Dara's Wedding

Daras Wedding,
originally uploaded by Helen Norris.

So after lots of planning, Dara and Zach got married on April 18th. The wedding was at the Rockefeller Lodge in San Pablo, a very nice place. There were lots of guests, Zach is from a large family, and there was a great turnout from Doug's family also. Dara looked beautiful, she wore my dress. Aisling and Dara's friend Emily were bridesmaids and wore lovely green dresses. And Aidan was, of course, the cutest baby around. Gordon officiated, so the ceremony was brief. The food was served by the catering company at the Rockefeller, Partytime catering, and I highly recommend them. The food was good, and the service was excellent. We brought the drinks and the cake ourselves, and Dara decorated and prepared flowers. All in all it was a lovely day. Photos can be seen here.

We had several out of town guests, including my mother who came over from Ireland and Gordon's brother and sister-in-law from Omaha. We did some sightseeing and other things after the wedding. Aidan had an accident at Dim Sum on Saturday, they may never let us back! Aisling insisted on taking my mother to various thrift stores, her favorite, and we also did some of the tourist haunts in San Francisco. Unfortunately, the Boudin museum was closed. We also went to Figaro at the Berkeley Rep - opera, not exactly my cup of tea! All in all, we had a good visit with my mother and she seemed to enjoy it.

Dara's wedding shower

Saturday we had a wedding shower for Dara at our house. Aisling was the hostess and she arranged the food and the games. We had it "catered" by L&L Hawaiian Barbeque, Dara's favorite, and Nan brought a tiramisu and a chocolate cake.

The turnout was good, a lot of Dara's future inlaws came. We ate and mingled and then Aisling started the games. I wasn't that enthused at the thought of some of the games, but I have to admit that Aisling was totally right, they were a big hit. The first game involved breaking into two teams and using garbage bags, paper towels and grocery store bags to create wedding dresses. The two teams were really competitive. The team Aisling was on went all-out with the paper towel-train and ruffle. The other team made a veil out of a bag from Luckys. Another popular game was the underwear game. Aisling and I had bought several pairs of plain white cotton underwear, which we distributed during the shower. Then all the guests used markers and scissors to decorate the underwear as Dara's honeymoon underwear. Then Dara had to model them for us. I have never seen a group of women get so quiet as they did when they were decorating those underwear! The winning pair were decorated with prison bars. We also played games that involved checking out what was in everyone's purse. Nan had the most unusual item, a sand dollar. We also had a game where we tried to identify various spices, just by a smelling and looking.

We then had gifts. She got really nice gifts, various household items including sheet sets and a coffee pot. However, Victoria, Zach's mom, had a very elaborate presentation of several outfits for various moments in marriage, including the Donna Reed and the combat outfit. It was really cute!

Photos of the shower are posted here.

March Sadness

Every year in March I get into at least one NCAA bracket pool. I don't usually do that well, but this year I think I've hit a new low! I believe I am dead last in each of the pools that I'm in. Apparently my strategy of picking the Catholic universities through the sweet sixteen isn't working. It seemed pretty sensible to me, and after all, Marquette *almost* beat Stanford. However, we're down to the final four now, and I have two of the four, Memphis and Kansas. I am also one of the few people to pick Kansas to win it all. So if Memphis can beat UCLA and Kansas can beat North Carolina and then Memphis, I could make up some real ground. So let's all root for the center of the country over the coasts!