Last weekend, I attended a friend’s wedding dinner. The venue is a 4-star hotel ball room and the dishes were fairly delicious. I’ve been to quite a few wedding dinners this year and this is the second time I took baby Clarisse along.

Ideally, I was hoping baby Clarisse would take longer than usual evening nap, say from around 4-5pm and sleep for no less than an hour. However, things didn’t go as planned because she woke up barely 20 minutes from her nap and simply refused to sleep again.

Dinner started right on time at 8pm sharp. We arrived at 7.30pm and already baby Clarisse is showing signs of restlessness. She wouldn’t sit still in her baby chair and wanted to grab hold of everything. Spoon, fork, bowl, plate and even the candles. Of course, we didn’t let her touch those things. We knew we’re in for a rough night.

What made it worst was the dishes took so long to arrive on the table. The interval between dishes took forever and the last item on the menu, the dessert, was served at 11.15pm. I was told about it because I left at 10.30pm. Baby Clarisse, eyes already so tired and red, refused to sleep no matter how I tried. So we left the wedding dinner at 10.30pm.

There’s another reason why we left early. Baby Clarisse was frightened when dinner guests started to shout “Yam Seng!” loudly at the top of their lungs. I should’ve carried her out of the ball room should I have anticipated the bride and groom’s family members, all of them shouted into their mics. The loudspeakers nearly left us deaf and poor thing Clarisse wailed in fright. She couldn’t stop crying despite how much I soothe and console her so we decided to leave there and then.

No more loud Chinese wedding dinners for baby Clarisse from now on. Not until she’s bigger.