When You’re Here You’re Family

So my brother’s getting married to wife 1.0, Lauren.  We all dutifully head out to Seattle for the festivities, dry as they may be (I’ve been to two dry weddings in my life.  The next one I’m bringing a flask). 

As it turns out, Lauren’s twin sister Shelby ends up going into labor the morning of the rehearsal dinner.  For reasons I don’t know, this causes the rehearsal dinner to be moved from my brother’s house to Olive Garden.  Yes, you heard me right, Olive Garden. 

Now the exciting part of this, in addition to getting to sit on chairs on castors, is that our end of the table is permitted, or just did it anyway, to order wine.  But that’s only the beginning of the exciting times we had.

A few minutes after our party is seated at a long banquet table (there were probably 20 of us),  Shelby arrives with her newborn.  Yes, you heard me right again, She gave birth in the morning, and showed up at Olive Garden that evening….with the baby.

Tell me more. Does it get better?  Why yes it does.  Early into the evening, the women of family gather round in the corner of Olive Garden to teach Shelby how to breastfeed.  Now I’m a fairly open minded fellow, but having a La Leche League hands on breastfeeding seminar in the middle of dinner at Olive Garden is going a bit overboard.

Later on, the wait staff gather round Shelby’s end of the table to sing Happy Birthday…on the baby’s actual birth day.  The look of discomfort on their faces was something to behold.

Oh yeah, and our waiter was a dwarf.