ONE MORE TIME : Family Pitches In for Nuptials of Fourth Daughter In One-Year Period

Weldon and Betty Doris had planned ahead. The South Laguna couple wanted six children; they had six children. They wanted the births to be a few years apart to give them some breathing time in the future; that worked out, too.

The mechanical engineer and his wife didn’t want the inevitable expenses that go with maturing children to start bunching up on them. But the kids wouldn’t cooperate. Love spoiled everything.

When Sue Doris, 34, a mechanical engineer and the last of their unmarried daughters, weds Jim Stebbins, an architectural designer and planner, on Saturday, it will mark the fourth wedding of a Doris daughter within one year.

Dad and Mom picked up the check for all four of them, to the tune, they said, of about $14,000 each.

“I guess we just all fell in love about the same time,” said the former Ann Doris, 27, a secretary who married salesman Steven Silver Sept. 6. “There must have been something in the air.”

It wasn’t always so.

The first two marriages of Doris daughters worked out according to plan: Jane Heath, now 35, a registered nurse, was married Aug. 31, 1973; her sister, Julie Chapman, now 30 and also a registered nurse, was married five years later on June 24, 1978.

Started Deluge

It was the Doris’ fourth daughter, Maria, 24, an accounting student, who started the deluge on July 12, 1986, when she married Ken Brown, an auto mechanic. Since then, the Doris household has been overflowing with outgoing wedding invitations, and Orange County’s florists, dressmakers and caterers have been wearing bigger smiles.

Maria’s wedding was followed two months later by Ann’s. Two months later, on Nov. 29, the former Lucy Doris, now 23 and an elementary education student, married Kevin Nelson, a software product manager.

“We’re getting to be experts at this,” Ann said. “We’ve been kidding about opening up a wedding consulting business.”

That, in effect, is what the Doris home has become in the last 12 months, family members said.

“This family is organized,” said Betty, 58, who operates a day-care business out of the family home. “Everybody works together; it’s not just the mother of the bride who gets all the responsibility.”

Having so many weddings in so short a time has been “an advantage, really,” Ann said. “Rather than relearning everything each time, we had experience. We learned from the mistakes.”

And in so close a family, it has been fun, she said: “All of us are our own best friends, so it’s not just exciting for the person getting married, but it’s exciting for all her best friends, too.”

Kept Rhythm Going

After the first in the series of weddings last July, the sisters said, a kind of rhythm was established.

“We looked up one night when we were stuffing envelopes for invitations, and we said, ‘Gosh, we’ve been doing this all the time,’ ” said bride No. 3, Lucy Nelson. “It’s neat to have someone close to you who’s gone through the problems before you.”

Bride No. 1, Maria Brown, added: “Yes, it was fun. Before we knew Sue was going to get engaged and the other three weddings were done, we looked around and didn’t have any planning to do and said, ‘What are we going to do now?’ ”

“We were all hoping for Sue,” Lucy said. “She and Jim had been going together for about a year.”

They should have known: Sue caught Maria’s bouquet.

One of the biggest challenges was trying to make each wedding unique. Betty said they kept a notebook during the planning of each of her daughters’ weddings as a way of ensuring that each ceremony and reception “would be very individual.”

Betty said: “One of the things we often get asked is why weren’t there any double weddings? . . . We couldn’t talk them into it. They wanted each to be special.”

Different Churches

Three Presbyterian churches in Orange County were used for the ceremonies to accommodate guest lists ranging of 225-300 people, Weldon said. But the Rev. Robert Schwenk of San Juan Capistrano Presbyterian Church performed all four ceremonies.

“He really made each one individual,” said the mother of the brides. “It was never, ‘Oh, here’s another wedding.’ ”

Cupid’s arrow didn’t strike every daughter with coincidental accuracy.

No. 2 bride Ann said her husband “had been asking me (to marry him) for six months before it sounded like a particularly good idea.” With a laugh, she added, “I think I gave Mom enough time. She said she needed six weeks between weddings. I gave her eight.”

Even the guests haven’t minded. “Some of our friends and family may have been getting tired of coming down here all the time for weddings,” Weldon said, “but no one complained. Most of them came every time.”

For No. 4 bride-to-be Sue, preparations have been made simple: “I just asked Ann to plan my wedding for me. If I had a question, I just picked up the phone and called her and asked what I was supposed to do next. She knew.”

Their parents said they have managed to maintain their equanimity with the ringing of wedding bells almost constantly in their ears.

“What with braces and contact lenses and college, we figured this was just one more thing and tried to take it in stride,” said Betty, who has been married to her husband for nearly 37 years.

The father of the brides said he “feels sort of like a king with all this going on.” But, he added, “I might have to postpone retirement a bit longer.”