The Dog Ate My Fun Monday Post

I wanted to participate in willowtree's Fun Monday, but, well, other things got the best of me. So, I guess I'm having a Fun Thursday. The request was to do a post about clothing art.

For our big official wedding, I hadn't wanted the whole formal dinner thing. I wanted to get married, go home and change into jeans, and then go to the pub for an evening of pints with my family and friends. Peter was mostly on board with this, as he also dreads the rubber-chicken-or-overcooked-steak-giant-ballroom-wedding dinners and he didn't want a traditional dancing reception because he doesn't dance. But it was pointed out, particularly by Peter's parents, that I was taking the whole thing a bridge too far in the casual department.

I was eventually persauded to pull up the tone of the evening. After a few difficult days and discussions, Peter and I hammered out the perfect compromise.

The formal dinner would be in a good restaurant and then we'd have an afters party in a pub. We had to do some research and juggling, but we found the perfect place: a little hotel in Dublin. (Yes, I should have mentioned, we were planning the wedding from Chicago and Peter had a three-week trip to Dublin over Christmas to sort out all the details.) The food there was meant to be great and we could have the afters in the hotel's bar. The hotel was exactly what I'd been looking for - a place with character.

I put as much effort into my afters outfit as I did into my wedding dress. The perfect pair of jeans and a good t-shirt. But the t-shirt I wanted didn't exist. Whenever I need art, I turn to my very talented Middle Brother. I gave explicit instructions - Bridezilla, smashing a wedding a cake underfoot, clutching a ripped up tree in one hand and a little groom in the other. (I wasn't a Bridezilla of course, no one ever thinks they are. I did have one meltdown on the day, which I regret now, but I feel that my willingness to compromise - to change the date, the venue, and other things- exempt me from Bridezilla status.)

Our wedding was lovely, the dinner was a pleasant surprise, and the afters were all I'd hoped for and more. We had an Irish band come in and play for a while. There was no dancing, but there was a good bit of singing. The bar was still open to the public, but we pretty much took over the entire seating area. We'd had to pay a deposit large enough to cover the number of dinners and bottles of wine we expected to use, and it turned out that we'd overestimated. The wedding coordinator told us we had 650 euro to spare and we could get a refund or use it to pay for a bar tab. We went with the bar tab. (And again, here, our luck was perfect, at the end of the night, the tab was at 647.)

Our wedding cake had been ridiculously huge because the smallest cake that the bakery I'd selected made was 250 servings and we only had 60 people at our wedding. We took the leftovers into the afters and everyone indulged in three delicious tiers of Chocolate Heaven all night.

My t-shirt was a big hit and I had several requests for it. It's nearly become a tradition that when one of our friends gets married, they get a Bridezilla t-shirt. (I don't know how I'm going to do that from the Middle of Nowhere now though.) Near the end of the night, I could see we still had way too much cake left and we really didn't have a feasible way to store it. I noticed a long table of women near the bar and knew that if anyone could appreciate three tiers of Chocolate Heaven, it would be a table of women. I brought them the caking, saying something like "Hi, I got married today and this is my cake. We've all enjoyed it all night and I would hate to see it go to waste. Do you think you could help us out?"

They turned out to be a field hockey team from Rotterdam and were delighted at the surprise gift. So delighted that they sang us a congratulatory song. That's what's going on in the picture below. Sorry you can't see more detail in the Bridezilla shirt, but I'm in surprisingly few of the afters pictures.