Wedding weekend

This past weekend we embarked only our second all-family plane trip, this time to Chicago for Dan and Kelly's wedding.  This is a big undertaking with two kids, at least in my view.  We each took one kid on Thursday since we had to split up ... and I had a middle seat.  Oomph.  Very fortunately, Malcolm fell asleep after 45 minutes and we made it all right.  If you listen to little Michael, our weekend featured: Kadence, Mayah, Erin, Uncle Brendan, Kelly, Grandma, Grandpa, a gray car (our rental), an elevator, a bus (shuttles at the airport), an airplane, and a hotel.  That more or less sums it up!  We had a wonderful time and were glad to see everybody.  The cousins in particular really seemed to enjoy the visit.

 The wedding itself was beautiful.  Poor Michael didn't make it as the ringbearer, though.  I wasn't surprised at all - I didn't think he'd make it - but the poor guy took off after the third bridesmaid, running down the aisle towards his dad and crying.  We encouraged him to just run the rest of the way down the aisle to me at the front, where he quickly settled down and happily munched on puffs and read "Five Little Monkeys" to himself the rest of the wedding.  Kadence, the flower girl, took off crying after Michael and took a little while longer to calm down with Grandma, but she did great too.  For his part, Malcolm was handed off between Grandma, Grandpa, and Brendan, and did well as long as he had puffs. Amazingly, although we had to roll the pants cuffs several times, at 13 months he fit into the same 24-month outfit that Michael wore to Erin's wedding at 18 months.  Yes, we knew he was a big little guy.  I was just extremely happy to get more than one use out of the outfit.

The wedding reception was also great.  Kelly is very talented at design and it was neat to see the results of all the DIY projects she has been posting about on her wedding blog, from striped paper straws, to mix-and-match painted flower vases, to napkin holders, to table numbers, to paper flowers.  I also was a fan of the Rice Krispie treat wedding cake :)  Congratulations to Dan and Kelly!

We were glad to have some extra time to spend with the extended family.  During one nice lunch in particular at Portillo's, we were lucky to find a back hallway with no traffic where the kids could get up and move around as they pleased, which they definitely took advantage of.  Michael took the opportunity to search for french fries at everyone's place, but also to hang out with Kadence.  Malcolm was his usual sociable self.