Picking the Date, or the Trials and Tribulations of an Enormous Family
Monday, September 28, 2009
I have a big family. My father has six step-brothers and sisters who are also his first cousins by blood (my grandmother married her sister's husband after her sister died). They all have families and kids of their own, with the majority of them girls and are now between the ages of 18 and 32. The last few years have been rife with weddings in our family. Almost all of them live in Indiana, which has meant a fair bit of traveling for me and my immediate family, being in Texas.
So shortly after I announced our engagement, I discovered that two of my cousins were engaged as well. One is planning her wedding for September of 2010, which I figured wouldn't be an issue since we wanted to marry in May. The second one, however, was not only planning her wedding in May, but couldn't really alter it at all as hers was fixed around her graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy! Ouch.
At the time Scott and I figured that our wedding date would be set by the cruise we chose for our honeymoon. After looking over the options for a cruise sailing from Galveston, we decided on one that would stop at ports in the Bahamas and Key West. The only problem was that this cruise is only offered once a month in 2010. The one in May conflicted with my cousin's wedding. So we decided to book the one sailing June 13, and plan the wedding for June 12.
As I wrote in the previous post, however, finding a venue that we liked and at a price we could stomach didn't bode well for June 12. So we settled on June 6, one week before the cruise, figuring that this would actually be kind of nice as we'd have a chance to go home and unwind from wedding insanity (wedsanity?) and pack for the cruise (rather than have to worry about that with all the other wedding preparations). But another cousin was to graduate high school on June 5, which would mean that his family would most likely not make it to the wedding.
Some of you might wonder that I'm so concerned about having all my cousins at the wedding (or as many as realistically possible). You'd think that in a family of 30+ cousins in my generation I'd not be likely to be close to many of them. But my parents put in a lot of effort to visit them regularly, so I did grow up close to them. And the cousin whose May wedding and Naval Academy graduation presented the first conflict actually lived in Texas for a few years when we were kids, so we're even closer.
Anyway, after some hemming and hawing, and some stress, we decided (again on the suggestion of my ingenious mother) to move it to May 30. Not only was this date not blocked off on anybody's calendars as far as I could tell, but it was the Sunday before Memorial Day. That meant that those traveling from out of state would most likely have that day off, hopefully making it less of a hardship for them to travel to Texas. Of course, the cost of travel arrangements on a holiday weekend might offset that, but I repeated to myself my mom's mantra: There is nothing perfect in this world. Any weekend we pick is going to have SOME issues. Besides, this way I still get my May wedding.
