Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho...It's Off to Work We Go!

So having made it to Texas safely and having met the Byrne family, we all turned our focus now on preparing for the wedding. Of course, it wasn't all work and no play. We did manage to squeeze in a dinner at an awesome restaurant out at Kemah where we merrily clinked knives to glasses so the couple would kiss.

"This is just not right," bemoaned Papa Byrne. "They aren't married yet."

I don't think anyone heard him or if they did, they didn't let on because the clinking continued....as did the kissing. Afterward, we spilled out of the restaurant and took a walk along the boardwalk. Spying a merry-go-round, some in the group decided to get the lovebirds on it for a ride. Off they went, around and around, and someone called out, "A kiss, a kiss.....give your bride-to-be a kiss."
Easier said than done when you are on a merry-go-round. It's a wonder that any of my pictures were in focus that night because I was laughing so hard as I watched Jason lean in for a kiss that turned into quite a gyration as he found his animal moving up and Laura's steed moving down or vice versa. Even funnier was that they had both been required to put little seatbelts on so twisting and turning wasn't even helping much.

We also had time to eat at a great little Mongolian BBQ place where you got to put whatever you wanted to eat in a bowl and then you handed it to the chef who dumped it out onto a huge metal drum. Just a few swipes with his wooden stirrers and the meal was ready to be slid back into your bowl and delivered into your eager hands. Yum yum! With food like this, it was a wonder I could still fit into my mother-of-the-groom suit.

Meanwhile back at the reception site, Joyce, Laura's mom, had us all working like a well-oiled machine. She had been working on the organization of the wedding and reception and had been gathering supplies for weeks. Faster than you could say "Almost Married", she was quickly transforming the church's gymnasium into a beautiful reception hall. We all rolled up our sleeves and lugged out banquet tables, set up chairs, found the tablecloths, ....but wait! Did I say "set up chairs?" Ah yes! We STARTED to set up chairs but then someone who is more obsessive-compulsive than me decided that all the chairs at a table should match so we began to scramble as we tried to sort the black upholstered chairs from the wine-colored upholstered chairs and then figure out what to do with the sand colored chairs. I could tell that Grandpa Byrne thought this was an exercise in futility and my muscles were inclined to agree with him but soon we had other problems to worry about.

The tablecloths had been folded up and stashed away until the tables were in place. We grabbed the first tablecloth and set it on the table and backed away to see how it looked. It looked wrinkled. Now I figured that once you got the candles on the table and the decorative greenery, let the cloths "rest" on the tables overnight, added 10 people with their place settings, and turned off the main lights, leaving everything in beautiful candlelight.....those wrinkles weren't going to be very prominent. But Joyce thought we should iron the tablecloths. I could see her point. I mean, she had worked hard to find those tablecloths and they were lovely. So someone found an iron and then a place to plug it in, spread the tablecloth on the floor, and began to iron. Ten minutes later and only a few feet finished on the tablecloth, I could see we were going to have to bring our pajamas and spend the night if we kept this pace up. It was then that I had a brainstorm.

I'd been lusting over one of those nifty clothes steamers for several months. Santa hadn't read my mind because one didn't appear under our Christmas tree. This might be just the excuse I needed to strike while the iron was hot, so to speak. Certainly a steamer would be a lot faster than trying to iron so many tablecloths with one or two irons. Without hesitation, I volunteered to head off to the nearest store and purchase a steamer to speed things along. Whee! I was going to get a steamer after all. George and I headed off and found a beaut at a nearby Target and soon we were back at the church, unpacking that baby, filling it with water, and setting up a steaming post in a back room.

Once I got the hang of it, I started to crank those tablecloths out. Grandpa Byrne occasionally popped his head in the door to see if I had passed out from the heat but I was doing fine. Even though the windows in the room wouldn't open and the steam was creating a sauna effect in that small enclosed space, I was having a blast. If there is one thing I don't mind, it's a little heat. Besides, maybe I could sweat off a pound or two before the wedding.

By the evening of that first big workday, we had the tables up, tablecloths on, and the candles on the tables.

The men had even finished the flowered arch that was going over the columns above the cake table. The next day would be a cooking day and then the big family dinner that night of Thai food, in lieu of a rehearsal dinner. My mouth was already watering.

The Porterfields Meet the Byrnes - Pre-wedding

Just over a week ago we flew down to Texas for our son's wedding. We headed down early so that we could have a few days to meet Laura's parents and relatives and help out with the wedding preparations.


I have to admit that I was a little nervous as we packed our bags. I had hoped to lose 40 pounds prior to our departure and the wedding to bolster my self-confidence (at heart I'm pretty shy) and to NOT be forever immortalized in the wedding pictures as the "overweight one." What was I thinking? Somehow I managed to forget the fact that we had Thanksgiving and the Christmas season between the engagement and the wedding....always a major "chow-down" challenge for me PLUS I tend to eat when I'm nervous. OK, I tend to eat when I'm happy, too, or sad or worried or glad or....well, you get the point. Just about the only time I don't have a problem with wanting to eat is when I have a case of the stomach flu.

