A Las Vegas Wedding

It was June 10 or 11. I got a phone call from my brother M. He was opening for my other brother, Br. Could I please retreat to a private area of the house for some very secret conversation? Once the stage was set, the bomb was dropped.

Br. wanted to take his lovely lady (K.) to Vegas and get married. Next weekend. Did we have plans?? He wanted to take us (and the rest of our, and K.'s, extended family) along. The really fun part was that the whole affair was to be a surprise for K. Now tell me, what girl doesn't want to be surprised with her own wedding?!

Oh. And an engagement, because that was still to be done.

Before you think that all involved are crazy or insane, June 24th has special significance to Br. and K. So although Br. had been planning to propose and eventually marry this girl, suddenly, it made prefect sense to get 'er done in the next two weeks.

After much scrambling, Br. managed to book K. a week of holidays, arrange flights and rooms for 26 people, plan a wedding, a reception and a honeymoon. Not only that, but he managed to have custom ordered rings ready to go 4 days before the wedding. Everyone flew out on carefully planned flights to stay at carefully picked hotels with strict instructions to be indoors by midnight on the 23rd so as not to run into the Happy (Half Unsuspecting) Couple before the Big Day.

<--I caught my brother M.'s fiancee peeking at the rings while we were at the airport.

We've pulled a number of adventures in our family but even this was ambitious. In the end, there were minimal glitches, K. was surprised with a special wedding that family was able to attend and even Br. received a surprise - 3 of his bestest buddies made it to Sin City for the big event.

Today, everyone is back at home. The newlyweds have returned to their jobs. It should be fun to hear the news spread through our small town. My brothers have always been known for their joie de vie and their half-baked schemes. The women in my family are masters of the Last-Minute-Plan-Change. We can take a lump of chaos and mash it into some semblance of scheduled entertainment - even if the entertaining factor is watching everyone get where they're supposed to be on time. I think that the success of this latest adventure is the culmination of many years of practice.

I'm looking forward to the next Big Adventure. Knowing Brother Br., he'll need to top this one sometime.