Boston and Tommy's wedding. Part 2

The wedding was Saturday afternoon. Tommy and Tanya couldn’t have had a more perfect weekend for their wedding.

We all got up for breakfast and headed down to the restaurant in the hotel. The stories I could tell about the breakfasts at the hotel alone… but I’m not going in to that here. After breakfast, it was straight back to the room to get ready for the wedding. I had to put my hair up in rollers which takes a while so I did that first. Then while they were cooing in my hair I did everything else I needed to get ready. We met in the lobby about noontime.

My Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary from NY had arrived Friday evening so I saw them then. My Aunt Kathy and Aunt Marsha came in Friday as well so I got to see them then as well.

We all caravanned to the church and waited out in the alcove there (and it was HOT in the alcove) until they opened the doors to the church. Tommy and Tanya had a HUGE wedding party! Many friends and relatives were included. Amy did one of the readings and I did the petitions. Susan’s official duty was to walk Leah down the aisle in the processional in to the church.

Before the bridal party entered, one of Tanya’s friends had made a slide show of Tommy and Tanya’s lives and that was about 20 minutes long. Those of us who had been at the rehearsal had already seen it, and boy did it make us cry! Even seeing it the second time. Just seeing all those photos of Tommy from his baby days to now, brought tears to my eye. He’s been through so much over the years and I couldn’t be happier for him and prouder than I am for how he got past everything to reach this point. The picture that really hit us all hard was on of Tommy and Grandma H at his high school graduation. Grandma’s been gone now for several years but seeing the picture of her made all of us cry our eyes out. We were prepared, and we warned my relatives to make sure they had tissues as they would need them.

After the slide show, the service started. The minister conducting the ceremony was a good friend of Tanya’s, and she’s a new minister at that. This was the first wedding she performed on her own. She had assisted at others I guess, but this was her first solo venture. So that made it all the more special for them. The service was short, and one of Tanya and Tommy’s friends, Quentin, sang a song during the Unity Candle part of the service and he has an AMAZING voice!

Off and on all through the service I would start crying, just seeing my baby brother up there at the altar getting married! He noticed and was teasing me a little about it at the reception. I must have told him 50 times that I couldn’t believe he was married now. LOL he just kept smiling and saying he couldn’t believe it either.

After the ceremony was the obligatory photos then we headed to the reception. It was held at a local yacht club and the whole reception was done in a seashore motif, right down to the cake. The centerpieces on the tables were glass vases filled with sand and sea shells, and sea shells were scattered on the tables as well. There were sea shell lights strung about the room too. The cake was very different, with a sea blue color icing and white chocolate sea shells decorating it. The cake itself was a layer cake with one layer of chocolate and one of white cake, in each tier. And one cake, the groom’s cake I guess it would be, was a carrot cake. Tommy wanted that. J

The meal was buffet style and there was SOOO much food, all of it wonderful. There was chicken, scallops, eggplant parmesan, rigatoni, salad, veggies, and tons more too. We all stuffed ourselves.

The whole wedding and reception were a blend of non traditional and traditional. At the reception, they did the wedding party dances and all before the food was served. The traditional bride/groom dance was sung by another friend of theirs. (They have some talented friends!) After that, they did the cake cutting, also before we ate. Then after that all was done, we ate and then the regular dancing was afterwards. The toast was fun too, as Chris, Tommy’s best friend and best man, told us some stories about Tommy’s adventures in his younger days. All I’m going to say about that is… I never knew my brother had such a thing for experimenting with fire…

Since the reception was at a yacht club, it had a deck that wrapped around two sides of the building so most people were out there the whole time. So not a lot of folks dancing. But we were out there on the floor most of the day. LOL Most of the music was 70s and 80s music and most of the slow songs were country songs. There were some REALLY funny moments too. One of their friends, did a whole routine to Thriller, and a couple others of their friends jumped in for part of the song too. Then the same friend who danced Thriller, lip synched Neil Diamond later on, with one of the bridesmaid’s bouquets as his “microphone.”

Everyone had a ball, a few people had TOO much fun, and a few too many drinks. There were some unpleasant moments as a result of that but I’m not about to go in to them here. Said people were quite subdued and embarrassed the next day when they realized what they’d done.

After the reception, which was over by 7:30 since it was an early wedding, we all went back to the hotel and hung out on the pool deck and in the bar area all night. This was quite interesting as Dad and Uncle Dave had both indulged a bit in the drinks, and as a result, they were telling us many stories of their high school exploits they never would have told us otherwise. It was very amusing hearing some of these stories, many of which we’d not heard before. Aunt Claudia had a couple stories of her own too. And Tommy told us several stories he probably would not have if he’d not been indulging at the hotel either. LOL I finally went to bed about midnight.

Sunday there was a brunch at Tanya’s parents’ yacht club (a different one than the reception as at). I think this was a previously unplanned event, and was a spur of the moment decision Friday at the rehearsal dinner. Tommy and Tanya weren’t leaving for their honeymoon (to Aruba) until Monday morning, so I think Tanya’s parents just wanted to extend the weekend a little longer for the happy couple. All our relatives left Sunday morning, but we ventured in to Boston one more time to go to the brunch. We had lots of eggs, bacon, sausage, bread, and some more wedding cake. Tommy and Tanya opened all their gifts there too. Most of their friends managed to make it, though a few were sleeping off the previous night’s alcohol consumption. LOL We stayed for the whole thing and we left to head back to the hotel about 2:00. We got on the road about 3:15 for the long drive home. We finally got home about 2 AM.

Monday and Tuesday I was at home, though I went to dinner with my best friend, Jackie, Tuesday night. I flew home to TX on Wednesday and today it was time to go back to work.

As expected, it was an exhausting trip, but an enjoyable one that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. I took TONS of photos and got them all developed today.

And that, my friends and readers, is the whole unabridged version of my trip to Boston. I’ll post about my dinner with Sonia last Thursday in a separate post.