No bed of roses for flower girl's dad

I'm not saying it's easy to be the father of the bride. I'm just saying it can't be any more stressful than being the father of the flower girl.

I found this out when my daughter, Sophie, age 3, was asked to be a co-flower girl with her cousin Julianna at a formal wedding, by which I mean "a wedding involving as much planning as a hydroelectric dam, but costing more."

The job of a flower girl at a formal wedding is to walk down the aisle looking cute as the dickens, so everyone goes "awww." She also carries a little basket of rose petals, which she strews in the path of the bride to symbolize the fact that it's a very special day, which will culminate, by tradition, in a huge bill from the florist.

So being a flower girl is a big responsibility, which requires a special dress, special shoes, special tights and a special hair thingie, and these items must, by tradition, take at least 17 hours to pick out at the department store. This was no problem in our case because there were two mothers AND a grandmother involved.

The dads — my brother-in-law Steve and I — played the traditional male role in the process, which was to stand around asking what the hell was taking so long. After the women had spent 45 minutes looking at hair thingies — which, for the record, were all identical to the naked eye, in the sense of being white — we got disgusted and went to the menswear department. We looked at all the menswear in the store, including shoes, and when we got back the women were STILL debating which identical hair thingie to get.

You cannot fault them. Many a wedding has ended in tragedy when the bride, halfway down the aisle, suddenly discovered that the flower girls are wearing the wrong identical hair thingie, causing the bride to throw down her bouquet in despair and run from the building, never to be seen again.

So what with the responsibility, we flower-girl families were already stressed when we got to the hotel on the big day. Unfortunately matters only got worse when — in an unbelievable stroke of bad luck — we experienced the most stressful thing that can happen at a wedding: wedding photographers. There seemed to be dozens of them, and they had all attended that special wedding-photographer school where they learn how to take a dozen people and organize them 14 million permutations:

"OK now I want the bride with the bridesmaids. OK now I want the groom with the groomsmen. OK now I want the bride with the groomsmen. OK now I want the mother of the groom with the bride and the bridesmaids whose names contain two or more vowels …"