Mommy Brain?

I think we might both be losing our minds.  Yesterday we had our first big crossing-state-lines adventure sans Yogi and although we lived to tell about it, the whole things smacks of a serious loss of brain cells.  Here's the story.

Last night my cousin got married.  This was a wedding that we definitely wanted to attend, but with travel falling on every other weekend during the month of December, we decided to give the boy a break and leave him at home with my wife's parents who drove in from still another state to help us out.  In light of the fact that we were leaving Yogi at home, we wanted to make the trip as quick as possible.  Our "as quick as possible" plan looked like this:

• Leave home around noon on Saturday


• Drive to the 6 o clock wedding, changing clothes in the hotel room my parents had gotten before hand


• Attend wedding


• Attend reception


• Visit with family and eat cake


• Drive back home in order to make Yogi's usual 3 o clock feeding

We encountered our first hurdle between steps #1 and #2 when I called my Mom to let her know that we would be arriving early.  Go us! The call went something like this:

Me: "Hi Mom, we're about 30 minutes outside of CITY NAME.  Are you guys at the hotel?"

Mom: "You're where?"

Me:We're getting close to CITY NAME"

Mom: "Oh my word honey, the wedding is in CITY NAME 90 MILES SOUTH!"

I have no excuse for this.  I don't know what happened.  I do know that when I got the invitation, I decided to put it directly in the recycling bc I knew I wasn't going to do anything further with it.  In spite of the fact that this cousin lives in our city and we have seen her on a number of occasions during the last few months and discussed this wedding with her at some length, we both got the location all wrong.  I have no idea.  None.

By the time we get our bearings and start heading in the right direction we have just enough time.  Just enough time means speeding and no time for changing clothes.  Or at least no time for changing clothes anywhere but in the car.  So, in the passenger seat I manage to do the following:

• Apply full make-up


• Remove jeans, t-shirt, bra and socks


• Put on strapless bra and wrangle my way into spanx (lovely)


• Slide on dress and manage zipper


• Shove my feet into heels

Once I am dressed, we pull the car over to the side of the road where I get behind the wheel and my wife gets changed into pants and a button-down shirt (this detail will be important later).  We drive into the church parking lot at 5:57.  Shezam!

Then there was the wedding.  This is getting long, so just the highlights:

• The first reading was the Genesis Adam and Eve story.  Love that.


• The sermon included five separate references to marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman.  Love that even more.


• The crux of the sermon was that something unexpected would happen when you put Christ at the center of your marriage. The minister spoke of this unexpectedness in a way that I'm sure he intended to sound like it would be a good thing, but instead sounded vaguely unsettling.  Maybe that was just me.

The reception was 30 miles from the church (30 miles in the away from home direction) at the local Elk's Lodge so my wife decided to pump while I drove.  While I drove my parents called no less than three times to make sure we were still behind them.  Love that too.  Between the ceremony debrief, the pump management and the phone ringing we were ready to get out of the car for the reception.  Apparently my wife was a little TOO ready.

This became obvious when we walked into the reception, greeted the bride and groom with hugs and were met with frank shock.  Somehow my totally together wife walked into the Elk's lodge with her shirt unbuttoned to the waist.  Because of her coat, no one had noticed on the walk in, but once inside it was pretty hard to miss.  She recovered pretty quickly, but man that was a surprise.

The rest of the reception was pretty tame by comparison, but I never did get comfortable with the huge looming elks mounted in every room.  Kind of a strange setting for a celebration if you ask me, but nobody did.  Keeping in step with the Deep South-ness of the whole thing, there was tons of food, lots of liquor and Budweiser and more discussion of hunting season than seemed reasonable for a wedding reception.  The minister sat at the table next to ours and I kept wanting to ask if his frequent references to "Christian" marriage throughout the ceremony was a new qualifier added in since the gays have been trying so hard to get into the game or if it's always been that way.  I honestly wanted to know this, but I couldn't think of a way to ask.

Although I had arrived at the reception with my own Glad-ware (when in Rome, right?) for one very specific reason, we didn't make it to the cake cutting.  My wife's mother loves wedding cake and we thought it would be fun to bring some back to her, but the clock was ticking and we had to get back on the road.

The trip home was relatively uneventful.  The final surprise nudity moment of the night came in a gas station where we were once again changing clothes  and due to my considerable public bathroom phobia, I had suggested that we change in the open space so that we could avoid the "jammed up with a toilet in a tiny stall" clothes changing experience.  I knew it was a risk, but it was late and I didn't really care.  I also thought we had gotten pretty good at changing clothes quickly.  I'm sure you've guessed that we weren't quite fast enough and we managed to surprise some poor soul in the middle of nowhere Mississippi who just needed to use the bathroom and who ultimately decided that it just wasn't worth it.

Six hours, two cups of coffee, one Diet Mountain Dew and lots of music later, we were home.  Yogi had just finished his bottle.

Posted in: Four Months, The Rest of Life, Wha???