Rehearsal Dinner: Pizza, Christmas Crackers, Dinos, and School Spirit

Last night, we got back home from our week-long stay in VA, the highlight of which was our middle son's wedding on December 7.  (A Pearl wedding on Pearl Harbor Day...)  My husband and I spent  a week at a Residence Inn--from the Wednesday before the wedding to the Wednesday after--living in sort of studio apartment appointed with a kitchenette and a living area, with our oldest son and his family one door down from us in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom suite complete with a full kitchen and three flat-screen TV's.  If you ever find yourself having to stay out of town for more than a couple of days, or if you are traveling with babies and young children, I can't think of a better place to stay than at a Residence Inn by Marriott.  The beds are comfy and piled high with the kind of soft, squishy pillows I prefer, and the bedding is layer upon layer of snowy white sheets and comforters.  I love Marriott beds--that is, when I can't sleep in my own.  And just so you know, I am not being paid by Marriott to say all of this (although if they want to send me a check, I will accept it).

While we were Residence Inn residents, every single morning we anxiously awaited the "We're up!" text from my daughter-in-law, and then we'd walk next door, knock, and be greeted by happy cries of "Papa!" and "Grammy!" from the twins (2 and 1/2) and gummy smiles from Little Gal (10 months).  And every single morning, my husband and I each got to take the hand of one of our little buddies, and our whole gang trooped down to the dining room to enjoy a complimentary hot breakfast together.  We got to play with the girls constantly, to lie down with the twins at nap time, and to babysit a couple of times so their parents could have some brief getaways.  It was so much fun being next-door neighbors for a week. 

Of course, as comfortable as our digs were down there, and as much as we miss our three granddaughters now that they're back in CO and we're back here, it's always so wonderful to be home.  When my husband got into our bed last night, he let out a loud sigh of contentment. I was brushing my teeth and thought I heard a groan of pain, so I popped out of the bathroom to check on him.  "Everything okay?" I asked.  "This bed just feels so good," he explained.  Dorothy was right: there's no place like home.

Anyway, enough about our hotel accommodations!  I'm sure that's not what you're interested in hearing about--not when there's been a wedding in our family.  I'm still almost overwhelmed by the thought of trying to blog about it, because there's SO MUCH to say, and SO MANY good photos to share.  So I thought today I'd tell you about the rehearsal dinner, which--as the parents of the groom--was our most important wedding responsibility.

The dinner was held at Blue Mountain Brewery, which has a lovely event room that can be closed off from the main restaurant.  There is a long bar at one end of the room and a huge stone fireplace at the other.  Because our party was larger than the room proper could fit comfortably, they also let us use a small side porch with French doors that opened up to the event room.  This porch is open-air in the warmer months but is closed off and heated for the winter, and it made a perfect place for the 15 or so children 10-and-under to play with the toys we'd brought along to keep them amused.

Along with their specialty beers, Blue Mountain is known for their specialty brick oven pizzas.  Back when we were in the planning stages, we asked our son and his bride-to-be if it would be okay if we did a pizza buffet (which would include salad and dessert), and they were both enthusiastic about the idea.  "It'll be like our Christmas Eve pizza dinner," my son said.  And that got me so excited, because the rehearsal dinner was going to be on December 6 (the Feast of St. Nicholas!), which made it a perfect occasion to give our 70-plus guests a little taste of our family's special holiday tradition.

I've blogged about our Christmas Eve pizza-and-Christmas crackers tradition before, if you want to read about that here.  In our family, it really wouldn't seem like Christmas Eve if we didn't open those crackers, ooh and aah over the cheap trinkets inside them, and read each other the incredibly corny jokes.  It wouldn't seem like Christmas Eve if my guys didn't don those paper crowns.

1999

2001 (Ignore '98--I never could figure out how to
program the date on that camera!)



I ordered the rehearsal dinner crackers from a company called Olde English Crackers.  They make completely empty ones you can fill yourself, completely filled ones, or semi-filled ones.  I decided to order them semi-filled, with the jokes and paper crowns inside; then I could add my own components so they'd have a more personal touch.  (The usual trinkets inside are sort of lame; when we open our Christmas Eve crackers, our kids will joke, "Oh great! Another plastic shoe horn!  I only have five already!" or "Another yo-yo that doesn't work!")  My middle son, along with his four brothers, is and always has been a huge dinosaur fanatic, and the bride loves monograms.  So our rehearsal dinner crackers were finished off with plastic dinos for the groom-to-be and Hershey's miniatures with monogrammed wrappers (it's amazing what you can find on-line!) for the bride-to-be.  I have to say, putting together these crackers, and hoping the rehearsal dinner guests would enjoy them, was the most fun part of preparing for this event.

