Indian wedding adventure

We go big around here, so for Maya's first wedding, we went all in for an all day Indian wedding. No 4 p.m. start time for Team Shukla. My good friend from college got married in Arlington, Va., this past weekend, so Anil and I booked a hotel for Saturday and Sunday night and crossed our fingers, having no idea how it would go for us.

Our biggest and best realization from the weekend is that, for now anyway, Maya can sleep through movies and room service in the hotel room. Yay for us! We were afraid we'd be laying in bed playing on our iPhones in the dark from 7 p.m. on. Anil erected a Macgyver-like attempt at sound-muffling around the travel crib, with me helpfully improvising lyrics to the "Macgruber" theme song from Saturday Night Live. He used the hotel desk, phone book, blanket, desk chair, and the carabiner on his keychain to clip the blanket to the chair. It also turned out to be worth it to pack the white noise machine and endure strange looks while carrying it through the lobby.

We even ordered "Ironman 2" on the hotel's pay-per-view--complete with explosions and gunfire. She slept through it all. Amazing. Then I slept through Anil going downstairs to meet our friends for some drinks. Not so surprising.

Here was the itinerary for Sunday:

9:15 a.m.: Rakesh rides a white horse from across the street to the hotel's lobby. Everyone rallies around him, dancing and clapping.

There was a DJ and pounding bass. Maya took her morning nap in the Ergo carrier, and I worried about bending the wrong way because somehow the back of my dress, and only the back, had mysteriously shrunk and was a little short if I wasn't standing up straight. I figured Maya was enough of a distraction that no one would notice, and it wasn't like my underwear had my name on it or anything, like someone else that day.

10:30 a.m.: Wedding ceremony in the hotel's ballroom. Fortunately, Indian ceremonies have some flux to them for the audience. I didn't realize this, so I deliberated whether we should leave Maya in the kids room so that she wouldn't scream "DA DA DA!" during some moment when the bride and groom were staring into each other's eyes. We saw lots of babies were in attendance though, so Anil convinced me to stop worrying. People ended up going in and out of the room, with or without kids, bringing back Starbucks; it was perfect. The ceremony was about an hour, so I took Maya to our room to eat, then Anil walked her around, then I let her crawl on the carpet outside the ballroom and she got rug burn on her little knees (I need to get more of these!).

12 noon: Lunch--a giant south Indian food buffet (south=spicy). This poor blond girl at our table from Charlotte, NC, accidentally bit into a red chili pepper and her head almost exploded.

There was a break in festivities from 2-6, so we went for a walk to the Air Force Memorial, around the corner from the hotel, then hung out on the rooftop pool. It was the first time I'd seen a few friends from college in years, so it was so much fun to catch up and drink a beer under the sun like old times. Maya was so excited that she didn't really nap all afternoon, so we were all ready to just curl up and sleep, but instead we showered and got dressed for cocktail hour before the reception.

6 p.m.: Maya juggling commences. Maya was so tired by this point. We'd given her a bath in hopes that she'd go to sleep in the Baby Bjorn on Anil during cocktail hour and sleep for a bit so that we could enjoy some of the reception before turning in. But she just needed to sleep for real, in her crib. I'm sad that we hardly even got any photos of Maya all dressed up (two different dresses!), awake and out of a baby carrier. On that note, I'm sad that we hardly got pictures of me without a baby carrier obscuring the front half of my body. But we did what we could to make it work for the three of us. The reception started around 7 I think, and we made it until about 8, but Maya was just done. Somehow she slept on me through an awesome dance performance of that song at the end of "Slumdog Millionaire," as I furrowed my brow worrying that being right under the booming speaker was damaging my infant's hearing before she's had the chance to do it herself with an iPod. Anil took Maya up to bed while I stayed for a few more toasts from family members of the wedding party, then I too called it a night. We didn't get to stay for dinner at the reception (I think it was served at 9, so it just wasn't in the cards for us), but we did get to order room service again and watch "Date Night." I'm sure we missed a huge Indian-dance infused party that would have been really cool to experience, but as the bride and groom's parents were talking about the importance of family during their toasts that opened the reception, it felt right that we take care of our own little family and call it a night.

This is the best photo we got of the three of us, courtesy of our friend Brooke.