Something old, Something new, Something ON FIRE?

As June rolls around I can't help but remember my amazing cousins' wedding in Sun Valley Idaho. The wedding was memorable for many reasons, the beautiful scenery, the bride arriving by buck board to the open field, the pastor calling the bride by a name not her own. But I think the fire is probably the thing everyone remarks on most. But I am getting ahead of myself.

An out of town wedding holds its own challenges for people traveling with children. This wedding had been planed and anticipated for a year. We had made our reservations 4 months before the wedding. The date of the wedding was 4 days before my youngest sons 6th birthday so we had planned to make this an extended trip celebrating his birthday on vacation. But as most of my carefully laid plans this too went awry.

My husband is an only child and several months before we were to leave for the wedding his father had a stroke.  About 3 months before the wedding it became clear that his parents would need to move closer to us so that we could help with his recovery. My PLAN was find a house for his parents in our neighborhood, buy the house, move them in to the house and sell their house all BEFORE we had to leave for the wedding. No problem right? WRONG. Everything that could go wrong did and long story short I left for the wedding with both boys and without my husband, who was to stay behind to finish moving his parents into the new house. When we travel, I try to make sure that the adults out number the kids. I find this decreases my stress. But that part of the PLAN had now been discarded.

We arrived in Idaho on time and without incident so I guess I got cocky. I thought " I've got this. I can do this" the PLAN is moving forward. I will up with my husband in three days for the rest of our vacation. Everything will be fine.  Arriving was the last thing that went my way.

When I checked into the hotel with my two suitcases and two kids and no husband to carry said suitcases I discovered that there was no elevator in the hotel and our room was on the third floor. My suitcases, which I never have to carry myself,  probably weighed 100 lbs each. All of the sudden I realize that maybe I really do need my hubby.  I tried to get one suit case up the stairs but ended up paying a college student $20 to lug them to our room.  I imagine that he probably hides from women and children with suitcases to this day.  The first "wedding event" was a tea for the ladies for the bride. My father had agreed to take the boys to Mc Donald's to eat while my mom and I attended a women's tea. I left the boys  with my father at 11:00am. At 2:00pm when I went to retrieve my kids I discovered that Grandpa had forgotten to feed them and they were starving and bored. Not good.

If you don't have boys let me explain. NEVER let boys get bored. Bored boys create havoc. Bored boys mess up the PLAN. So I quickly packed them up, took them back to our hotel, and we walked to the closest restaurant for "lunch".  By this time it was around 3 pm. So when we all met for the rehearsal dinner, two hours later, the boys were not only not hungry but they just wanted to go outside and play. So, again, as quickly as I could we got through dinner and got out of there.

The next day was the day of the wedding. After breakfast, I took the boys on a forced march around Sun Valley. Tired boys tend to not get bored. The PLAN is going to work.  I was still thinking I was in control. I didn't know that the reigns were slipping away.

The wedding was held in a field. To little boys sitting on a chair in a field is torture. They wanted to run and play and they realized that slipping away during the ceremony meant that mommy wouldn't get up and chase them down or yell for them to sit down. Being the family of the bride, we were seated in the second row. The boys slipped away and began running thought he field and yelling to each other about the stream they had found. I was trying to figure a way to get them back without making a scene when the pastor calls my cousin by someone else's name. I am hoping that everyone else will stay focused on the pastors mistakes and not notice the boys yelling back and forth. Next thing I know Josh has gone behind a tree to relieve himself. Except that behind to him was in front of the wedding party.  I wanted to crawl under my chair and die.  But of course I couldn't because we still had the reception to get though. The PLAN is starting to unravel.

The reception was held at the country club. My wonderful cousin, knowing that my kids would be the only kids there, had planned ahead. At each of the boys plates was a coloring book and crayons. YEAH! I am thinking that this will go smoothly now and maybe no one will mention Josh and the tree.  Maybe the PLAN is going to be okay

I wait a few more minutes and then I went to the catering manager and asked if I could pay for the table cloth that we had destroyed. " No" he says, " It is worth the cost of the cloth to be able to tell this story. I have never done a wedding where the table was set on fire before."  Great, now there is a catering manager in Idaho who plans to tell this story.  I begin to hope that people don't believe him. He is getting way too much happiness out of my shame.

Just before they are going to serve dinner, my cousin, the bride shows up and gives Josh a high five over the fact that he set the table on fire. She tells me " No one will ever be able to beat this wedding story." It now appears that the whole family will be going to dinner on this story for the rest of the summer.

I am still clinging to the idea that maybe no one will notice the giant char mark or mention the "tree incident" when after Dinner the best man tell me he was envious of Josh an Justin for their "play" time during the wedding. Well at least he hasn't mentioned the fire. Maybe he won't go home to Chicago and tell all of Illinois. That was the moment when I abandoned the PLAN and began to pray that I could just make it till tomorrow when I would meet up with my husband.

To this day I have people ask me "Did Josh really set a table on fire at a wedding?"  I hang my head and say "Yes..." and the story begins again.

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