wedding: survived

It was a long, rocky, and laborious road to get this girl the wedding she wanted, but we pulled it off! After a long morning of the bride and bridesmaids setting up the reception (I won't even go into that), we finally arrived at the task of getting her hair curled (two and a half hours) and cinching her into her dress (still too big, despite just having it altered to reduce it by several dress sizes).









After the ceremony, we walked past a local park to take pictures and there was a birthday party for a 6 year old girl taking place and every one of those girls ran up to the sidewalk and just stared with their jaws hanging open. They waved furiously and shouted "You're beautiful!" as the bride passed by. She was a parade unto herself.

Adjacent to where the pictures were taken, there was a girls' soccer game happening and I kid you not that the girls were deliberately kicking the ball into the endzone so that they could gawk and wave to the bride. I can't even count how many girls would run by yelling "congratulations!" or "you look like a princess!" Every single one of them was entranced. And it didn't end there. All the kids at the reception could not stop staring at her... they would bump into things and get run over by other people because they were totally enraptured. Every single one of them just wanted to hug her and dance with her. It was really adorable.


This little one in the red dress cut in on the 'dollar dance' just to pet Shaina's dress. She was mesmerized.


After that, she found the best spot in the house to color: the unused part of the dance floor! She just plopped down and got to doodlin'. I wish I had video of her teeny feet bopping to the beat.


My parents are not formalwear kind of people, but my stepdad and brother decided that they'd go rent fancy, matching suits just to spice it up.


Ryan and Daniel, horsing around. Funny enough, the beers in the picture don't belong to either one of them -- they were just on the table. Everyone half expects teenage boys to run amok at a wedding with an open bar and sneak champagne here and there... not this one, though. Or Ryan either. Although maybe they should have switched to champagne... Ryan spilled an entire Coke down the front of himself.


See? We're not really the serious type. Between my stepdad and Ryan is my aunt Sharon (one of the twins).


Re-creating a moment from my wedding, where my stepdad posed for a picture playing air guitar. (He was spectacularly drunk at that point and effectively ended the cash bar by shouting 'next round's on me!' over and over and over and over... I don't know of a single person who bought their own drink.)


The garter toss... I just love her face in this one, even though it's a bad picture.


I didn't want to clutter my Flickr stream with a bunch of wedding pictures, so I posted them to a Picasa photo album -- if you're interested in seeing the rest of the 503 that I took.

She had the day she wanted, which was what was important. Now I just need to sleep for 5 years to catch up on my energy! Weddings take a lot out of a person!