a wedding shower for J...

The happy and beautiful bride-to-be outshines the awful quality of this picture! (forgot my camera at home so this is from my cell phone)  

There were not a terrible lot of free weekends after the holidays before L & J's wedding, so s.i.l. A and I got together with J's dear friend, sister, and other bridesmaids to throw her one big shower rather than her having to go to 2 or 3 of them.  S had inventory the same weekend as the shower, so the kids and I headed off to the farm by ourselves.

Saturday was the shower and unfortunately there were some icky roads and also it was on a long weekend (Martin Luther King Jr day), so there weren't as many people that came as we had hoped.  But we had a blast nonetheless.  J's friend sent out the invites and brought all the food, L&J helped us take care of renting their church fellowship hall, and A and I came up with devotions and a shower game.  Dear A found the shower game and it went perfectly with the invites which asked everyone to bring a recipe for J.  We gave everyone sheets of paper, and then J came out and modeled the lovely apron and kitchen utensils as pictured above for just a minute or so.  Then she hid again and we gave everyone 3 minutes to write down as many of them as they could remember.  What A and I didn't think was that 5 people got 11 out of 12 right!  If we ever used it again we said we would add more things.

J got some very nice gifts (quite a few people dropped gifts off at the church ahead of time), and we had a good time getting to know the other bridesmaids, and J's friends and family.  G went along with me (thanks Dad and uncle M for watching the boys!) and had a lot of fun too.

The only thing that went wrong was after the shower and only affected me, really.  I slipped on a patch of ice and went down hard whacking my head harder than I have ever done before.  Wasn't knocked out, but definitely discombobulated.  G ran to get my brother L who helped get me on my feet and then drove us to Mom and Dad's.  I had a lump the size of a baked potato by the time we got there!  But no signs of a concussion, just really sore and a major headache for the rest of the weekend.  Felt much better by Monday when we drove home.

We had a great time over the weekend - so much fun to celebrate with the wedding shower, but also fun to get to spend time with family again.  We are so excited to have J as an official part of our family and are looking forward to the wedding!