Couldn’t resist the pun. I think I might have made it up! Or have you heard that one before…? I’m also a big fan of Idaho? No YOU-da-ho! But that’s completely irrelevent to this post.

I just realized that I took a bunch of pictures at my cousin’s wedding in Iowa over Labor Day weekend just so I could put them up on my blog, and I completely forgot to do that! So I owe you some pics. Or Iowa you, as I like to say.

Ok, I’ll stop.

Here’s a pre-ceremony shot in the church. The wedding and reception were in Farnhamville, Iowa. We stayed in Fort Dodge, which incidentally is home to a lovely Applebee’s where men walk around sporting ties with illustrations of Jesus on them under the words “Jesus Saves” in huge white letters. Yep.

This is Will and my bro-in-law Mark. It appears that Will is tenderly stroking Mark’s shoulder with his finger while his other hand clutches my purse. This may or may not be an illusion. I’ll let you decide. But know this: when these two are together, things get weird.

Like my shoes? They had me on the verge of tears by the end of the night, but I got a lot of compliments on them and that’s really what’s important, right? Ask me again when I’m wearing orthopedic shoes at the age of 40, but right now I have no regrets.

The bride was beautiful and the groom was my cousin.

Ha, just kidding Ben, you looked pretty good too!

Here they are leaving the church and trying to not catch on fire due to some of us who may or may not have tried to light several sparklers at once creating large fireballs and momentary terror. I’m guessing the experience of running through flames and trying to avoid smoke inhalation brought these two even closer together. You’re welcome, guys.

After the ceremony, they rode off into the ominous underbelly of a violent storm. On a tractor. Just kidding – it didn’t even rain on them, I just like to bring the drama. I’m serious about the tractor, though. It was Iowa, so it was awesome.

The decorations at the reception were super cute. Leave it to my family to turn them into some sort of competitve sport. Approximately 1 hour (and several drinks) after this picture was taken, we were having a table-wide hard core grudge match, the object of which was to see how many of those little sparkly things we could throw into various people’s wine glasses. Let me tell you, there were some great shots. Some of us delivered under pressure. Some of us nearly choked on the sparkly plastic things that we didn’t realize were in our wine glasses afterwards. It was great.

Once that the whole “getting married” thing was over, my cousin Ben set his sights on his next lifetime achievement: drinking that ginormous beer.

Just to prove we were in Iowa, we had to get gratuitous shots of cornfields and countryside.

And what’s a wedding without champagne?

Seriously, what is a wedding without champagne? NOT a wedding, in my opinion. Weddings = love, and I love champagne. It makes sense.

This is my favorite shot of the night. I love the array of colorful dresses and the flash of light. It happened completely by accident, but I’ll take it.

Here’s when the night got interesting:

I learned one thing about that Enrique Iglesias song “Baby I Like It” – my dad really likes it.

It was an awesome wedding. The entire weekend was a blast. Congrats Ben and Stephanie!!