Part 3

OCD Flower girl, or “She definitely is Joe’s daughter.”

So rehearsal day finally arrives, after a week of driving back and forth from Orlando to Tampa, going to Disneyworld, the grossest cab ride in history (yeah, I’m looking at you), “eating” dinner with the family (the three of us who had dresses to fit into didn’t actually *eat* much. We drank the hell out of the water, though.), making bouquets and centerpieces, last minute shopping trips, and CAREFULLY orchestrated nap schedules to make sure everyone would be fit to participate.

The guys line up in their places, the bridesmaids go, I go, the ring bearer goes… and now it’s Little Miss OCD’s turn. She’s wearing this dress -

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Only this time, I managed to wrestle that completely not-matching bow out of her hair.

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- because we told her she couldn’t wear her actual flower girl dress yet, but she still wanted “to look FANCY.” And here she comes walking oh-so-carefully down the aisle. She’s got a plastic Halloween pumpkin full of petals, and when she gets to the point where we told her to start dropping them she reaches in and pulls out… one. One petal. Which she bends down and oh-so-carefully places on the path. Then she takes two steps and reaches in for another. One comes out, one gets put on the path. Just when we think this process can’t get any slower the wind blows the petals into the grass… so she runs over to get them and put them back… We were all rolling. It was really hard to get her to just pitch handfuls on the floor. Which is interesting, considering Aunty Suz sent her some silk petals like 2 days after she got engaged to practice with, and she never had any problems pitching those by the handful all over the freaking house.

Mr. Uncle Matt was mad that we made her do the rehearsal. He thought she was so cute doing that one-petal thing, it was a shame we had the opportunity to “fix” it. I thought she was pretty cute, too, but I knew it was going to be 700 degrees the next day and I didn’t want the bride passing out from heat stroke while she waited 3 hours for the flower girl to make it down the aisle.

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Somehow the family photographer only managed to get this picture during the rehearsal – none of her after she passed her mark and started the careful petal placement. Stuff you can see in this pic – her ridiculous hot pink bow flip flops (the obvious choice to go with this dress), her pink princess Halloween pumpkin, how excited she is to be preforming this important duty. Stuff you can’t see – how hysterically terrible she ended up being at said important duty, how unbelievably see-through Suz’s dress was. It was like having a rehearsal for a naked wedding. I guess it’s all for the best that we don’t have any pics from the other angle, once we were up there with the sun behind us. They wouldn’t be fit for this family-friendly blog.

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(Can that all really qualify as a caption? It’s an entire paragraph! Must. Learn. Brevity. )

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After all our instructions and practicing, she did a bang-up job at the wedding. Handful, step, step. Handful, step, step. We had a moment there at the end where she ran out of petals three steps away from the front, and it looked like she was going to go backwards to scoop some off the ground, but we got her attention in time. Oh, there was also that moment where she actually STOPPED halfway down the aisle to post for the photographers -

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You can always tell when a child has been chased around with a camera since birth.

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We all thought she did a great job, though. There was a teeny, tiny, insignificant meltdown on the front lawn while we were trying to do group pictures (eeeesh), but later we realized the probable cause was the fact that it was over an hour past her usual dinner time and nobody had so much as offered her a cracker. Whoops.

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The kids have been doing cute things this week while I blog in the past tense. I only have a few more of these stories to go, and then it’s back to every day acts of hooliganism. Also, it looks like I need a post heavy in Jonas pictures. Reading these last few you’d think I only took Madam with me to Florida.

Maybe I’ll post tomorrow. Maybe not. I love it when I skip a day after faithfully posting for several in a row and my stats shoot WAY up. Sure, I know it’s just my Mom checking 72 times to see if I’ve posted yet, yet? Now? Is there something new now?, but it does my ego good to see the higher number.

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