Wedding Wednesday: The Aftermath

This is my final Wedding Wednesday post! Today I thought I'd write about what happened after the honeymoon.

We arrived home after our honeymoon to a trashed apartment. I mentioned this in my last post, and a few people asked why. I don't know if this is normal, but around here we like to play a few pranks on newlyweds right when they get home from the honeymoon. plastic wrap on the toilet, sugar in the salt shaker, etc. Well unfortunately, Luke had taken part in a few pranks when our friends got married. The worst time was Luke and his friends put a catfish in the bathtub at our best friends' house. Bad, I know. But Luke came and took the fish back to the lake where he got it, and all was fine. He did a few more things there, too, like fill the bedroom with balloons, put rice on the ceiling fans, etc. This was 3 years before we got married, but our friends didn't forget. They got us good...or bad, however you want to look at it. I think they were a little harsh, and I may have broken down and completely bawled when I first saw all the damage. But now that I look back, I guess it was funny. Luke's friend Michael took our spare key and had a copy made without us knowing. That's how everyone was able to get in.

First of all, they filled plastic cups with water and placed them inches apart on the steps leading up to our entrance so we had to empty every single one in order to enter our apartment.

When we got inside we noticed that everything was rearranged, trashed, and random items or pieces of furniture were covered in foil. Still just funny, not mean.They also somehow rigged the doorbell so that every time someone flushed the toilet, it would go off. We had an old school doorbell, so I guess it wasn't that hard to do. All of that was still funny.

I forgot until just now about how they put salt in our ice cubes. That one took us days to figure out. We kept wondering why all of our lemonade and iced tea tasted so gross. We thought something was wrong with our water until my sister was nice enough to 'fess up about the salt.

Then it got a little mean. I think they were a little hard on us, but that's okay! First of all, Luke has a huge plastic cup that he keeps all of his gum in. He had a bunch of packs of Extra Polar Ice in there before the wedding. When we got home, the gum was all chewed up. Every last piece. The gross part? They had spit the chewed up gum right back into the cup. That one made Luke pretty mad because he thought it was just too disgusting. Needless to say, he threw the whole thing away.

They took all the cards, dice, and other little pieces from our board games, mixed them up, and put them in the wrong boxes. It took us awhile to discover that one, too.

Another mean thing they did was take all of Luke's DVDs out of the cases and put them back in the wrong ones. Originally Luke even had all the cases in alphabetical order. And back then, he had hundreds of DVDs (luckily he has since sold them all on ebay, thanks to Dave Ramsey;-)). They did the same thing to my CD collection, which had also been organized alphabetically. That took awhile to fix.

And that's not even half of it. I had gotten a brand new, pretty expensive spice rack at my shower. They took all the labeled lids off of the spices and put them back on the wrong ones. I was close to tears at this point. Thank goodness my mom has a good nose, and could put the right lids back on the right spices. I didn't want to go out and buy all new ones! They also switched my baking soda and baking powder.

And the grande finale, the worst thing that I could have never even imagined anyone doing to us, was this:
That's right, they filled our bathtub with spaghetti. I burst into tears when I saw this, as would any normal woman, I think! Keep in mind that obviously our air conditioning was not on while we were on our honeymoon, so that cooked spaghetti was sitting in 80-90 degree temperature from Wed. - Sat. For some reason, they put some of our towels underneath the spaghetti...maybe to protect the bathtub? I'm not sure why, but the towels were disgusting. Smelly and moldy, and we had to throw them away. We spent at least 3 or 4 hours cleaning this up. Once we got all the spaghetti scooped out of there, and put into 4 or 5 trash bags, there was a gross gunky, moldy mess covering the whole bathtub. I had to pretty much scrape it off, and I swear, I never got it completely out. I think this was a little meaner than a catfish. First of all, because a catfish doesn't mold in your bathtub. Secondly, because Luke took the fish back to the pond for our friends, but no one cleaned up this mess for us. You know what? I thought I was over this and thinking that it was funny, but I'm still a little mad! lol...that's okay, though, I'll get over it eventually! Maybe...:-P

So that was that. The day we got back from the honeymoon was NOT a memorable day. Did I mention that I was sick, too? But once we got the mess cleaned up, and my health was back to normal a few days later, we could really start our lives as newlyweds. I love that time, and will never forget it. It's so much fun learning to live together, merging our lives. I guess we're still doing that 1 year later. I definitely still consider us newlyweds at least.

So my question is, is this normal? Did anyone else have anything like this done to them after the honeymoon? People around here do it all the time. I think my parents and their friends even used to do this sort of thing to one another. I know one thing: I will never again do this to someone else. It's just not fun to come home to this!!