Pittsburgh
pamelamyers | October 7, 2013
This past weekend we drove out to Pittsburgh for Elyse’s wedding. It was going to be fun for us, for sure, but it was especially exciting for Sam since it was her first wedding! I tried to explain what a wedding was to her and all she had to hear was there are pretty dresses, flowers, music, dancing, and cake, and she was sold. It helped that she remembered Elyse and Tia from their visit. It made the whole thing more thrilling.
We were worried that the six hour drive would be hard for Sam to handle. We had done it with her once before for his Uncle Joe’s wedding, but she was so young then, it was easy to amuse her. Not to mention, she napped a lot. This time, the night before we left, Mark thought she might enjoy a scavenger hunt. So, early in the morning, I was on the computer frantically looking for clip art images to make a scavenger hunt list she could look at. Finding the images was easy, trying to choose things she is likely to see on the boring Pennsylvania Turnpike was not. But I did a pretty good job, if I do say so myself. Mark’s idea was a pretty good one. She kept amused the entire trip trying to find the things on her list. She barely did anything else. Every time she found an item, I would put a sticker next to it. If she found it more than once, she got another sticker.
Here is her list. As you can see, she found a few other things on our trip that she thought were special enough to merit my drawing them on — a crane, a taxicab, a windmill, and a bulldozer.
Then, we found even more things, so I had to resort to drawing on the back. The spinning donut was just a funny sign on a donut shop that we saw once we got there and so was the “very funny thing” which is what Sam has always called those weird air filled things with flappy arms that you see in front of mattress stores, mostly.
We had the whole day Saturday before the wedding to fill so we decided to take Sam to Rosalind’s Candy Castle, the candy store that has been owned by parts of Mark’s family for as long as he can remember. That store was always a huge part of his childhood. He remembers going there to see his Aunt Lou and Aunt Lib in the back making huge batches of candy and having Easter baskets full of Rosalind chocolate. So much is gone now that Mark remembers from Pittsburgh, but Rosalind is still there so it was imperative we go!
We didn’t tell Sam what kind of store we were going to before we got there. When we told her it was a candy store, I thought her head was going to pop!
We let her pick out about a million different things, but it was too hard to say no. After all, it’s not like we will be going back there any time soon. There was so many different types of chocolate lollipops!
That is one happy little girl! The proverbial “kid in a candy store”, she ran wild!
Wedding time! What a beautiful setting. The entire thing – the ceremony and the reception — was lakefront. It was such a gorgeous day.
Mark, Sam and Tia 🙂
Sam loved the whole thing. She was so good for the ceremony only talking to me once or twice, and once just to say the bride looked beautiful, which she certainly did.
Sam’s favorite part by far, was the dancing. She boogied down the entire time!
After a while, Sam went onto the beach to collect all the flowers that had been dropped by the wedding party. She had such an armful by the time she was done, she looked like a bride herself.
It was a late night, and this is how Sam looked, sound asleep in the car, by the time we got back to the hotel. Surrounded by flowers, exhausted, in her pretty party dress. What a perfect shot to end the evening!
