Justin and Julie; Jacob, Joel and Jeremy: Off to a wedding and an unexpected relaxing weekend

Justin's sister, Sara, got engaged this past summer and set a wedding date for December. She really wanted us to bring the kids and we didn't have anyone to leave the kids with so, completely and totally not happy about it, we planned to take the boys with us.

As the weekend of the wedding approached, it became very clear to us how difficult it would be to drag the kids to the wedding festivities. Our kids are very schedule oriented and have a lot of trouble handling much change. They also go to bed early and are pretty terrible to be around if we try to keep them up late. Thanksgiving was hard enough with them because meals were happening later than normal and with so much going on around them they couldn't settle down and eat so I think they were also hungry (even though there was tons of food).

The plan for the weekend was that we would not send Jacob to school on Friday because instead we would be making the drive into middle-of-Louisiana and that night there was a family dinner arranged at one of the nicest restaurants in the town everyone was staying in. A 7pm dinner. Our kids go to bed between 7 and 7:30pm.

The next day the wedding was at 1pm. The twins go down for naps around 12:30pm.

Justin's mom was flying in to the Houston airport and driving to the wedding with us and offered to help us out with the kids while we were there, but any amount of help we got there wasn't going to have our kids deal well with messed up sleep schedules, sleeping in a hotel, etc. Not to mention that we felt like it would make the festivities far less enjoyable for her as well.

The Sunday before the wedding, church was completely awful with the boys. They were loud, out of control and made us never want to take them to church again. That evening Justin and I discussed how hard the weekend would be and how much we would want to kill ourselves halfway through.

We toyed with the idea of me missing the family dinner the night before the wedding and just putting the kids to bed at the hotel while Justin had dinner with his family. But then we would still be faced with tired, cranky kids during the ceremony for Saturday too. And I would be stuck sitting in the dark at the hotel with sleeping kids instead of eating a nice dinner.

We finally decided that I would just stay home with the kids and not go at all. It just was not going to work.

Then my dad called two days before Justin would be leaving to let me know that my mom was able to get the day off work and would come and keep the twins so we would only have to take Jacob with us. So my mom drove down from DFW the morning of her birthday to watch the kids for the next 50 hours or so.

And as luck would have it, Jacob was having some tummy trouble that morning so he still missed school, but he also stayed home with the twins and Grandma Mac. Amazingly he didn't have any other tummy trouble after we left.

Since we didn't have the kids with us we were able to have a great time and enjoy seeing family and seeing Sara get married. We know that she had wanted to see the boys too, but it was so much better to not bring them.

Here are some pictures that we got from Justin's dad (we may have forgotten our camera).