Wedding Miracle!

Meghan and I got married, and I wanted to mention that we were sooooo excited and blessed to have our friends and family come to support us for the big day.

I am sure I will be able to blog about the ceremony and reception and honeymoon at some point, also the violin at the ceremony recieved rave reviews (way to go Dale!), but I wanted to tell you about the miracle that took place during the wedding weekend.

For the wedding, Meghan had to have something old, new, borrowed and blue, and to take care of 3 of these things at once she had an old handkerchief from her Mother's grandmother (Meghan's Great Grandmother Rose). Apparently back in the day women had handkerchief sets, so each of Meghan's aunts and her mother received one of the matching handkerchiefs as an heirloom (so 5 exist). So Meghan had her Aunt Angie's handkerchief to cover off the old, borrowed and blue part (it is a white handkerchief with a blue flower embroidered on it).

For the wedding night Meghan and I stayed in the Amerisuites and fortunately for us (you will see why in a bit) the florist for the wedding was kind enough to stop by the hotel and place flowers and candles all over our room as well as to make a heart of rose petals on the bed. The next morning Meghan and I slept in a little too late and had to run out the door to make it to the brunch at our house that Meghan's family had prepared for all of the out of town guests. Well in our haste the handkerchief was mistaken for Kleenex and either left on the floor in the hotel room or inadvertently thrown away!

When late in the evening on Sunday while preparing to leave in the early morning for Aruba - Meghan realizes the handkerchief is missing and it all comes together that it is what was on the floor in the room. A call to the hotel revealed that a lost and found record did exist for our room that night but only for candle holders. Asking "what if" it were in the trash and the prognosis was grim... dumpster diving.

I knew I had to go and make an attempt, but I give Meghan's brother Matt a lot of credit for volunteering to come along and we headed off into the filth along with some prayers to find the handkerchief. Apparently all of the trash from individual rooms makes it into larger bags. We estimated that with 25 rooms per floor and 6 floors we had 150 rooms to deal with, maybe filling 15-30 large trash bags. The only hope was that the rose petals would clue us in on which bag may contain the handkerchief.

Once we arrived at 10pm we knew we were in trouble when the dumpster only had side access door as it was too tall to climb into. We began pulling out large bags and we were in pretty good shape, the bags were see through AND the hotel didn't throw out the smaller bags that were in the trash cans in the room, apparently they must leave those in and just dump the cans into these larger bags (gross). After about 20 bags in things look grim as we were nearing the end of the top layer of trash and the next layer was settled in and we began to hit bags of food waste. We were getting close to where we might have to climb in to get bags out! We had also pulled bags out which had large amounts of soda or coffee in them which would have ruined anything inside.

The 2nd to last bag in the top layer that we could reach I saw petals as I began to pull it out and there pressed against the outside of the bag was the handkerchief! With a small tear in the side we were able to pull it out, still in tremendous shape! It is also funny that we were married in St. Anthony church, the patron Saint of lost articles! Thank you St. Anthony!