In any case, George and I, in all my chubby glory, flew on down to Houston and stepped off the plane into glorious warmth. We weren't in Kansas anymore, Toto. This was Texas and it didn't feel like winter at all. This was a good start to a happy occasion.

We picked up our rental car and headed over to meet Laura's family. We'd talked to them before on Skype but this would be our first face-to-face meeting. I hoped we would do Jason proud and not embarrass him before his future in-laws. And I hoped we would like Laura's parents. I really shouldn't have worried. After all, we had met Laura and quickly discovered why Jason was head-over-heels in love with her. She was delightful. She had obviously been raised in a loving, nurturing home. The door opened and we were welcomed with open arms. In quick succession we met Laura's parents, her sisters, an aunt and uncle and three cousins, her maternal grandmother, her paternal grandparents, a sister's boyfriend, and one friend from Canada. During the course of the evening, several things became readily apparent.


One, this was an affectionate family. They liked to hug on each other. This was so unlike our backgrounds. I don't think George's family ever showed emotion around each other when he was growing up. In my family, I don't have any recollections of my mother ever cuddling me. I do remember my father picking me up off his lap around age 5 and setting me down on the floor and saying, "You're getting to be a big girl now. I think you're too big to be sitting on my lap." To this day, I remember how crestfallen that made me feel. So when my children were born, I was really looking forward to giving and receiving hugs from them. Unfortunately, my dear daughter was never much of a cuddler and her mantra as she grew older became "don't touch me." Luckily, our son Jason was the cuddler so I had at least one fellow feeler and hugger in the family. Now here we were surrounded by huggers. I was amazed and happy that Jason was gaining such a family and envious, all at the same time.


Two, this family was an active family. They apparently were very good tennis players. Laura, the cousins, and friends participated in a type of sumo wrestling, for wont of a better description. When I first met Grandma and Grandpa Byrne, they mentioned that they had been able to fly out to Texas early because they didn't have to do their ski patrol duties that day because of the unseasonably warm weather. I didn't think I had heard them correctly. I mean, this was an older couple. They almost could have been old enough to be my parents.


"Did you say 'ski patrol'?" I asked confused.


"Yes, we're on the ski patrol," they responded.


"Ski patrol, as in sking down a mountain?" I continued.


"Right, we've been on the ski patrol for awhile now. We really enjoy it.", they assured me.


Wow, I thought. Later I found out that they sail, have scuba dived, and are a lot peppier than I am. They both had amazing energy during all the wedding preparations and Grandma Byrne plays a mean game of Scrabble. But more on that later.


Three, they had a lot of relatives and a lot of nicknames for each other. I'd return to the house we were staying at in the evenings and work on a little flow chart that I had drawn up in an attempt to figure out who was related to whom, what their names were and what they were actually being called. I was doing pretty good, too until the night before the wedding when a whole group of new relatives arrived with children in tow. Abandoning the flow chart, I drew back to my second line of defense......smiling and waving.


I think it was the second day we were there that someone mentioned how much the ladies in the family enjoyed playing Scrabble. Jason had told them that I had played Scrabble a lot also, so soon I found myself sitting at the table with a Scrabble board in front of me and some very intense players surrounding me. Now let me just say here that over the years I've played a LOT of Scrabble games with my mother. It was always her game of choice. I usually couldn't come up with a good enough excuse to get out of it so we'd play and the game would sometimes drag on for what seemed like hours. In an attempt to speed things up, we developed our own rules, like playing with 9 tiles instead of 7 and letting players take back and reuse a blank tile if they could substitute the actual letter it was representing. But that wasn't the way we were playing Scrabble here. I racked my brain, trying to remember all those "Q" and "Z" words that Mom had on a list in the old Scrabble box. In the meantime Grandma Byrne was taking every Triple Letter spot that I opened up, Mom Byrne was coming up with obscure words that meant who knew what but actually existed and Aunt Pam was circling helpfully and offering to look up words in the dictionary for us.


I flashed back 40 years and heard my brother say, "Yeah, go ahead and look it up in the dictionary but you'll lose a turn."


"No one looks up a word in the dictionary unless their word is challenged and then they lose a turn if it isn't in there," I heard myself telling the ladies. I still lost, big time! But hey, it was fun. I hadn't played Scrabble since macular degeneration had claimed Mom's eyesight and I'd actually missed it.


That night, back in our temporary quarters, my brother called.


"Well, you've met them. So tell me, who's more normal.....them or us?"


I laughed, thinking of my kooky family growing up. "Well, John, I'd say it's definitely them," I replied.


"Oh, darn," he sighed. "See you on Saturday."


"And John," I continued. "Behave yourself when you get here."


"Don't I always?" he laughed and then I was listening to the dial tone.