The Last Wedding We Were Invited To

One of my oldest friends was married this month, and we were invited to share in their beautiful day. I’ve known this friend since I started infant school. We used to play imagination games in the playground, watched horror films together at sleepovers, and went through our first heartbreaks at around the same time. We go way back.

Ebony loved the last wedding we went to (it was her best friend’s parents’ wedding), and spent most of the day hiding under tables with the bridesmaids, doing handstands (that didn’t look anything like handstands) and dancing with her best friend. It was lovely, and I was excited about her busting some moves on the dance floor at this wedding too.

The wedding was lovely. The bride looked perfect, the bridesmaids were beautiful, all of the guests were wearing their best smiles. The venue was beautiful, with a red carpet leading from the gardens to the towering white columns at the doorway. There were petal-filled birdcages, vintage books, and candles covering every table, The smell of sick wafted through the air.

Oh, right, yeah. So, Ebony was sick all over their vintage-inspired, handcrafted, long slaved-over, impeccable wedding.

She was one of two (I think) children at the wedding, the other was a slightly older, much less vomit-y boy who I didn’t see causing any trouble. Ebony, being two and a half, is a master of causing trouble. After shouting “GERROF!” (this roughly translates to the way a Yorkshire farmer might say get off) very loudly during the ceremony readings, and lying flat on her back in the (limited floor space of the) doorway of the reception venue, and stealing a collection of flowers from the bridesmaid’s bouquets, I thought the worst was over.

She then shouted “I AM BEING QUIET!” over the father of the bride’s speech, then cried (loudly) in the next room when Laurie took her out. When the food arrived, she ate her soup with a spoon and knife, flicking it perilously close to my beautiful People Tree dress on more than one occasion, and announced to the person sitting next to us that she needed a “big poo” during the main course.

As the desserts were being brought out, Ebony effortlessly opened her mouth like a fish, and a mountain of multi-coloured projectile vomit landed on the table. Without thinking, I grabbed her and made a dash for the toilets. A real mum would have grabbed the goody bag from under the table to use as a sick bag, but I was consumed with how mortifying the sick was and just wanted to get Ebony away from the table. The toilets, it turned out, were quite far in running-with-sickly-toddler-speed, and Ebony started throwing up again as we were passing the bar. Luckily, by this point we were out of the dining room and well away from the cake, but there was a lot of sick. I had to run whilst trying simultaneously to protect my dress (this was my number one priority, of course), stop sick pouring on the floor, and not let Ebony choke on her own vomit. This should probably be a sports day race, it’s really hard.

I eventually put her down in the toilets and told her she could be sick in the toilet now if she wanted, to which she replied that she felt “much better now, Mummy.” I then stripped her off, tried to wipe the sick from the folds in her neck, tried to get the sick off my boob (sorry, beautiful People Tree dress, I failed you) and decided to head to the car. I thought the bar would still be empty as people ate their dessert. It wasn’t.

Turns out the guests were pretty quick eaters, so there was a crowd of people gathering not far from a big splat of sick. I left Ebony, wearing only knickers and a necklace made of undigested risotto, and ran to the bar to alert them to the sick. Then, avoiding the eyes in the room, I ran Ebony to the car where I attacked her with baby wipes, covered her in blanket, and sent her home with Laurie.

Now I remember why we had a child-free wedding.