As long as she gets a shot on the dance floor.

Composed at haste and with packing left to do before we leave at 4:30:

The last of the unmarried college friends gets all matrimonial on us this weekend. Thus we head off tonight for Cape Cod. In planning for this event, we had anticipated taking daughter L. to the ceremony. But.

But but but.

(Hey -- I sound like a nine-year-old boy! This will come in handy in a few years when daughter L. starts bringing home school friends and I need to make small talk.)

But: Evidently there have been some mild second thoughts on the subject of two-year-olds from the bride-to-be and the groom-to-be. (Isn't there some unwieldy German philosophical term for those states-of-being? Does not Hegel expound at length on that curious transitional state of pflegensiesich-um-zu-sein, in which one has the responsibilities of co-habitation but none of the kitchen appliances? And how all the while you are expected to choose a tasteful floral centerpiece that comes in at under $15 a pop? And the deleterious effect this has on one's temper?)

In all fairness to my friends, they attended a wedding this summer where a pack of toddlers began to run wild and menace the crowd with slobbery pacifiers and broken schnapps bottles. The wedding party was forced to call in a team of early-childhood language development postdocs to restore order. So there is that. And our friends have made it abundantly clear to us that daughter L. would in fact be welcome to the festivities.

Happily, we have come to realize that the standards of childcare and child behavior are historically mutable. Wet nurses, governesses, attachment parenting, naming your child after a state: Each of these has been favored at one time or dismissed at another. So we decided that between our love for our friends and our love for our daughter, our family can sustain a bit of cultural creep: Though ordinarily we might militate for pan-familial inclusion during social and religious celebrations, we have here decided to compromise a trifle.

We have arranged for a few hours of childcare on site during the wedding.

Um, yeah: We got a babysitter. Not earth-shattering, exactly. I think it has been done before. In fact, waxing metacognitive about the whole process is exactly the sort of thing that gets daughter L.'s grandparents to start up with the rolling of the eyes.

But: one of the lessons we keep trying to drum into daughter L. is that (broadly) people should be judged by their actions rather than their class or status. I.e., it isn't first-graders we dislike: it's the bossiness. Though admittedly, daughter L.'s people have traditionally fallen into a class of rather fidgety small folks prone to vocal complaint when the action drags. Also, this will spare her for a few hours of the sight of her father in a tuxedo, a bit of sartorial nattiness that will no doubt confuse her greatly. So I am happy that we can find something to sustain our affections for everyone here in this odd gray area, where accomodation and radical inclusion reside at one end and pre-emptive decorum sits the other. Thus our decision to shuffle daughter L. off to a side room for a few hours.

And to bust her out when the hors d'ouevres come around.

Comments

[Wife B.]

Do you think there will be any hors d'ouevres with absolutely invisible vegetables in them?

[G.]

I'm hoping for macaroni and cheese on a toothpick.

[Donnis]

I'm always curious about how many philosophy credits there are in your background.
And ALWAYS amused...

[frog]

Wait. A tuxedo?

You don't tell me ANYTHING!

I'm anxiously awaiting the photos. Wow.