A Carolina Wedding!!

       Paul and I were lucky enough to take the red eye flight to South Carolina. We were also lucky enough to travel with his brother Eric and Amanda (sister in law) and their two very young children on the said red eye flight. It sounds bad, I know, but it really wasn't too bad. It was quite hysterical watching four people with two babies trying to navigate the airport with a ton of bags and the kids. No worries though, we managed to get all the bags checked into the right places and got everyone onto the right planes. We left from Salt Lake Airport at 12:50 AM and arrived in South Carolina at 9:15 Eastern time (7:00 our time), and we were expected to be up and ready to roll asap.

       After getting checked into our hotel and having some breakfast we went right over to the church where Peter's reception would be to help set up. The church looked really cute and only needed a few finishing touches, so we spent a few hours getting all the last minute decorations put up so that we were ready to go for the wedding tomorrow, (Saturday December 27th). After the church was all set up, the girls got to go get manicures while the boys entertained themselves for a little bit. I had never had a pedicure before so I decided to get one of those, and man are they nice. I was a little weirded out at first by the Asian man washing and massaging my feet, but it turned out not to be so bad. Jessica's family had a dinner for everyone, (kind of like a Mormon style rehearsal dinner I suppose), which turned out to be great. We met all of her family and got to know them a little bit better.

       Wedding day! Julie woke up to go running, which woke me up so I decided to go, and in her effort to not wake anyone up she woke up everyone, (it was kind of funny). Anyway, Julie and I went for a nice hour long run in the rain, came back to the hotel, had breakfast, and showered quickly as we could so that we could be all ready to go for the wedding. Eric and Amanda were a little late getting their kids together so Peter and his parents left to go to the temple before we did, and on the highway we totally caught up to them and arrived at the Colombia South Carolina Temple the same time that Peter did.
       The wedding was beautiful. The happy cute couple just seemed so happy. They were glowing and you could tell that they were in love! After the ceremony, of course come the pictures. It was so fun to see all the cute poses they did and all the fun pictures they had taken. I made sure that Paul and I took some of just us while we were dressed up so cutely. Finally after pictures were done we had an hour drive back to the reception location. I slept so it was no biggie.
                                                                                             Upon arrival, we had to get all the very lastly finishing touches set up. All in all the reception looked amazingly cute. Once the reception started Paul and I tried to act interested in everything. We were just holding out until we could trash the car. That was one of the high lights of the evening. Sadly it was too cold to completely trash the car. We did what we could with what we had in the cold. When the couple finally got ready to leave they started handing out these huge massive sparkers! They were the coolest things I had ever seen! I am not joking you when I say that the sparklers were almost as tall as I am! We lit them off and made a lovely walk way for Peter and Jessica to run down to get into the car. Once they left we had the joys of taking down and cleaning up the reception hall. Thankfully there were lots of wonderful helping hands there to get it all taken care of. When we finally got back to the hotel, Paul and I crashed. We were so tired from the day, still trying to catch up on sleep from the red eye flight, and I guess we were subconsciously preparing ourselves for what was going to happen in the wee hours of the morning.
       At around 3:00 AM everyone in the hotel wakes up to a banging on the door. We come to find out that Eric's 3 month old baby, Milo, was having trouble breathing and they were really worried about him. Paul and his dad got out of bed to help Eric give him a blessing. But again at 5:00 AM we hear a banging on the door again. Eric said that Milo was doing ok but they were going to get packed up and find an emergency room to take him to. Paul and I had to wake up and pack the luggage Eric needed to take with him. Its a good thing we went to bed early as we could because we sure didn't get a whole lot of sleep that night.
       When we finally had to get up in the morning for good, we got ready to go to church. We went to sacrament then, started the 5 hour trek from South Carolina to Virginia. That story will be in the next post!