Mother Son Wedding Dances

Kids who can sleep through anything ...

I suspect my sons get their sleep-through-anything trait from their father. I remember leaving a summer job during lunch in 1989, driving from Burlingame to Redwood City to get tickets for the first night of "Die Hard 2," and then sleeping through 90 percent of the movie. I watched the first 12 minutes, woke up just once after that when my friend nudged me and said "Cool!" (I vaguely recall seeing Bruce Willis in an ejector seat flying above an explosion) and then fell back asleep for the duration.

I was thinking about this the last Fourth of July, when my older son, then 5, slept through most of a fireworks show near my parents' house in Healdsburg. Their front lawn faces a fireworks display launched from a park about three blocks away. It's so loud that the every car alarm goes off in a 10 block radius.

We joked about that for the rest of the year. But the new sleep-through-anything king in our family is my 3-year-old, who slept through two of the busiest hours of his Uncle Scott's wedding. Like pretty much everything these days, I've decided to tell this story in photo essay form. (Look for the bonus fireworks big finale slumber video at the end.)

1. We spent the weekend at the lovely wedding of my wife's younger brother Scott and his wife Gloria. They were married in Walnut Grove, Calif., in an old mansion along the Delta. Here's my younger son an hour before the wedding, playing on the stairs and showing zero signs of fatigue. We tried to make the tie fit right and tuck in the shirt, but he's one of those kids who instantly looks like Peter Falk in "Columbo" when you put him in nice clothes.

6. After the photos, I moved him back to the sitting area on a different bench. There was a string quartet playing 20 feet away, and he was in the center of constant activity as people from the wedding drank and talked above the music. And that's where he stayed for more than an hour. Since I was hanging out next to him anyway, I decided to start asking guests to pose next to him. This is Sandy and Sherry, two of my mother-in-law's friends, who both read The Poop. (Sherry's daughter is a regular commenter!)

8. This is one of my favorites, with a collection of the groomsmen's wives. Several guests stopped to fan him for a minute and we also loosened his tie. (He still didn't wake up.) I thought it was a nice gesture to put the aviator glasses on my son. I think he was pretty well in the shade at that point, but they make him look a little like Iceman from "Top Gun," which he'll appreciate when he's older and I show him that movie.

Love, Lipstick, and Pearls: Our Wedding: Entrance and First Dance

My Father and I dance to The Beatles "Hey Jude". I used to make him place this song on repeat for hours as a child and it always makes me think of him. A lot of my taste in music is influenced by my Dad, he listened to all the old goodies and I just jammed along next to him on our family drives growing up. I'm now trying to talk Matt into naming one of our children Jude, but I think I'm losing the battle. Oh ya, my Dad and I cried the entire song. Full on sobbing.

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