Saturday was the big day, at least as far as Jesus is concerned. I'm sure He had His calendar marked. We all piled into the car, loaded up with enough food to give Romania's national economy a significant uptick, and headed out to the village house in Letca Noua. As with the wedding, most of the guests showed up pre-baptism to help us set up for the after-party. Thanks guests!
We spent a couple of hours setting up, and then the group headed over to the Letca Noua Miracle Church for the actual baptism. I didn't go to the ceremony itself, but Ioana brought back pictures. In Romanian tradition, the parents have nothing to do with the baptism, it's all done by the couple's godparents. In fact, until relatively recently the mother wasn't even allowed in the church for the baptism.
"You're going to do what to me?"
Io tells me that the air conditioning in the church still isn't working, so it was pretty hot in there. But the ceremony went well, other than the fact that Gabe screamed his head off through a lot of it, to the point that they eventually had him baptized naked but with a pacifier.
Cati's daughter Anna was not happy that her mom was holding some other kid.
The priest anoints Gabe with specially consecrated holy oil, which I guess they keep in an empty Evian bottle.
Post-dunking Gabriel gets dried in a ritual towel and anointed with myrrh. I actually had no idea what myrrh was until I saw this photo. If someone emails me a photo of frankincense my life will be complete.
I know exactly how you feel, sister.
She's not really about to strangle Gabe.
So that's it -- Gabriel is now officially Ready for the Rapture! That's good. In case the Rapture comes.
After the baptism everybody came back to the house for a big party. Unlike at the wedding, though, there wasn't that much drinking at this party. A couple toasts with tuica and a couple people had beers, but for the most part people were drinking water and juice.
Gagi and Io's uncle grilled up a ton of barbecue. We had skewers, pork chops, mici, zucchini, you name it. Everyone ate like kings.
And after that, we came back home and basically collapsed. Sunday was my first Father's Day, which I spent a lot of putting together baptism gifts like this Self-Rocking Chair With Motor Pre-Broken For Your Convenience. It was sort of weird having people wish me a happy Father's Day. Like, I called my dad to say happy Father's Day and he was like, "Happy Father's Day to you, too." WTF?! I guess it's official now.
Io made me an excellent brunch, meaning that all the Williams men got first-class food service that day courtesy of Ioana. She also gave me two excellent t-shirts with pictures of Gabe on them. I guess I'm supposed to spend the day watching sports or playing golf, but there's no golf here and the only sports you can watch are freaking soccer, so I played computer games instead. Welcome to the Future, Father's Day.
And now there's just one more week here before I go back to LA. We have a fair amount to get done and Io is still taking nursing finals, so it's going to be a bit busy.
Moment of Zen:
* I bet you all thought I blew it by using the O Brother, Where Art Thou? quote last time instead of saving it for today. How wrong you were. Manhattan Transfer 4Eva.
No comments:
Post a Comment