benching

The photo above is AWESOME, Louis, Grandpa Bob, and Ben all lined up with their familial noses and other similarities (you can really see it in color, but there’s a lot of business going on in the background in color here).

My family says the birkat ha’mazon (prayer after meals AKA benching) exactly once per year: at the Passover Seder. I’m not sure how often Ben’s family benches at home, but they’ve never done it when I’m around other than at a seder as well. I’m not sure why, but I felt very strongly that we should have our wedding be as traditionally Jewish as we felt comfortable with, including benching at our wedding. We ordered new copies of the new USY (United Synagogue Youth, the Conservative movement’s youth outreach and activities program) bencher and put home-made bookplates in them with our “logo” from the Boulder Parks & Rec department.

Was using an ampersand in Hebrew weird? Yes, but it does look awesome! Also, I’m sorry if I use too many fonts, I like to make different things different fonts… it’s a weakness.

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thank goodness we didn’t have our reception video taped!

In case you somehow missed it, Ben and I can’t dance. Well, we can hug-n-waggle like middle schooler, and I can booty dance, night club style, but we can’t ballroom dance. It’s pretty sad. Oh well.

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awkward moments 2.0

Ben and I though that since it was my parents’ anniversary and almost his parents’ anniversary we should thank them for being awesome parents with mini versions of their wedding cakes!

My parents’ wedding cake was carrot with cream cheese frosting and their caterers thought it was just regular cake and almost dropped it when they picked it up because they weren’t expecting a perfectly dense, moist, carrot cake, but a normal wedding sponge cake instead. It was crooked –or so I’ve heard– there are not photos of it in their album. Oops.

Ben’s parents’ cake was an almond cake with a berry filling and was frozen or late or something like that because there was a huge ice storm the weekend of their wedding. Oops. (I wish I knew the details, but Ben isn’t clear on what they are and I never remember to ask.)

Anyway, we had this awesome idea to thank our parents publicly with tiny cakes. Too bad we never sorted out HOW this was going to happen and just made stuff up as we go along. Like dancing, I’m glad we only had still photographers. Though I wish we’d gotten to try some of the cakes…..

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yeah, I laugh like a hyena

(c) Kokoro Photography

Amanda (one of our photographers), Ben, and I have been working on finalizing our wedding album. It is too many pages. Way too many pages. The standard 30 pages is fine for a Christian wedding, but not a Jewish wedding with multiple parts to it!

Anyway, while looking through our photographs again I’ve found more evidence that I laugh like a hyena and need to cover up my bubbies some more. The seamstress added 1.5″ of extra fabric to the top of my dress to cover them up better, but they apparently still tried to make an attempted escape! Next time, I’ll wear a turtle neck.

PS- I love that even in a b/w photo, you can see the deepness of the purple in my sapphire. Who needs diamonds when you can have purple!

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friend’s toast/roast and I laugh like a drunk

the official version

At Katie and Peter’s wedding (on Saturday, July 4th, 2009) I made a drunken toast based on an xkcd comic published the day before their wedding. They had SO many fabulous blue-fizzy drinks with blue curaçao and DRY ICE. Amazing. I had some alien compulsion to try them all. Oops.

Anyway, Katie decided to get up and say a little unplanned something to us at our wedding too. I have no idea what it was, but this is the photo that I feel shoes my real laugh. The laugh that makes my eyes water, my lungs run out of air, and my torso to double over. I have issues. I can’t stop laughing, it just degrades into little giggles that come back in fits and starts.

unofficial version, by a friend

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flaming bananas!!!!!

“We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the was turning….” Yes, I sang along, while the pastry chef prepped our Bananas Foster.

I wish there were some cool story behind why we decided to go with Bananas Foster instead of cake, but the real reason is that since I have SO many allergies (nuts, berries, chocolate, coffee, and raw citrus being the most prominent) I wanted an ice cream sundae bar instead of cake because I was afraid of being accidently poisoned at a cake tasting. An ice cream sundae bar could have gotten to be quite expensive with all the toppings I was dreaming up, so I pitched the idea of Bananas Foster to Ben and he loved it. There it was: he got to play with fire, and I still got ice cream! Nom.

We’d had a run through of how this was supposed to play out at our menu tasting, but we’d used REGULAR rum, this time we got to make a BIG FLAME with Bacardi 151. See our “OMG it’s on fire” faces? At least the chef wasn’t afraid?

At our tasting, staff members kept poking their heads into the ballroom because it SMELLED SO GOOD. The Bananas Foster wafted down the halls! Now, it’s on the menu at the restaurant. They even bought the flambe carts just for us because the trial was a bit of a disaster with a lighter and induction burner. Not a disaster really, just kind of lame looking. The flambe cart was awesome though. I hope they added our dessert to the restaurant menu because it’s tasty, and not just as a way to justify the cart :/

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hora!

Amazing.

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happy momma and others dancing

Ben’s mom looks genuinely surprised that her son knows how to fake being able to dance. She also looks like she’s having fun :)

And I’m saying to my dad “Wow am I glad that we only have still photography, I have NO idea what I’m doing!”

PS- I have NO idea what song we danced to. It might have been the Beatle’s “When I’m 64”

Here’s my birthday twin and middle brother dancing. Her husband plays in the jazz band where Daniel used to work, I’m not sure he’s used to having such a good dance partner. In the background are Whitney’s parents, who are also fabulous dancer and good friends of my parents too.

 

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we are the champions/we can (supposedly) dance if we want to

Am I a crazy, or does my hair somehow look like feathers?

Um, who cares if my hair looked like feathers?! We’re married!

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reception seating

Ben and I had our own table cards (both answers are TABLE 1). In tiny, tiny text, on the back on the card is the answer to each “equation” that we gave folks to figure out what table they were at. All of them started with huge numbers and/or had really simple problems 2^2=4, etc. It was fun, though some folks were apparently quite confused.

There are some great photos, that we’re including in our album, of people pondering their table numbers.

Can anyone argue that quarter note over 4/4 doesn’t equal one? I know it really depends on the time signature, but think of andante (walking tempo 92-102 BPM) or something.

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