The Wedding and more

It's Thursday and I'm still feeling exhausted from everything that happened over the last week! First we had the Clyde Reunion (for all descendants of my dad's maternal grandparents) which was jam packed with activities every day starting last Friday, the 21st. We didn't participate in everything because that would have been nearly impossible but we did participate in these things: lunch at the ATK Thiokol Rocket Park; swimming in Brigham City; dinner at Maddox; Ogden Dinosaur Park; the main reunion event at the Uintah park which included a catered lunch, a small program about the Clyde's, water balloon volleyball, kickball and family pictures; a half hour fireworks display at my parent's house; Hogle Zoo and another lunch at my dad's cousin's house.

Interspersed between all of those events, we just had a lot of fun hanging out with all of my siblings. Can you believe there were 26 people sleeping in my parent's house through it all?! We also spent a lot of time helping Karina finish up all of the details for her wedding. We helped her find wedding shoes, attach straps to her dress, made her a veil, made all of the boutonnieres, corsages and centerpieces, made programs, attached captions to all of the pictures in her two photo books (which took like 2 hours!!!) and more... Probably the biggest issue we ran into occurred on the actual wedding day. Zeke and Pei went to the florist to pick up Karina's wedding bouquet. From the beginning Karina wanted her bouquet to be a collection of everyone's favorite flower. Well, when Zeke and Pei got there, the bouquet was not ready and it turned out that the florist had basically decided not to order it!!! And they acted like it wasn't their fault!!! So they tried putting something together which ended up being a dozen red roses and four little white flowers. Hello- does that sound like an assortment? Karina wanted cala lilies and gerber daisies and maybe a few roses. And it made Zeke and Pei really late getting to Snowbasin. Luckily we had a lot of extra wildflowers that we had bought for the centerpieces and Monika and I rearranged it to be what Karina wanted.

The ceremony started at 11 am and was really beautiful. First we (as bridesmaids) were escorted in by the groomsmen. Then my niece Michelle carried in the rings on the ring pillows. And then Ming and Lucas came in as the flower boys. They were hilarious!!! Ming was chucking the rose petals and Lucas dumped his basket out right away and then tried putting them back in. Everyone was dying laughing. I can't wait to see that on the video. Then Karina was escorted in by my dad and she looked absolutely beautiful! My parent's bishop performed the ceremony. First there was a reading by Charlie's uncle Steve who is Bahai, then my parent's both said something, then I played a piano piece by Rachmaninoff. Then there were the actual vows. After the ceremony, we did some family and group pictures and then there was the lunch which was tasty Indian food. There was also the cutting of the cake, a toast by Charlie's brothers and also Monika and there was some dancing. Lucas was hilarious! All he wanted to do was dance. That will be fun to watch on the video also. We left Snowbasin around 3:30.

That evening we had a reception from 6-8 at my parent's house so pretty much as soon as we got home we had to start preparing the house for the reception. It was pretty non stop action which is why I'm exhausted! And sadly my camera is really awful so I didn't take any pictures, but as soon as I get some, I will send them out. It was a fantastic day and if you want any more details or if I confused you about anything, let me know.

Also, for some good news, we got an apartment in Minneapolis!!! It's a 2-bedroom townhome. It's only available starting September 1st though, so now it looks like Zeke might fly out early to make it to orientation and my parents and I will leave around Aug. 29th. It is such a blessing to have an apartment because the day before they called us with the apartment, they had pretty much said "it's not looking good. you should look elsewhere." Another blessing is we changed rental trucks to Penske which was cheaper than Budget and we can pick it up here in Provo instead of driving down to Cedar City.

Okay, I've written for long enough. I love you girls!!! I want to read some blogs from you girls too.