Along with assembling these special rehearsal dinner crackers, I also had fun planning a decorating scheme that I knew would be a hit with both of the guests of honor.  These two kids are a pair of dyed-in-the-wool college football fans.  As crazy as my son (and the entire Pearl family) is about Notre Dame football, my new daughter-in-law is the very same way about her alma mater's team.  I already had plenty of Notre Dame-themed fabric lying around, but I asked my sister-in-law who lives in Florida if she could pick me up four yards or so of Florida State fabric, if she happened to run across any.  The décor came together very easily after I got my hands on that FSU material; I used it to make a bunting to hang on the fireplace mantle and also to make some of the components of the table centerpieces.  I used gold charger plates that I already had on hand, and I cut out a circle of  Notre Dame fabric to put in the centers, then topped them off with battery-operated pillar candles.  I made placemats to put under the chargers out of the FSU fabric.  Along with the gold crackers, this was just enough to make the square tables of eight look fun and festive.  For the two longer tables, I put the chargers on draped fabric instead of small placemats, to give them a more dramatic effect.

When it came time to open the crackers, my husband explained the tradition to our guests, and he said that although we usually wear our crowns throughout our meal on Christmas Eve, he didn't expect them to do that--but if they could just let me go around and snap some photos before they removed them, that would be appreciated.  Well, I'll tell you, that was such a fun crowd!  Most of them kept those crowns on all night!  I love this shot of the handsome prince and his beautiful princess, along with her parents.  (Notice that the bride and groom-to-be are even dressed in their team colors!)

My husband also said that he wouldn't make our guests stand up and share their jokes with everyone, the way we do at home, but perhaps they could share them at their tables--which apparently they did!

The plastic dinosaurs inside were a hit.  (I was going to say especially with the under-10 crowd, but the over-10 crowd might have enjoyed them even more!)

Even though I knew Blue Mountain was providing a gourmet brownie assortment for dessert, I felt I just had to bring a homemade cake.  For every birthday and important occasion in my sons' lives, I have always made a cake.  I made a cake for my oldest son's rehearsal dinner four years ago; I decided I'd make one for this son, too.  And what better theme for this "groom's cake" than a T-Rex?

This cake really didn't come out the way I'd intended it to, and I almost didn't bring it because I was a little embarrassed about how amateurish it was.  It did taste a whole lot better than it looked, though, which is good.  That weird shape on the bottom is supposed to be a tail, but one guest commented that he thought it was a tank tread.  (My son is an Army captain in the Reserves, so that works, too!)  The little separate heart-shaped cake, complete with monogram, was added for the bride's benefit.  I'm so glad now that I brought this silly dinosaur cake, because when someone told my son how delicious it was, he proudly said, "That's the cake I got to have for every birthday growing up, and I've had that cake hundreds of times in my life."  It made me so happy to give my boy something, on the eve of his wedding, that brought back positive memories of growing up in our house. 

It's hard for me to describe the energy and joy that filled that event room during this party.  I think I can safely say that a good time was had by all.  The bride-to-be's family couldn't say enough nice things about it.  But most importantly, I know that we made our son and his best gal very, very happy that night, and that all the little touches--the pizza, the Christmas crackers, the dinosaur toys and dinosaur cake, and the décor celebrating FSU and ND school spirit--were very much appreciated by both of them.

Sometimes, pictures really do speak a thousand words, so I  think I'll just post a few here.  And I'll be back again...because if you think the rehearsal dinner was awesome, you should have seen the wedding.

The "Shoe Game"--have you heard of this?  It's sort of like the old "Newlywed Game" TV show.



This rehearsal dinner party was a pretty huge success for my husband and me--so I thought I'd share this post over at CatholicMom.com., where it's Small Success Thursday.

