Same events as the previous post, different title, just to be cute, and because it's really true :-( and also because I need to write all these posts tonight.
Three weddings: May 29 in Massachusetts (we drove with the whole family); June 19, close to home; October 10 in California (only K and I went, it was a lovely getaway).
There wasn't actually a funeral (my FIL was cremated and my MIL still had his ashes) only a memorial service and I wasn't there.
Kelvin graduated from 8th grade and here are some photos of that day and the reception:
photos will be inserted later
K's grandma's 90th birthday party was a beautiful celebration:
photos will be inserted later
Showing posts with label Weddings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weddings. Show all posts
Saturday, December 31, 2016
2016 Maker: Wedding Edition
My dear friend J got married in June and I helped by making tons of very "Pinterest-y"things I'd never made before to decorate her wedding shower and her wedding reception. It was lots of work, but lots of fun too, and oh, so pretty, I couldn't stop photographing! I made 30+ pinwheels (gluing paper to have two pretty sides), 12 folded paper rosettes (that my dad helped me with), and 10+ double or triple colored tissue paper pompoms (too bad I don't have good photos of those here, you can see them mostly in the background).
Monday, September 01, 2014
New (to me) Wedding Music
This summer I went to two weddings which couldn't have been more different and I want to share some of the music since I don't know if I can or should share photos. (maybe in a another post?)
Two weekends ago we went to Philadelphia to attend my husband's Brazilian/Chilean postdoc colleague (not tenured at UPenn!) who is a really dear friend of ours. I met the bride at the wedding, but my husband had already stayed at their house so he knew her -- such a lovely young woman!
The bride walked in to "The Book of Love" and I couldn't believe I had never heard this delightfully moving song (covered by Peter Gabriel). I'm sure you know it, in case you don't here is a HQ youtube version I can't stop listening to:
There's also a live rendition by Peter Gabriel and while the orchestra and the backup singer are great, he's more speaking than singing in certain parts. Blogger wouldn't let me have three embedded videos, I don't know WHY!! :-( so it's this one here.
At the other wedding, the bride walked in with a live (and extra slow, because it was too hard for the pianist) version of this pretty earworm that apparently is all the rage at weddings all over the place (because of Twilight, apparently):
And I also gather (from YouTube comments) that "The Book of Love" has been in quite a few movies & TV shows and the cover was actually recorded for a movie (that I learned from Wikipedia).
I'll try to find some wedding photos that don't show people to share.
Two weekends ago we went to Philadelphia to attend my husband's Brazilian/Chilean postdoc colleague (not tenured at UPenn!) who is a really dear friend of ours. I met the bride at the wedding, but my husband had already stayed at their house so he knew her -- such a lovely young woman!
The bride walked in to "The Book of Love" and I couldn't believe I had never heard this delightfully moving song (covered by Peter Gabriel). I'm sure you know it, in case you don't here is a HQ youtube version I can't stop listening to:
There's also a live rendition by Peter Gabriel and while the orchestra and the backup singer are great, he's more speaking than singing in certain parts. Blogger wouldn't let me have three embedded videos, I don't know WHY!! :-( so it's this one here.
At the other wedding, the bride walked in with a live (and extra slow, because it was too hard for the pianist) version of this pretty earworm that apparently is all the rage at weddings all over the place (because of Twilight, apparently):
And I also gather (from YouTube comments) that "The Book of Love" has been in quite a few movies & TV shows and the cover was actually recorded for a movie (that I learned from Wikipedia).
I'll try to find some wedding photos that don't show people to share.
Monday, July 14, 2014
I Missed the World Cup Final Game Because...
... we had to be at our friends' wedding that started at the same time as the game!! :-(
Well, maybe you wouldn't care, but for me, and for many people around the world who really love and enjoy watching the World Cup this is/was extremely exasperating!
When I found out the date of their wedding (the day after missing the engagement party which my family attended last December) I immediately texted both the bride and groom and told them that they should be aware that they had scheduled it for the day of the final!! How could they do that?
But they didn't care!! :-( And then, they got really, really lucky because Brasil (sorry, I will follow my practice on FB & will use the Portuguese spelling here) was not in the final after that devastating loss.*
We love these friends dearly, though, and because of some complex circumstances (her dad being against their relationship & marriage and not providing any financial support), they needed all of their friends to come together to help them, her mom, and his parents and family so they could have the wedding of their dreams. (she's in her first year of medical school and really wanted/needed to get marry this summer, precisely in the middle of her 4 week break)
So... yeah, not only were we at the wedding, but we and three other families (including my only local Brazilian friend) were "honorary families" and we were actually honored in the ceremony by being escorted by the groom and walking in (and then, immediately going to the cafeteria adjacent to the church to finish preparing the food -- we didn't even get to take photos with the bride & groom! ;-( ).
