A Wedding Weekend

My friends Ryan Miller and his (now wife) Jackie were married this weekend. I was in the wedding, along with Kai and Kevin, among others. The best man didn't want to give a speech, so Ryan, Kai and I gave it. More on that later.

The wedding was at Forest Park in St. Louis. The weather was AMAZING. They seriously could not have possibly had better weather. I'm not sure how they got a 76 degree day in early September, but on our wedding in early October we set record highs at about 95. It seems like the awesome weather would be nothing but a good thing, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. Being the nicest day in months, apparently all of St. Louis decided to go to the zoo. I left the house at 10:30, picked up Kai, and headed to Forest Park. On a normal day, we would've gotten there by around 11:00. Saturday was no ordinary day. The traffic on Hampton entering the park was backed up a bit less than a mile. I figured it would move rather quickly. Boy was I wrong. We sat in traffic for a bit over an hour. It was awful. In that time we moved less than a mile. Wedding parties for other weddings in the park got out and walked. A bride and two bridesmaids walked by at 11:45. We asked when their wedding started.....12:00. Oops. They weren't even dressed yet. We felt pretty sorry for them. A few minutes before, the rest of our wedding party walked to the park. Since we had no one else in the car with us, we couldn't get out (although we seriously considered just parking the car there and walking :-)

So, the wedding went off without a hitch. Abby was amazingly adorable in her new dress that Bobo bought her. I have many many new favorite pictures. One of her pictures was even on the 7:00 news last night!

Where's the wedding??

Such a cheese-er

It was pretty windy, so she decided that she needed her jacket on.
Thanks for coming Sally!

And my new favorite picture. Possibly one of my favorites ever!

Another favorite:

This was the one on the news:We also got a couple of family pictures:

After the ceremony, we got on a party bus and went to three places around town to take pictures. It was pretty exhausting. First, we went to a park. We were there for quite a while. Then we went to Ted Drewes. They give free ice cream to wedding parties. Sweet. We finished up with Laumier Sculpture Park. It was a lot of pictures in all.

Then it was on to the reception. They had a Cardinals baseball theme, which was pretty cool. The table "numbers" were former Cardinals players instead. And the wedding party was introduced to baseball music.

Abby got really upset when I walked in with one of the bridesmaids. She was also upset that she couldn't sit with me at the head table.

The speech went really well. We wrote it the weekend before. It took us four hours to get it together. I think the time we put in was well worth it. We tried to stay as clean as possible, but lets just say there was some pretty good jokes in there. As Kai said "we took you to the edge, but it was up to you to dive in." We'll leave it at that.

The rest of the night was a lot of fun. There was plenty of dancing, although I was exhausted by this point. I tried to get Abby to dance with us. But, the music was just too loud for her. She danced a bit, but not much.


Best of luck Ryan and Jackie. They're currently on their honeymoon in Hawaii. Lucky ducks....