Meet me in St. Louis

Last weekend Matt and I hit the road for St. Louis to be in our dear friend's wedding. Dave and Meghan are so fun and of course their wedding had their personality which made it a joy to be in. The worst part was leaving this sweet face on Friday and not seeing it til Sunday!

I mean really....

Matt and I were honored to be asked to play and sing in the wedding. Although I will say, I didn't know we were ALL the music until about 2 weeks before the ceremony which was a little daunting, being that we are not wedding musicians! I was not sure we were going to pull it off when we had our first run through on April 5th (no one tell Meghan), but I have to say on April 13th we sounded pretty dang good! Or at least people lied to us and told us we did.

Here's us and the happy couple at the rehearsal. See---they look happy, we must not sound that bad?!?

Then we hit the bowling alley for the rehearsal party. SO MUCH FUN!!

Dave doesn't look impressed with Matt's form

Adorable!

Saturday we didn't have wedding commitments until 3:30, so we wandered the Central West End and found the largest mosaic collection in the United States at Cathedral Basilica St. Louis. The amount of work in this beautiful church amazes me. The mosaics, which cover 83,000 square feet of the church and contain 41.5 MILLION pieces of glass in 7,000 different colors took from 1912 to 1988 to complete. These pictures obviously don't come close to doing this work of art any justice, sorry. I also snapped a shot of the chair the Pope sat in when he came to town in 1999. I'm not catholic, but that's still cool.

You can see I couldn't get a lot of close ups, because they were having mass at the time we stopped by. We technically weren't suppose to go in at all, but an usher told us to go quickly and be quiet so we did.

I couldn't get a very great picture of the outside because the church is so big. But the architecture was stunning. And Matt read the difference between byzantine cathedrals (domes) and English gothic (spires) is a symbol of the different doctrinal beliefs. Spires point to heaven in the sky--somewhere else, while domes symbolism God bringing heaven back to Earth someday. Pretty cool. So again, not catholic but I can certainly appreciate honoring the prayer "thy kingdom come, thy will be done ON EARTH as it is in heaven."

After that we headed to Delmar Loop. A hip little neighborhood by Washington University. It had great vintage shops, a record store and it is home to the actual Blueberry Hill where Chuck Berry evidently found his thrill.

So then it was time for the wedding. Matt and I were super nervous but also excited to get to do some great music, since we both haven't been in a band in years. We had 7 songs prepared for the prelude music, and everything went smoothly until we realized we had no way of knowing when they were ready to start the wedding and we were on our last song....  So we just started the processional with hopes people would start walking out, and when no one came out I just started making up new verses. It worked, and no one seemed to notice "Be thou my Vision" doesn't have 12 verses.

After the service the bride and groom were so happy they collapsed, it was hilarious.

And then we hit up Oliva's on the hill for a beautiful, fun reception. 

Sometimes when you are the blogger in the family, and picture taker, there are never any good pictures of you....this is the best I got all weekend.

Sunday morning we slept in, walked to brunch and then said goodbye to our beautiful hotel. 

What a great getaway weekend! Thanks Meghan and Dave for getting married, see you again soon!