Wedding Weekend-Rehearsal at the Church

Friday afternoon after the bridal luncheon we all came home and hurriedly finished all the last minute preparations for the rehearsal dinner in just a few hours. Mom, Tracy, Ginger, Linda, and Kaley, my brother Caleb's girlfriend, all helped Mom finish her cupcake favors. I was in charge of making sure Eli got a good nap. We wanted him to be on his BEST behavior for the rehearsal and for the dinner afterward.

Ginger and Linda went to Savoie's, the restaurant, to decorate while everyone came to the church for the rehearsal. Andrea's church is really old and I love old churches. I wish I'd had the time to really photograph it well, but I was short on time as you can probably guess :)

The inside of the church

I mentioned in a previous post that Andrea's family is Greek orthodox, so she and my brother were going to have a traditional Greek orthodox wedding. I didn't know anything about this type of religion or wedding, other than what I'd seen in the movies, so here's a little informative website that describes the actual wedding ceremony in detail for those of you interested.

Andrea knew it was bad luck for her to walk down the aisle the day before her wedding, so her cousin, Brittney, did that for her but they traded places once they were at the altar.

Josh and Andrea wearing the traditional Greek crowns

Eli was the ring bearer for their service. A year ago when they asked me if he would be in their wedding, I thought it was a great idea. In my mind, I knew Eli would be close to 2, but I thought I'd be able to reason with him, he'd be able to stay up a little later, he'd follow directions better, I'd be able to bribe him (ha ha!), etc. As the day for their wedding grew closer and closer, I went into panic mode. My expectations before had been very unrealistic. I knew that Eli could be uncooperative. I knew that he still HAD to have a nap every day and if he didn't he would be SUPER CRANKY. There is NO reasoning with an almost 2 year old. What was I thinking???? I made sure to tell Josh and Andrea that we would do our best, but I couldn't promise anything more than that. They both said that he would do fine and to not worry. Fingers crossed...

If the way he did at the rehearsal was any indication of how he would do at the wedding, then we were home free! Eli hit it off with the flower girl, Mattie, and she took him under her wing. He followed her around everywhere! Not only were they cute and adorable, but they walked down the aisle together PERFECTLY! I was so happy! Josh wasn't able to make it to the rehearsal at the church, so the only problem we ran into was what to do with Eli after he made it to the front. For the wedding, he would go and sit with Josh, but since he wasn't there Eli went from me, to Grammy, and then to Pop until the rehearsal was over.

So sweet!

We had to practice going up and down the aisle several times in order to get things right and to get the timing right. It was hard enough keeping an almost 4 year old and an almost 2 year old focused for one trip down the aisle, so you can imagine how hard it was for us to keep them focused for 3 trips down the aisle. While we were waiting on the stairs during our third run through, I gave Eli the camera to look at pictures. Little boy genius has figured out which button to push to take a picture, so he took several pictures of the bridesmaids. Some of them were pretty funny; we found out that he's a leg man :) I call this picture "View of a Toddler." This is what they see all day long, lots and lots of legs.


The third trip down the aisle was the last one for Eli. He decided to park it on the floor after that and just let the rest of us do the work.


Luckily for all of us, the third time was the charm and we all got to go to the restaurant for the rehearsal dinner. Eli was very ready to see his Daddy! I was so proud of how well he did at the rehearsal; I was keeping my fingers crossed that he'd do well at the dinner as well :)