Sigh... I'm writing all this because I'm really, really exhausted after we edited their reception video until 3 am last night after I'd gone to four stores to buy ingredients to make punch. I was responsible for all the drinks of the reception and I didn't stop spooning sherbet into lemon-lime soda for about 3-4 hours. Sigh...
And I want to sleep, but my husband is watching the game online. An excellent game, a CLASSIC final with Argentina vs. Germany, so of course I'm blogging!
In case you're not aware of it, most if not ALL people in Brasil were rooting for Germany and against Argentina -- isn't that crazy? Brazilians are so "anti-Argentina" that it's almost annoying. The BBC published/posted an article explaining this phenomenon.
OK, I'm all over the place, as always! I want to try to post some photos of the wedding as well as more commentary on the world cup (interesting links), I hope I can do that!
P.S. It was a beautiful wedding and reception (though it was positively exhausting!)...
* I wanted to write more about that, at least share a bunch of links. For now I will just say that during our drive back on Thursday I thought more about the game, felt very very sad and shed a few tears. But my husband told me to stop and said I could only cry SEVEN tears, one for each goal, ha ha ha :-( really dark humor! In any case, I probably did cry only about seven tears, it was a pretty short-lived outpouring of grief!
Well, maybe you wouldn't care, but for me, and for many people around the world who really love and enjoy watching the World Cup this is/was extremely exasperating!
When I found out the date of their wedding (the day after missing the engagement party which my family attended last December) I immediately texted both the bride and groom and told them that they should be aware that they had scheduled it for the day of the final!! How could they do that?
But they didn't care!! :-( And then, they got really, really lucky because Brasil (sorry, I will follow my practice on FB & will use the Portuguese spelling here) was not in the final after that devastating loss.*
We love these friends dearly, though, and because of some complex circumstances (her dad being against their relationship & marriage and not providing any financial support), they needed all of their friends to come together to help them, her mom, and his parents and family so they could have the wedding of their dreams. (she's in her first year of medical school and really wanted/needed to get marry this summer, precisely in the middle of her 4 week break)
So... yeah, not only were we at the wedding, but we and three other families (including my only local Brazilian friend) were "honorary families" and we were actually honored in the ceremony by being escorted by the groom and walking in (and then, immediately going to the cafeteria adjacent to the church to finish preparing the food -- we didn't even get to take photos with the bride & groom! ;-( ).
Sigh... I'm writing all this because I'm really, really exhausted after we edited their reception video until 3 am last night after I'd gone to four stores to buy ingredients to make punch. I was responsible for all the drinks of the reception and I didn't stop spooning sherbet into lemon-lime soda for about 3-4 hours. Sigh...
And I want to sleep, but my husband is watching the game online. An excellent game, a CLASSIC final with Argentina vs. Germany, so of course I'm blogging!
In case you're not aware of it, most if not ALL people in Brasil were rooting for Germany and against Argentina -- isn't that crazy? Brazilians are so "anti-Argentina" that it's almost annoying. The BBC published/posted an article explaining this phenomenon.
OK, I'm all over the place, as always! I want to try to post some photos of the wedding as well as more commentary on the world cup (interesting links), I hope I can do that!
P.S. It was a beautiful wedding and reception (though it was positively exhausting!)...
* I wanted to write more about that, at least share a bunch of links. For now I will just say that during our drive back on Thursday I thought more about the game, felt very very sad and shed a few tears. But my husband told me to stop and said I could only cry SEVEN tears, one for each goal, ha ha ha :-( really dark humor! In any case, I probably did cry only about seven tears, it was a pretty short-lived outpouring of grief!
Tuesday, April 08, 2014
Epic Wedding Shower!
I can't resist, I have to post these photos!
Many of them are a bit
blurry because there wasn't enough light to photograph without flash. :(I edited them and cropped some (a first for me! I never take the time to edit, but I'm learning).
