I Give You This Ring...

It's time for part 2 of the wedding weekend recap!

Getting Ready and Ceremony

I was a little nervous about the whole getting ready process. We started at 9 am and we were not expecting to be done until 2:45 or so. Yeah, I was more than a little jealous of all the guests that could spend the day at the beach! I spent most of the day looking like this...

Hot, I know. It came together though, don't worry...

I don't mind getting my hair done, but I am less than a fan of getting my make up done. I survived it all though, and the day went by slightly quicker than I thought it would. Plus I had snacks to get me through...

Eventually all of our dresses were on and it was time for Eric and my "first look." If you couldn't tell already- Eric did not do a whole lot of "traditional" things, so you can probably guess that we saw each other before the wedding. We really wanted to take pictures before the ceremony so we could enjoy more time with our guests. This meant we got to have a special "first look" when we saw each other.

Then we headed down to the beach for pictures...

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I am a little nervous about the squinting in beach pictures- mainly because as we've discussed before I am an abnormally ridiculous squinter, but my amazing photographer has assured me that even if people are squinting a little bit, it's worth it for the gorgeous beach background.

Anyway, after pictures we had a little time to relax and spy on people coming to ceremony from the upstairs window :)

Truthfully, I normally see wedding ceremonies as a necessary evil to make it through before the massive party of the wedding begins. I've been to some good ones, but I always prefer the reception. However, at my wedding, I think the ceremony was my favorite part of the day and night. The ceremony was set to be outside, and if you read my blog often you know I was more than a little nervous about the weather. I checked it at about 1:00pm to see the chances we'd get a 5:30 wedding in, and it said "100% chance of rain!" Somehow I managed to not panic and then I realized I had looked up the weather at home and not at the Cape. Even so, my Dad and I were watching the clouds roll in as we waited to walk down the aisle. Scary!

So here is the deal with our ceremony. Pretty soon after we got engaged Eric and I had the idea to have a friend marry us. We considered churches but it was hard to find one that worked logistically for us, so we decided on an outdoor wedding which is really what we both wanted anyways. We decided on Eric's friend Brian as the officiant. Brian has been a good friend of Eric's for many years, it's partly responsible for Eric and I getting together AND has the perfect personality to lead a ceremony. He took it 100 % seriously, he practiced a lot and his girlfriend got him a nice portfolio to hold his script and highlighted his lines for him :) Eric made sure he got a one day license to marry us of course! I never had any doubt that Brian would do an amazing job but he even surpassed my expectations and I love that it's not some random person in all of our pictures!

Once we decided Brian would marry us, I quickly realized this meant I was writing the ceremony. Of course I had absolutely no idea how to write a marriage ceremony so I turned to the same place I go whenever I don't know something... google. One Friday afternoon I came home from work and just wrote the whole ceremony beginning to end. Most of it I found online, but I picked and chose what was "us." My favorite part by far was our vows. I posted our whole ceremony today in case you want to read it. For the vows part, we used a version of the Scottish Handfasting Ceremony. The basic idea of these vows is that there will be hard times in a marriage, we will burden each other or make each other angry, but in the end we will work together to make sure that these hard times only make us stronger and more in love. To add another special twist, we used "chords" made of Scottish tartan's to "bind" us together. Eric's grandmother sewed together the tartan from his family (Mitchell- his great grandmother) and my family (Muir- my grandmother) to make the chords and then we had our first three bridesmaids and groomsmen put them over us as each binding was made. It's a bit hard to explain and I think everyone who heard about it had no idea how it would work, but it went quite smoothly I think :)

After all of these chords were draped over our hands, Brian said, "The knots of this binding are not formed by these chords, but instead by your vows. Either of you may drop the chords, for as always, you hold in your own hands the making or breaking of this union."

The only obvious glitch that occurred during the ceremony was when Mike (Eric's brother) gave me Eric's ring and I put it on, and then Eric was supposed to give me my ring, but he didn't have it yet. If you read the ceremony you can see this was 100 % my fault. For some reason I decided to have Brian say "Mike, please give Kelly the ring..." not, "Mike, please give Eric and Kelly the rings" or go back and have him say separately, "Mike, please give Eric the ring". Oops. Honestly though, I kind of liked the glitch, it added even more personality and truthfulness to the ceremony. Eric and I are definitely capable of laughing at ourselves :)

At the end, it was time to kiss...

And then we were outta there...

We had a receiving line to leave the ceremony, and we got to say hi to everyone. It was fun to see everyone, especially my 2 little students- one was a girl I had two years ago, and another was a girl I've been tutoring for over a year now- I'm pretty sure I've told stories about her before. After the receiving line we took a few pictures and then... the rain came down. Yup, you heard that right. We got our ceremony and receiving line done and then within 5 minutes the rain started. It was amazing. And, the rain caused one of the coolest parts of the night...but you'll have to wait until tomorrow morning to hear about that! It's bed time for this married woman :)