Many good points have been raised here already, not the least being Cary's, but I'd like to offer another thought.

A wedding is a legal transaction enmeshed in this culture with way too much emotional and religious baggage. This is an event that costs a fortune and is draped with the notion that it should be the happiest day of the bride's life - although somehow the groom doesn't seem to bear that anticipatory weight!

My suggestion is to take the wedding and the party and separate them - by a day at least. Have the wedding wherever you choose, but make it the private, quiet and child-free affair invested with the dignity befitting such an occasion, whether or not religion plays a part. The pregnant s-i-l could probably leave the newborn with a caregiver for that short time to attend such an event.

Then, a few days later, or whenever it suits you, throw the reception blow-out of your dreams. If there are enough of them to justify it, you could have an adjacent kids' room for the party, and you'd never know the little dears were there.

My husband and I just did this in January for reasons having nothing to do with children, but just because we're both rather shy, and we just couldn't conceive of the wedding-as-performance. It gave us the freedom say our marriage vows privately for just ourselves and the j.p. and exactly as we wanted it to be. Two days later we had a big reception that we both really enjoyed, with all our friends and family. It was entirely comfortable and without stress, and we're still remarking on how much fun we had at our own wedding! I absolutely can't imagine the pressure of having to do it all in one day, never mind the lack of time or the ability to enjoy our guests, who had come from all over the country.

Once upon a time, back when the earth was cooling, there was a remarkable transit system that covered a large portion of United States. It was the interurban streetcar and trolley system that allowed people to get around in widely separated rural and exurban areas for not too much money, and - for the time - in relative speed.

I live in a semi-rural area where I have to use my car every day, but I'm just down the road from a weird little intersection where 5 trolley lines once crossed. There is literally nothing there now but a gravel pit and a highway department truck lot, but in the early 1900s it was a major crossroads from which one could - with enough time, persistence and a handfull of basically coordinating schedules - get from a beach in Maine to almost anywhere on the East Coast.

There are a lot of freeways and highways that were built on the roadbeds of the trolley lines that used to serve us before the advent of the automobile. They still go where people want, but now we all go alone. And we're paying for that now.

Again with the heated rhetoric about abortion.

Until the point when those "products of conception" could be independently viable outside the uterus - until that life form is able to breathe air and take nourishment from some other source besides through the mother - it may bear a terrible resemblance to a human being, but it simply is not one.

A pregnant woman is more than an incubator, and to regard her as nothing more than that is far more dehumanizing than the brutality of abortion. That's just about what we're facing at this point in reproductive history.

The whole issue of man-bashing has bothered me for years. This is the feminist equivalent of the chauvinistic pat on the head and the indulgent chuckle about their silly little foibles

One's standards of cleanliness and organization are not gender-based. They are the result of personal training - mostly delivered by our mothers, but not necessarily - and distilled through a lifetime of practice. My mother was a slob and I'm much the same, but my kitchen is usually neat and clean because that matters to me. My husband's father washed the floor on his hands and knees, and my husband does that, too. But he does it because that's what he sees - I don't.

How is it that this particular bias is left to stand in our otherwise politically correct culture. These are the same kind of wide-ranging generalizations that would be excoriated as totally unacceptable, absolutely un-PC, if they were applied to age, ethnic bacground, religion or life-style.

Just get over it, girls!

Jeez, let's think about it for a minute. Do you think we can ever be secure enough? Isn't there already too much of that kind of bandwagon uber-security rhetoric from both sides of the aisle?

Bill's my kind of candidate - the one who speaks truth to the electorate and hopes they're intelligent enough to grasp his meaning. Not that the electorate has shown much intelligence in the past few election cycles, of course.