After returning from our vacation, we had to get ready for Jo & Martin's wedding! Amanda was a flower girl for the first time, and we were a bit nervous. For starters, she had picked up a bug on our trip - it started as the sniffles, but the Thursday night before the wedding she woke up in the middle of the night with a high fever, and over the following couple of days it got much worse. By Saturday morning she was pretty miserable.
We had to be at Jo's house by 8 am to have Amanda's hair done and get some photos taken, so we doped her up with cold medicine and hoped for the best.
She was OK until around 10 am, when we had to get her in the car to head over to the church. We hoped she would take a quick nap; however, she desperately wanted to hold her flower basket in the car, and we knew if she did so it would end up in pieces. So instead, we got to listen to her scream her head off for the entire 30 minute car ride (imagine "I HOLD IT!!!" over and over again in a hoarse, possessed-sounding voice, along with arms and legs furiously kicking in all directions, and you'd be part-way there).
By the time we arrived at the church, she was absolutely miserable. We headed to the bathroom to try to calm her down and fix her messed-up hair, and she wanted to sit on the potty. Unfortunately, she was exhausted to the point of almost falling asleep while sitting on the toilet, but every time we tried to take her off, she would scream "I PEE! I PEE!" and pull her Pull-ups back down (Pull-downs, perhaps?). It was to the point that we seriously doubted we would get her off the potty in time to walk down the aisle.
By some miracle - we still don't know how - Jeff managed to get her off and over to the front of the church just a minute or so before she was due to walk down the aisle . It looked briefly like she might be OK, but just as the doors opened, it became apparent she wasn't going to walk alone. So I ended up walking down the aisle with her - she had me on one side and her beloved Tyrone in the other. (The fact that Tyrone is bright orange didn't really help matters - she couldn't possibly have wanted to hold nice white Baby Beluga down the aisle, right?). As soon as she started walking, her face crumpled and she cried all the way down the aisle.
Of course, everyone else thought she was adorable and we could hear all the laughs and giggles during the long walk to the front of the church. We also got many comments during the course of the day and evening about how cute she was. If only they knew the whole story!
Once we were in the church, she promptly fell asleep on her Lolo's shoulder (thank goodness they had decided to come to see her debut as a flower girl!). She woke up part way through the ceremony and fussed a little, so Jeff and I had to sing during the signing of the registry with her on Jeff's shoulder - a little unconventional, but she was feeling so sick and unhappy that we were just happy to have her close.
Of course after the ceremony she was much more cheerful:
She spent the night at Grandma and Grandpa's, and Jeff and I headed off to the reception at the Wall Centre, which was beautiful! Luckily she is fully recovered from her illness. We're hoping for better luck as she gets a second shot at being a flower girl at Mike & Cristina's wedding next month!
