Summer of Love

How time flies when you're attending wedding related events. Effective next Sunday, I will have been to 5 ceremonies and accompanying receptions, 2 showers, 2 bachelorette parties, 2 engagement celebrations, 2 gift openings, 1 rehearsal dinner and a side of baby shower (served fresh with a game where you had to consume and identify mystery baby food, which, for the record, is vomitous, particularly in "meat" form).

Prior to this summer, I could have counted the weddings I'd been to on one hand. At a recent engagement celebration, I was chatting with one of my newlywed friends about how life has, rather abruptly, changed from what it looked like just 2 years ago. All sorts of weddings and babies and home buying and grad schooling...and we never even saw it coming. (Okay, sometimes we did.)

At any rate, all of these events have been fantastic for several reasons. First, research. Notes include asking attendants and guests to please turn off their phones; making sure everyone eats something to avoid the bride or groom needing to sit down in the middle of the ceremony; making sure not to be daunted by things that make our wedding ours, no matter how much other people protest; remember the marriage license; register for much more stuff than you think you should but not for stuff you'll never use; etc. Second, weddings are so fun. Eating, drinking, dancing, laughing, crying...it's unreal. Third, each event has been totally appropriate and amazingly reflective of the couple getting married, and that is so beautiful. I CAN NOT WAIT.

We've spent a fair amount of time thinking about and planning our wedding this summer, as well. One of the stranger phenomena I've encountered are all of the different message boards - some for people who aren't even engaged, but plan to be one day (scary, scary wedding industrial complex) and some for wedding withdrawl - "what to do when you realize that the biggest party of your life is over". Ick. What if it's just begun?