I was only responsible for the drinks, my passion fruit mousse, and helping set things up (thankfully, because I was up most of the night on Saturday with my husband who was making a movie for the shower on iMovie). And I also gave suggestions to the bride's mother which helped her plan some of the decorations. This shower was a group effort, although the bride's mom made most of the decorations and the food. Oh, and I made prints of the couple's photos and put them in picture frames from my house, and prepared a banner (inspired by this one) with the bride & groom's names, but didn't take any good photos of it.
The "Lovebirds" ;-)
aren't they adorable? :-)
The drinks
(plain water/seltzer water with fruit and punch made with Hagen Daz sorbet)
An overview:
Decorations:
The Food! (mostly Romanian)
The Desserts:
(my passion fruit mousse* is in the tiny cups)
The Gift table:
Wasn't it a lovely shower? :)
* I make it using frozen passion fruit pulp by Goya, if anyone is wondering, blended (in a blender, obviously) with condensed milk and "La Crema" heavy cream.
Thursday, July 18, 2013
45 Years Ago Today...
...my parents got married! I hope that in 5 years we can have a wonderful celebration for them with the whole family for their 50th wedding anniversary!
I posted one photo here back in 2009.
I posted one photo here back in 2009.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Six Weddings, a Funeral & a Baby Shower
So much crazy and appalling stuff going on in the world (a rapture & end of the world that didn't come, deadly tornadoes once more, this time not in Alabama, but in Missouri) and here I am, navel-gazing. It feels 100% inappropriate, but it's either this or not blogging for me because that's what I feel like blogging today.
A friend's facebook update from this weekend: "
that only means you have lots and lots of friends and that's a wonderful thing! I missed literally hundreds of weddings in the 15 years I've been out of Brazil. I haven't gone to one in a long time. :(" --> for the record, of the events above, I participated of the funeral -- just the viewing, and the baby shower.
And I had to post another comment to clarify my previous one: "[I'm] sorry, but your update just reminded me of how hard it is to keep moving to new places every few years and the fact that I left 25 years of life behind by moving to another country. I'm usually reconciled to our decision to do that most of the time, but once in a while, it hurts a little bit."
Yes, it does. Sometimes it hurts a whole lot. I must be hormonal right now (I never know when stuff is going on in that dept. in my life, have never known, since I'm 100% "irregular"), but still... being an expatriate is hard and once in a while I need to have a good cry about it, so maybe today is the day. It also helps if I write on my journal and blogging will probably help too.
I'm thrilled with our new house, our neighborhood, the boys' school + church community (both adjacent to a boarding academy) and the prospect of living here for many years. However, as the school year comes to a close and we attend big (Spring Concert) and small (classroom "Author's tea" & Sports award night) events at the boys' school, it becomes clear that most people have lots of friends and have been part of this community for years and I'm still pretty much a newcomer who doesn't really belong.
This is a feeling that I've long learned to live with and I need to say that we do have a few good friends already. It didn't help that in the past year we lived in a really small house and weren't able to entertain much, only our Brazilian friends, so we weren't able to interact with a lot of people that we wanted to come over. I'm sure that after we have more people visit us we can make more friends.
The (maybe sad) truth is that since we left Brazil nearly 15 years ago, I only began to be truly happy after I felt part of a virtual community of like-minded friends through this blog. Only then I stopped talking about going back to Brazil. I wrote all about it in a post (still one of my favorites), titled How Blogging Changed my Life from November 2006.
It's been five years in this "virtual life" and although I continue to love blogging and blog reading, the truth is that I need "real life" friends too. It doesn't feel good at all not to have any really close and dear friends to invite to my 40th birthday party. I dreamed of having that in Brazil, of assembling all my dearest "old friends," but that's not gonna happen. We have a house instead (bitter irony, no? I HATE HATE money again. I envy rich people with a vengeance. whatever, useless, stupid rage).
So, yeah. It doesn't make me feel any better to write this post. I understand that we moved here one year ago and that I need to work hard to make new friends. The hard part is that it's very hard to make "true friends," especially now that the standards have been raised dramatically by my "bloggy" interactions with brilliant, caring, wonderful people like you. I truly feel partly handicapped by my addiction to blogging (which otherwise I usually see as a good thing).
Thanks for listening, those who were patient enough to read the whole thing.
I don't really feel bad for missing hundreds of weddings in the past 15 years. I enjoy leading an adventurous expatriate life. So I have to lift my head high and rejoice that I have so many friends (and family) all over the world and in addition to them, I have lots more wonderful friends online. Thanks for being there for me!
