Oh, brother...

[apple_pathways]

Highlights from my trip to Indianapolis to attend my future sister-in-law's wedding shower:

• Got up at 6:00 am after 4 hours of sleep. Ugh. I still insisted on driving, since I am the calmest and most patient in my family, and it will be better for everyone if I'm behind the wheel.
  
• The drive up down there was pretty good: traffic wasn't too bad, and we made it in 4 1/2 hours! And I only gave someone The Finger once! (It was well-deserved.) (Oh, and I promise: I am still the calmest and most patient one in the family!)
  
• We got to my brother's house a little after 12:00 pm and hurriedly dressed for Erin's shower. I wore my new red shoes! Awesome.
  
• The shower itself was incredibly boring, as these sorts of things are. I was near-comatose for most of it, due to the four hours sleep and the four and a half hours of driving. Food was BAD. Cake was delicious. Why is there never booze at wedding showers?
  
• Erin's family is very nice! I like her mom a lot, and her sisters seem very warm and funny. (She has three: two older, one younger.)
  
• After the shower, we checked into our hotel room, and I took a nap. That evening we were going to Conner Prairie Interactive History Park for some kind of Halloween event, and a haunted hayride featuring the Headless Horseman. Erin's whole family goes every year. The plan was we would take a quick nap (it was about 4:30) and Erin and Todd (my brother, did I mention that?) would meet us back at the hotel around 5:15 so we could ride together and get there around 6:00pm when the gates open.
  
• I was woken up from my nap at 5:20, and Todd and his gf didn't get to the hotel until well after 6:00. This is typical of my brother. All the time people were making plans, I kept thinking, "They're not being explicit enough; things aren't going to work out this way!", but my mother gets very nervous and edgy about things concerning my brother, so I didn't say anything. I told her when he was an hour late: "This is what happens when you don't let me boss people around!" (Why yes, I am an annoying control freak: BUT I GET SHIT DONE, DAMMIT!)
  
• The hayride and the park were a lot of fun. Erin's niece and nephews were cute, and I wanted to take her cousin's little girl home with me. She was about 1 1/2 and more than a handful, but just SO adorable! She was sitting on one of the picnic tables enjoying caramel apples and cider, and when she wanted a bite of something she would just stick out her tongue and lean forward: whatever her tongue landed on she ate! It was too funny watching her basically face plant on her dad's caramel apple.
  
• The Headless Horseman was very cool. We all sat in wagons filled with hay and towed behind a tractor. In the middle of the ride a man on horseback dressed in (headless) costume rides out of woods and chases the wagons through a covered bridge. So much fun!
  
• Went back to the hotel, went to bed, woke up and had biscuits and gravy for breakfast. YUM!
  
• The drive back was delayed by an hour long traffic jam after an RV accident, and a side trip to the Cracker Barrel, which is the pit of hell as far as I'm concerned.
  
• Came home to a cat very put-out by the fact that I'd missed her dinner time the night before. She ran into the kitchen right away to stare at her bowl, and bit my calf when I wasn't fast enough. (To clarify, we left out plenty of dry food for her: but her life revolves around the spoonful of canned food she gets every night for dinner.)
  
• Came on LJ and wrote all kinds of nonsense that made very little sense when I came back this afternoon.
  

How was everyone else's weekend?

Comments

[ladylovelace.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you had fun overall, right?

Mind, you'd think a group shower would be fun by default, huh? ;)

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

I am so envious that the rest of the world doesn't have to deal with the concept of a bridal (or baby) shower. *sigh*

A group shower would have been much more fun!

[rachel2205.livejournal.com]

I find the idea of wedding showers kinda weird... Did you play any strange games, e.g. with toilet roll?

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

Nope, no "design a wedding dress out of toilet roll"-type games. To be honest, I would rather have played some wacky and embarrassing games, as it would have represented an attemtp to entertain us at least! Instead, there was a marriage-related word scramble game and then we played Bingo while she unwrapped the gifts. (You fill out a Bingo card with the gifts you anticipate the bride will receive, and then mark them off your card as she opens them.)

Here's how a typical wedding shower goes:

Arrive, place gift on table, make small talk with other female friends and relatives. If you're lucky, there will be something decent to eat.

Play some sort of boring shower game involving wedding trivia or humiliating the bride and groom.

Lunch. This can make or break a shower. In the case of this one: DEFINITELY BROKE IT. We had some weird sort of crock pot hamburgers.

Now it's time for 1-2 hours of gift opening, wherein the bride opens gifts that she herself has picked out and which everyone else has already seen on her registry. Bridal Bingo is usually introduced to make this part more "fun".

Cake. Again, make or break time: awesome cake at this shower! But some of the icing was dyed turquoise to match the bridesmaid dresses, and it turned everyone's mouths blue. In my opinion: bonus.

You are now allowed to leave.

I fucking hate wedding showers. And my mother and I are throwing her one in two weeks! For joy!