as our rehearsal celebration was winding down (that was quite an evening too, involving Ben’s friends Paul and Jason and about every musical instrument in our house), we had a family discussion about how the next day should go. I was planning to get up early and head over to St. Clair Shores to pick up my bouquet (the only flowers at the event), then come back this way to help Elizabeth, Mom, Aunt Peggy, and my other siblings put out favors, ice cream handbills, and candle centerpieces at the hall at 9:00. As Ben was leaving, he said, “You know, we’re going to be seeing each other before the wedding anyway. I’d rather be here with you than get ready at home, so I’ll bring all my stuff and meet you at the hall at 9:00 and we can get ready together.” Leah and Benjamin ended up deciding to get the bouquet, so my day started with bringing down the laundry, taking a shower, and going over to the hall. Ben came in just as we were finishing up (he ended up going out to breakfast with his mom and sisters). He looked at me with that big smile of his and said, “Lauren, how about getting married today?” “Sure,” I said. “What time?” “Seven sound good?” he said. After finishing at the hall, we ran little errands together. We took pew bows over to the church and gave them final payment, we stopped at the bank, we took the rest of my clothes over to the new house, ate a nice big breakfast with my family, and leisurely got ready more or less together. We didn’t get dressed together, but I kept him company while he was brushing his teeth and combing his hair and he kept me company while I was doing my hair. There’s a photo Benjamin took that I’ve never seen in anyone else’s photo album: I’m doing my hair in our little green bathroom by the kitchen and Ben’s sitting on the counter watching me and talking with Elizabeth, who’s doing her hair too. Apparently, it’s common for brides and grooms who see each other before the wedding to take something called “reveal” pictures, where the bride is revealed all dressed up to the groom for the first time. We didn’t want that moment to be a big photo op, though, so after I got dressed I sent everyone else out and called down to ask Ben if he wanted to come up. He said he did, so he came up the stairs to the sewing room. To those who know Ben and how he plays chess, he gave me his very best “I just lost my queen” look. It was the only time he teared up all day. I cried like a baby after the ceremony, but Ben just got a little teary right then. And then we had to hustle because we were running late for pictures. The interesting thing about taking pictures outside yesterday was that it was FREEZING. Thankfully, the rain held off and it wasn’t windy, but there was a bone-chilling moment when Sunshine our photographer (4-11 Productions, if anyone’s interested!) said, “Okay, everyone, time to take the coats off.” Ben and I were standing there as our family was shuffled around us to get different series of pictures and Ben said out of the corner of his mouth, “Lauren…I hate to tell you this, but I think I’m getting cold feet.” Then he looked at me and said. “Nice necklace. Looks like an ice cube.” If you see me laughing in any of the park photos, it’s probably because of a remark like that. My mouth got really cold while I was smiling until I couldn’t feel it anymore and my toes were literally blue by the time we got in the car. But we got some really pretty photos, I think, and Sunshine was great about rotating everyone in and out of pictures and getting everyone promptly bundled back into warm cars. We’d expected it would take about half an hour for family photos and another half hour for single portrait pictures of Ben and I and we got done twelve minutes ahead of schedule. After that we went out to visit Grandma Lila so we could have photos taken with her before we went to the church. It was kind of a strange experience walking through an assisted living home dressed as we were. A lot of people just stared at us in a sort of stupefied way. They were probably thinking, “What on earth did they put in my coffee this morning?” By the time we left for the church, it became clear we were going to have plenty of time to arrive an hour before the ceremony started. We had left plenty of cushion time in our budget just in case (hey, the first rule of planning an event is never plan anything for the last minute…and leave lots of last minutes) and we weren’t using any of it. Ben said, “Does this mean we’re going to have to sit around in a back room for a whole hour?” “You could greet people at the door,” I suggested. “I mean, it’s not normal for me to be out there but you could.” “I’m not spending all day with you and then leaving you in a back room while I greet people,” Ben said firmly. “It’s not good for a man to be alone, remember?” “True,” I said. “I know,” he said. “Let’s greet people together.” My first instinct was to say, “that’s just not done” but then I stopped and thought about it. The reason it’s not done is because it’s considered bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding. Out