DC Part 2

I uploaded many of the pictures but it’s harder to find time to sit down and write it all…

Friday we first went to Diana’s new house (Justin’s house, which is now their house) to meet Justin and chat. I got to see her dress and Justin tried on different colors of bow ties to see what would work. It was good to finally meet him, of course. I realized that this was the first time a close friend was marrying someone I hadn’t met. Not that it mattered, but it was good to meet him all the same.

After that, I got my hair cut. Yeah, I spent my brief time in DC getting a haircut. But it had been a really long time–I think close to a year, because I don’t think I was yet pregnant last time I got it cut. I was hating it, and I couldn’t handle the idea of going to the wedding with my hair as it was. I wish I had some idea of what I wanted with my hair or a person I trusted to give free reins to. Anyway.

That night we met up with other friends who live out there (friends of mine from college, most of whom I met on my study abroad to London). We went to a Lebanese restaurant and then back to Jared and Shark’s condo to just hang out. Morgan K. came and met us which was always a treat, and our Morgan got to meet the second Morgan that influenced her name!

Us, Warren, Morgan, Jared G., Jared F., Shark, The G.s’ friend Amanda, and Morgan’s friend Dave. (By the way, I’m not just a neglectful mother: our Morgan had, um, gone through two outfits that day and all I had left in the diaper bag was a onesie. There were more clothes in the car, though.)

The next morning was the sealing in the Washington D.C. temple. The sealing itself was lovely, and I kept crying. I tend to stuff up my emotions as concerns myself, but it made me so happy to see them be married that I couldn’t help it.

It happened to be raining, which made pictures hard for them and us not really explore much. Therefore, I didn’t take a single picture of them, and this is the only one I took of the temple (out the back of the car after we were safe and dry inside):

Morgan K. came and met us at the temple so that we were both able to go. This was a big deal for me because it’s the first time I’ve been away from Morgan. The only other time was when for some reason we were driving two cars and she happened to be asleep in Adrian’s car. So even though we weren’t in the same car, we were also still no more than 20 feet from each other. Anyway, I tried to feed her a lot before and just prayed that she’d be okay. I was a little worried, but I tried to let it go and knew that Morgan K. would be capable of taking care of her (minus feeding her, obviously… I did bring the pump and everything with us but we didn’t have a fridge at the hotel and I didn’t have time that morning so I just had to hope she wouldn’t be hungry). Happily, Morgan slept the whole time we were gone.

Us at the visitor’s center after the sealing. It was so good to have Morgan there! Nice of her to drive all the way from Pittsburgh to see us, and then to come just sit at the temple so we could go, too.

After that we met up with Jared, Jared, and Shark at a burger place downtown. It was good, and the shakes were amazing. It took us forever to get there through the ridiculous traffic, and that was the time of me [first] losing it in the car because I couldn’t handle Morgan crying. I knew she needed to eat, but by the time we got there–feeling doubly bad because they’d been waiting for us, and we were really hungry, too–she had exhausted herself and fell asleep.

After all that we went back to the hotel to chill out a bit (you do kind of need to make adjustments when traveling with a young baby, and we weren’t doing that as much as we maybe should have). We all fell asleep and woke up around the time we should have been already in the car on our way to the reception, which would have been a major problem because it was on a boat so we really really couldn’t be late. Yipes! Luckily the traffic was clear as soon as we got out of downtown and we found a parking garage fairly quickly so we were okay. Hehe.

The boat left right around sunset, so I had fun taking pictures of it during the ring ceremony. (We were too far back to actually see them during the ring ceremony…alas.) Believe it or not this is through a window. Manual focus helps. Later, there were fireworks, too, which were conveniently going off that night for the end of the cherry blossom festival.

This is how Morgan spent a good part of the reception, snuggled with Adrian.

Of all the lame things, this is the only picture I have with Diana, and I didn’t take a single one with Justin, too. It was a bad combination of the rain at the temple and generally needing to pay more attention to Morgan than the camera. Just a little silly since that WAS the reason we were there at all. Hehe. This is at the end of the night as we were leaving the boat.