A friend's facebook update from this weekend: "
that only means you have lots and lots of friends and that's a wonderful thing! I missed literally hundreds of weddings in the 15 years I've been out of Brazil. I haven't gone to one in a long time. :(" --> for the record, of the events above, I participated of the funeral -- just the viewing, and the baby shower.
And I had to post another comment to clarify my previous one: "[I'm] sorry, but your update just reminded me of how hard it is to keep moving to new places every few years and the fact that I left 25 years of life behind by moving to another country. I'm usually reconciled to our decision to do that most of the time, but once in a while, it hurts a little bit."
Yes, it does. Sometimes it hurts a whole lot. I must be hormonal right now (I never know when stuff is going on in that dept. in my life, have never known, since I'm 100% "irregular"), but still... being an expatriate is hard and once in a while I need to have a good cry about it, so maybe today is the day. It also helps if I write on my journal and blogging will probably help too.
I'm thrilled with our new house, our neighborhood, the boys' school + church community (both adjacent to a boarding academy) and the prospect of living here for many years. However, as the school year comes to a close and we attend big (Spring Concert) and small (classroom "Author's tea" & Sports award night) events at the boys' school, it becomes clear that most people have lots of friends and have been part of this community for years and I'm still pretty much a newcomer who doesn't really belong.
This is a feeling that I've long learned to live with and I need to say that we do have a few good friends already. It didn't help that in the past year we lived in a really small house and weren't able to entertain much, only our Brazilian friends, so we weren't able to interact with a lot of people that we wanted to come over. I'm sure that after we have more people visit us we can make more friends.
The (maybe sad) truth is that since we left Brazil nearly 15 years ago, I only began to be truly happy after I felt part of a virtual community of like-minded friends through this blog. Only then I stopped talking about going back to Brazil. I wrote all about it in a post (still one of my favorites), titled How Blogging Changed my Life from November 2006.
It's been five years in this "virtual life" and although I continue to love blogging and blog reading, the truth is that I need "real life" friends too. It doesn't feel good at all not to have any really close and dear friends to invite to my 40th birthday party. I dreamed of having that in Brazil, of assembling all my dearest "old friends," but that's not gonna happen. We have a house instead (bitter irony, no? I HATE HATE money again. I envy rich people with a vengeance. whatever, useless, stupid rage).
So, yeah. It doesn't make me feel any better to write this post. I understand that we moved here one year ago and that I need to work hard to make new friends. The hard part is that it's very hard to make "true friends," especially now that the standards have been raised dramatically by my "bloggy" interactions with brilliant, caring, wonderful people like you. I truly feel partly handicapped by my addiction to blogging (which otherwise I usually see as a good thing).
Thanks for listening, those who were patient enough to read the whole thing.
I don't really feel bad for missing hundreds of weddings in the past 15 years. I enjoy leading an adventurous expatriate life. So I have to lift my head high and rejoice that I have so many friends (and family) all over the world and in addition to them, I have lots more wonderful friends online. Thanks for being there for me!
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Beach Wedding
It was beautiful, unforgettable, really. The first (and probably only) beach wedding any of us had ever been to (at this beach). I took pictures with my friend's camera, but only after the ceremony was over, since, as usual, I played the flute and sang (a duet! with my husband! our first ever duet! I would have cried if I knew everyone could her us singing, but as it were, only the bride and groom, and the people closest to them could hear. The bride and groom didn't cry either, so that helped. We sang this song, if you're curious). I hope you like them. I can't wait to see those taken by the photographer. Oh, and it was last Sunday afternoon... from 5:30 pm on.The cake table (poor cake started to melt a bit because it was too hot):
The fruit table (traditional at Brazilian wedding receptions):
The favors:
Bride and daughter:
Groom and son:
The whole family, drawn to the sea:
And my boys too:
We were all matching, so we tried, not very successfully, to take some family pictures:
The photographer (a friend, not a professional) and the bride:
It was a little too confusing during the reception, and even the ceremony (children were playing and being noise, people were photographing and moving around), but it was still beautiful in spite of that!
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Here in Brazil #3: Wedding Album
This is how the church looked (and this is a fairly conservative decoration for Brazilian standards, there are usually tons of different kinds of flowers)
Don't they look cute? (I met this little girl's mom when we were both 8 years old :)
The dress that caused all the trouble...
Our family in style
Isn't he just adorable?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