of all the traditions we were ignoring…what allegiance exactly did I hold to this one? And we’d always been a little concerned with how we were going to make sure to say hello to as many of our guests as possible considering we were going to take photos with our grandparents instead of doing a receiving line. Furthermore, the problem with receiving lines is that they involve everyone trying to exit the church at once, saying hello to the whole bridal party along the way. If we greeted everyone coming in, we realized, we would say hello as people came in at staggered intervals and we would avoid the bottleneck on the way out, allowing everyone to go over to the reception and enjoy dessert…and get home early if they wanted to. So we stopped off in the back room for a few moments to make a quick repair to my sleeve, feed Ben a sandwich (I wasn’t hungry), and say hello to our family as they were arriving. Then we went out and stood by the doors to sanctuary and said hello to nearly every one of our guests. It was a spontaneous decision I would’ve never thought to make, but I think in some ways it was one of the best parts of the wedding. We didn’t have time to sit around getting the about-to-play-in-a-recital stomachache or wonder how things were going out there, and we didn’t miss Leah and Mrs. Gurin playing Bach’s Double Concerto. It was great. The funny thing about the day was that it went by so leisurely that it was almost a shock when all of a sudden it was time to start the ceremony. All the girls were standing in the little hall off to the side of the sanctuary and Rebekah – who was the official Bridesmaid Support Staff – went down the whole line of them and lit their lanterns. It was a really beautiful sight, all those beautiful girls in their dresses and white shawls with their lanterns being lit. When I first came up with the idea of having them carry lanterns instead of flowers I thought it’d be pretty, but I wasn’t prepared for how lovely all my sisters actually looked. Ben and I both shared the processional – he and his parents went down first, and then my parents brought me. The most fun part of doing this method was that people didn’t really recognize I was coming down the aisle until I was about halfway there, so there was this very dramatic moment when I was almost to Ben and everyone stood up all of a sudden. It felt like an acknowledgement that something big was happening for both of us rather than everyone paying homage to a queen. And Ben came down the aisle first, so it wasn’t like I got all the attention and Ben just crept in by the side door. The ceremony went picture-perfectly. Ben was a little disgusted because he got right into the middle of his vows and his mind went blank until he was reminded of the next word. I didn’t have any trouble like that, but I thought we were on microphone a little louder than we were, because I spoke in a normal-to-loud speaking voice and a lot of people sitting in the back of the church told me later they couldn’t hear a word I said. I feel a little bad about that, but at least it was out of ignorance and not because I was too nervous to say anything. And then the ceremony was all over; and even though Ben and I had discussed for weeks what we were going to do about the traditional kiss at the end of the ceremony, in the end we did nothing at all but smile and walk off down the aisle. Oops. If anyone’s interested, we got through the reception without any kisses too. As for when Ben actually kissed me the first time, I’m not telling. Some things can just stay personal. The reception was fun too. I guess there was a mixup with the seating chart and people had too many names on the same tables and things were all turned around, but Anna straightened things out to the best of her ability and I suppose on the scale of things to go wrong, that was a fairly simple one. We didn’t have a big bridal party introduction and didn’t make announcement when Ben and I got there either – we had a few short speeches by Dad Turner and our sisters and Aaron and Ben thanked everyone for coming, and we went around and visited nearly all the tables. Actually, the only time we sat down for a bit was when Jenny brought us some ice cream and we stopped at the table we were visiting and ate. Then later in the evening I finally got to sit on Ben’s lap. We’ve been waiting a long time for that. Benjamin took a beautiful photo of that moment which is so pretty it looks completely posed even though it was spontaneous. And we finally, finally got to go home together without saying goodbye. That’s probably what made it the best wedding ever. |
Author: LaurenWife of Benjamin and mother to two wonderful little girls who are getting bigger every day. Enjoys writing down thoughts and discussions we are having within the family and sharing them with whoever is interested in reading. CommentPlease don't be shy! If you're reading the blog updates, we'd like to hear what you think. Click on the "comments" link to send us a note.
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