Thursday, February 16, 2012

You're My Everything: The After (Birthday) Party

Early in our planning for the rehearsal dinner, we decided to have a rehearsal dinner after party.  We wanted to expand upon our standard rehearsal dinner to squeeze in some extra time with our out of town guests.  Specifically, the vast majority of my extended family is from at least a few states away.  I wasn't happy with the prospect of having them come in for the weekend and only seeing them for a little snippet of time during the wedding day mayhem.  On the other hand, inviting them to the actual rehearsal dinner would have effectively doubled the dinner guest list.  We compromised with the after party - all out of town guests were invited to the house for drinks and desserts to join in the festivities.  As if I didn't wax poetic enough about our dinner in the previous post, this after party was an awesome addition.

To jump-start the after party, we threw a miniature birthday party, as our rehearsal dinner coincided with two guest birthdays - MOH H and BM A's boyfriend.  We arranged to have a birthday cake there for the two of them, and then everyone gathered up and serenaded them on their special day.

Photo by BM J
Photo by BM J
As the final notes of "Happy Birthday" faded away, it was time to dig in to our desserts!  Because we were expecting more people for desserts than just the rehearsal dinner crew, a few extra desserts were ordered.  But only a few.

Photo by BM E
Just in case you didn't develop visual-induced diabetes with that previous photo, here's another peek:

A piece of Western PA education for you: Those little cream-filled Oreo-esque yummies in the top left corner are called "Gobs," not "Whoopie Pies."  I don't know why, but I know that there's a little nugget of the USA, between Pittsburgh and Johnstown, that calls these babies gobs.  Consider yourself informed.
Photo by BM E
From that moment on, friends and family just keep pouring into the backyard, resulting in a constant increase in the happiness and love surrounding us.  This after party was a huge perk of having an at-home rehearsal dinner - no strict space restrictions and no cut-off times, so we could invite as many people and entertain as long as we wanted!  Undoubtedly, one of my favorite perks of the after party was seeing so many of our college friends who had traveled from far and farther away to help us celebrate.  We had friends come from all regions of the United States, in addition to Honduras, El Salvador, and Vietnam, just for us.  Given the distance, there were many faces we hadn't seen for many months, so having a casual opportunity to catch up before the craziness of Saturday set in was truly one of the best wedding gifts of all.  Well, that, and finding out more than a few of my Notre Dame friends actively read my wedding blog :)

Photo by BM B
Photo by BM B
Photo by BM E
Photo by BM J

Before I knew it, I was walking Mr. Snow Cone to a friend's car to shuttle him off for our night apart.  It was so surreal, walking away from the car and knowing that I wouldn't see him again until only an aisle separated us.  After everyone had said their good-byes and the house was eerily empty, I spent a bit of quality time with my parents, sharing memories from the near-decade Mr. Snow Cone and I had dated leading up to this point.  I remember all kind of looking at each other with a shared smirk, disbelieving that tomorrow was finally the day.  My mom headed upstairs to bed, but not before telling me that I'd picked a winner in Mr. Snow Cone.  As if I needed to be told that. 

Finally, I headed up to bed, wrote my last post as an unmarried blogger, and read a card BM K has given to me earlier in the day.  In that card, she'd copied, verbatim, the Facebook message I had sent her from over two years ago when I realized that Mr. Snow Cone was the guy I wanted to marry.  The fact that she had remembered the message and tracked it down was so thoughtful and the perfect sentiment to end my evening.  With a happy heart and tears in my eyes, I called it a night, all a-tizzy about the next day.

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