For anyone living under rocks, Friday, September 18th, 2009 I got married to the most wonderful, hottest awesome girl out there. Needless to say the past few months have been out of control. Follow the wedding planning with a weekend in the woods then a fairly unique trip to Mexico and I’m about 15 blog posts behind… and that’s not even considering all I’ve got to catch up on with work, which oddly enough, is why I’m writing this. Welcome to my brain lube.

In case you’d like the back-story on the wedding, check out http://www.ryandjay.com for all things leading up to the wedding. You’ll note that the posts stop at the exact same moment posts here at jaythornton.net stopped, exactly one workweek before the wedding. By then, we were in crunch time. So now I’ll try to get everyone caught up to at least the wedding day… here goes.

The both of us were lucky enough to have less than a full workweek the week leading up to the wedding. I took Thursday and Friday off and my lovely wife added Wednesday to hers, which worked out well given that out-of-town guests actually started showing up on Monday. Ry’s mother was first to arrive, followed by Jess and Ambrose on Wednesday and the rest of the guys/girls and family on Thursday, just in time for the rehearsal dinner.

I spent a decent amount of time early in the week repairing the quad after some internal breakage the prior weekend at the bachelor party. Thanks to Ben for helping break and almost single-handedly repairing the 400 for the coming weekend. I had a great time hanging out in the garage and turning wrenches and I’m sure he did too. One final break on Wednesday and we were hoping and praying for a second overnight delivery before Saturday morning… but we’ll get back to that.

Ry spent the bulk of her time getting ready, organizing all those things that brides-to-be do on the day of the wedding and hanging out with Ben’s wife while we worked. We spent Wednesday night hanging out with Ambrose at the house, enjoying good conversation and better adult beverages, preparing for the herd to show up the next day.

Thursday, rehearsal dinner day, opened kind of quietly. I was starting to feel the organizer’s stress as I coordinated plane landings/airport pickups of two out-of-towners, Pat and Carl, while trying to make sure my Dad, Grandmother, and out-of-town usher all made it to the rehearsal on time. Oddly enough, everyone made it there on time but the bridesmaids. There, I said it. The rehearsal went well (read very quickly) and except for that moment when I was facing my bride-to-be and it got real, really quick, the whole event is pretty much a blur. Dinner was great at my mom’s house. We all ate way too much then moved the party to Eddy Haskells for a night cap.

Everyone retired to their various sleeping spots for the night around 1am with all plans for the big day loosely prepared. The girls would be out of the house by about 10am and all the guys would be to the house for steaks and beer somewhere around noon. Knowing my guys, I told them to be at the house my 10:30am, the first ones arrived about 11:45, I got there a little after noon after picking up the afore mentioned quad parts, and Mark got there about 1pm. I’m glad I said 10:30 and not noon. We would have never made it.

Steaks were great, the day was perfect and overall, I had a really relaxing and fun time. We passed the guitar around and the guys all got to know each other by way of embarrassing Jay stories. It was really great that everyone got along so well. We all got cleaned up and dressed after a late lunch and about 5pm we shoved off, picked up the little man from day care en route and made it to Dickson street right on time, if not a little early.

After a bunch of photos, a little direction from our awesome coordinator, and a lot of waiting for the girl pictures to come to a close, we were underway… and the rest, is for another blog-post.