Bring On The Bubonic Plague

This Easter is shaping up to be a fun one for me.

My husband has tickets to the first game at Target Field (the brand new home of the Twins) for their exhibition against the Cardinals, which is my husband's favorite team. He mentioned that he had these tickets and that we were going to go, along with a friend of his from St. Louis.

He neglected to mention that he didn't have tickets for the wee ones (although with a night game on Friday, that would be a trick anyway). And he neglected to mention that this was Easter weekend. Once I found out those two facts, I started hemming and hawing - and we love our baseball (and football and hockey) around here, especially in person.

Easter is a holiday weekend. It's for families. The wee ones want the Easter Bunny to bring their baskets, and I want to be with them to celebrate. We sort of agreed that we'd drive up sans children on Friday and then drive home Saturday immediately following the game. That's a lot more driving than I want to do, but it worked.

Then we got The Call.

In February, my husband's younger brother announced he was getting married. Considering that he's eleven years younger than my husband and had already been engaged once and had it broken off, forgetting the fact that he's made a lot of life choices that I certainly hope the wee ones never do, we didn't put too much stock into it.

Then we heard that they were planning to get married quickly (and no, not for that reason). They didn't have a date, but considering that my husband coaches in the spring and is either at or hosting tournaments most weekends in spring, he was fearful of what the date would be.

We finally heard from my MIL that the date did not coincide with any coaching commitments. Not only did it not coincide with any of the coaching dates, but we weren't invited to the wedding. No one was. They were getting married in Vegas and then holding a reception later.

The reception? Yeah... the Saturday night before Easter. Good-bye first Twins game. Oh, and the reception is going to be held about forty miles east of where my in-laws live.

Now we have a problem:

There is a reception that starts at the wee ones' bedtime in a city where we have no childcare on the night before Easter. The wee ones are invited to the reception, but I am sure there will be behavior there that I just don't want them exposed to.

The only good news? My husband got it and agreed with me one hundred percent.

But how do you say that you aren't going to your brother-in-law's wedding because it just doesn't work with your schedule? That just isn't going to fly.

My husband's aunt offered to let us use her babysitter for the evening. Buuuuut someone I've never met watching the wee ones in a city they don't know well while we are almost an hour away just doesn't quite sit well with either of us.

So we noodled and noodled on it. (Fortunately, the reception invitation hadn't come while we were thinking.) My husband finally suggested that I might become deathly ill on the Thursday before the reception, which would preclude me from coming. And maybe the wee ones will start to come down with it, too. (Sadly, you can see the impact of how we was brought up in the fact that missing Easter with the wee ones doesn't seem to faze him.)

And now I'm the bad sister-in-law hoping that I get sick. Or rather, planning to get sick. Then again, my husband didn't sell his baseball tickets for the weekend until we got the text last night from Vegas from his brother in law stating that "The deed is done."