St. Louis trip

It's taken me a while to write this one...

At the beginning of October, we went to St. Louis to attend another wedding, this one for my cousin Ariane and her new husband, Eddie. For some reason, this is the only shot we got of her that turned out at all.






Richard had been out of town on business, but was able to fly into St. Louis instead of home. Dad, Evie, and I picked him up at the airport. I would just like to take this opportunity to publicly curse the designers of the airport, parking structures, and surrounding streets of St. Louis. I mean, come on now. Was your goal to annoy, frustrate, and waste the time of anyone who has a reason to go there? If it was, let me just say that you succeeded. Thankfully, we finally found Richard and got out of there.

There were a lot of us out-of-towners at the wedding, so we all stayed on the same floor in the same hotel. I think we overwhelmed the poor desk clerk. It was fun to see so many of my family members, though. It was the first time for Evie to meet some of them. We also found out that there was a monkey convention at the hotel when we were! Service monkeys, I guess. Some rode around in cages, some on people's shoulders. Some wore diapers (cloth diapers!), some wore clothes. Emily and Evie both thought it was so much fun to see all of the monkeys. Richard didn't believe us until he saw them himself - he thought we were all in on a joke on him at first! I told him that it's his family known far and wide for their storytelling prowess (cough... lying... cough cough), not mine.

On Saturday morning, we went to Grant's Farm. The highlight of the trip, besides watching Evie devour an amazing amount of hot dogs, bratwurst, and french fries, was the goat feeding station. You could buy baby bottles full of milk to feed the goats with. The goats would swarm around anyone with a bottle, full or empty. I saw so many kids in tears, scared of the goats.






Em just bossed them around.









Evie needed her Daddy to hold her up and out of the way.












Saturday evening was the wedding. It was beautiful, and Ariane made a lovely bride. Everything was going along wonderfully. The girls both looked beautiful.









Then Evie decided to swallow one of the table decorations (glass stones/flattened marble things) that she had been playing with for the last several hours. (They are under her hands in the first picture.) You know, the minute we decided that she was going to play safely with them since she had been doing so well. She put it in her mouth, and then started choking. I couldn't sweep it out with my fingers, and Rich couldn't either. I panicked, then put her over my knees and pounded on her back. I hoped it would fly out, but she swallowed it instead. After days of checking her dirty diapers, and a trip to the hospital for x-rays, the stone still hasn't been found! The doctor thinks that we probably missed it during a diaper check - I really hope so! Before we decided to leave, I popped Evie into our ringsling and tried to get her to sleep for a while, she was so cranky. Didn't happen, but it was worth a shot.

We were very glad to get home.