Small Successes to Report This Thursday

Sometimes it's too easy to view every small failure (and we're human, so there sure are lots of them) as a mountain and every small success as a molehill.  That's why I was glad to see this link-up at CatholicMom.com, one of my favorite websites.  It celebrates the small successes that don't seem all that momentous at the time but can be true game-changers, and it's a reminder of that pithy, oft-quoted saying, "life is not a sprint, it's a marathon."  (Although holy moly,  the last thing I would ever, ever, EVER do is sign up to run a marathon, so I don't really like my life being compared to one!)

I guess I tend to dwell on my failures more than I do on my successes, because when I sat down to write this post I had to think really, really hard about the events of the past week in order to come up with three small successes to share.  And just the fact that it wasn't that easy to do makes me realize that this link-up might be a good exercise for me.  Good for my outlook and good for my soul.  So here goes.

-1-

Okay this is kind of funny: I was sitting at my laptop, trying to come up with success #1 and getting stumped, so I clicked on over to the CatholicMom.com site to see if the link-up had gone live yet...and when I did, I saw that the article I submitted titled "Three Reasons I Love CatholicMatch.com" had been published yesterday!  I didn't know when it was going to be posted on the site, so it was a wonderful surprise.

Ever since the first of my five sons was born in 1983, I've been a stay-at-home-mom; the only real career aspiration I've ever had, from the time I was a young bookworm in love with the written word, was to be a writer--which always seemed like an unattainable, pipe dreamy sort of a thing. But here I am, a writer.  (And coincidentally, the article is about three successes, but they're rather huge ones: three successful on-line matches that produced three beautiful Catholic couples.)

-2-



I just found out that the flower girl dress I made for my future daughter-in-law's cousin's young daughter fits her.   Woo hoo--success!  I had to hope that the size 6 pattern I used to make the dress for this little girl--who lives down South and whom I've never laid eyes on in person--would fit the same way the off-the-rack size 6 she normally wears fits...and thanks be to God, it does.  (Phew!)  When I mailed the ivory satin frock off to her, I was so worried--especially since the wedding is now exactly one month away, and if it wasn't a good fit, that wouldn't give me much time to either do alterations on that one or just stitch up a new one.  I was able to bring a completed dress out to CO with me when my husband and I visited our wee granddaughters recently, so I knew that the twins' dresses fit them; but until today I didn't know about flower girl #3's dress.  So life is good.

When my son's soon-to-be bride asked me, shortly after their engagement back in April, if I would be willing to make these dresses, I was thrilled at the prospect--but I am now exhaling a major sigh of relief.  (Three flower girl dresses that fit: that's three darling small successes right there.)

-3- 

Successes #1 and #2 each contained three for the price of one, so I think I should be done here.  But let me see, is there anything else I can tell you about?  Well, this week I came to the realization that I might be making some progress in overcoming my vanity.

When I had to have the two back molars removed on the upper right side of my jaw this past summer (due to some weirdly twisted roots and root canals that had seemed to fix the problem for a while, but were now failing), like a great big baby I cried tears over the loss of those teeth.  I did not find out I'd contracted a serious disease.  I had not been given the awful news that I have cancer.  I merely had to have a couple of teeth extracted.  (I know--I am ashamed.)  But you see, it was a huge deal to me, because I saw that when I smiled really wide, or threw my head back in laughter, the gaping hole was extremely obvious.  It made me feel so ugly.  And so old.  And there was not going to be enough time to finish the process of getting an implant before my #3 son's wedding next month.  Woe is me.

On Monday, I had a metal "root" screwed into my jaw, which will one day hold a nice faux molar...but not in time for my son's big day.  So to tide me over, my dentist made me a clear plastic retainer that has a false tooth embedded in it.  The device is not all that noticeable, but it makes me lisp a little.  So my choice is to speak with a slight speech impediment throughout the wedding reception, or to expose the fact that I have a big black hole where my teeth should be.  It will be an excellent opportunity for me to practice humility.

You're probably asking where the success is in this story.  It's a small success, but I've finally achieved it: I've accepted the measly little cross I've been asked to carry.  And by the time I was sitting in the oral surgeon's chair on Monday as he drilled away at my jaw bone, I was finally at peace with the whole thing.  There were no silly tears this time--just a feeling of relief that modern dentistry has an answer for pretty much every situation.

Baby steps, right?  It's not a sprint.

Now if you head on over and check out this post on the CatholicMom.com website, you can read about the small successes others are having and let their stories serve to inspire you in your daily life.