May 20th, 2000: Our Wedding Day Wedding & Honeymoon6/5/2000; 8:32:55 AM Whew! It's been a hectic past three weeks! Finals week, then a whirlwind week of planning & moving into an apartment, then this little "wedding" shindig that we had been talking about for so long that I almost ceased to believe it would actually happen... but it did!I'll be putting a summary of the wedding & honeymoon for all to see, but it's also going to serve as a scrapbook of sorts and as a way of remembering what we did years from now, so it may seem a little detailed Clicking all of the pictures except the cake top picture will lead to a more full-sized version.On September 17th, 1999, I proposed to Heather Pratt (actually that link isn't very representative), whom I had known for many years but had not been romantically involved with for so many. We were simply best friends for a good long time, helping each other through college, when you don't just need acquaintances, you need friends.And after a whirlwind of planning and the hardest school year yet (not a good combo, I might add), we finally arrived at M-Day: May 20th, 2000 at 3:30 p.m. Here's the bride coming down with her father, looking surprisingly confident after a nerve-inducing rehearsal the previous night We don't have many pictures from the main ceremony, as we can't use the professional's pictures due to copyright restrictions... and I haven't even seen them yet as they aren't developed, so I'll just have to tell you how it went. The wedding ceremony is a case of "no news is good news"... it went even better then the rehearsal, which had way too much giggling (I think it's hard to swear to have & to hold et. al. when you don't mean it, it's just silly then).Our church is the church I've grown up in, a place dating from around 1930 which really looks better then you might first get the impression of. The pastor of the church whom I've known for almost as long married us. We kept the ceremony short... there's little worse then a over-long wedding I'll never listen to Pachbel's Canon the same way again... we used it for the processional. We lit a Unity Candle, and browsing around the web it looks like we chose an unusual combination. We had our mothers light the candle when they were escorted in, and after our vows Heather and I went up and lit the main candle, and blew both of the others out, symbolizing how we are now devoted to each other and not our families. There seems to be a reasonable symbolism for any other combination... I've seen leaving the two candles lit to symbolize joining of the families, and I thought I'd even heard of a 5-candle version somewhere, with the 2 outside for family, the inner two for the couple, and the central one for the wedding, with all 5 left lit at the end. Hopefully we'll get the rights to put a couple of the ceremony pictures on the web from the photographer when we see the photos.Eventually, you have to leave the church and start out on your way. If you look at the full version of this picture, you can see some spots on the picture. That's birdseed, which we threw as has become traditional in honor of the rice-kills-birds urban legend. Actually, while birdseed may be softer and pose less of a threat to those walking on it, I can't imagine it's any more fun to be hit with. Heather hopes to someday find out who got her in the eye with a handful of the stuff, and... ahhh... wreak vengeance. Also, a few of the kiddies seem to have missed the point and thrown the whole little packet without unwrapping it.We were shaking out birdseed for the rest of the day.Overall, the ceremony really went off with a hitch and there isn't much else to tell. (sorry, couldn't resist ) Heather's mother rented a limo for the wedding party of 10 to ride over in. Unfortunately, I think the limo was only truly meant for eight. All 4 of my men were on the back seat, which was no larger then your average car back seat, and we're not talking small people here... oops.It was kind of neat being in a limo, but there was one major downside: While everybody else was at the reception hall getting cheese and crackers, we were driving around in the limo through Ann Arbor, Michigan. When we finally arrived, everything was gone and the reception hall didn't see fit to have anything for us, the wedding party... you know, the people running around and standing up in hot clothing all day. When I sat down, I didn't even have water! As you might then imagine, when the soup came, the head table suddenly got very, very quiet, except for the clinking of spoons, as we all gave our soups the utmost attention, as nicely captured by this photo. (That's what's so interesting about the soup!) Also, if you look at full picture, you'll see a glass container full of something colorful... those are Skittles™, which we had put out as a last-minute thing by my father, who had intended that all the guests could get some during the snacks if they would like. Well, they were forgotten about then, but when we arrived, they provided a life-saving hit of sugar (or at least, headache-averting) to our wedding party... even amoung those who don't normally eat those sugary things.Advice: Make sure the wedding party has some food for them as soon as they arrive. It's not really for their comfort, it's to avoid cranky wedding parties. Dinner was OK, dessert was excellent. Of course, after dinner you have to have the first dance. We played "Happy Together" by the Turtles, which may not strike you as dancable but since neither of us can dance, it hardly mattered. Ballads from the 60s, techno, The Blue Danube, it's all the same to us when it comes to dancing .We also did something I'd never heard of until the planning sessions called a "dollar dance". Browsing around on the web, I guess some people find it controversial.... our reasoning for doing it was simple. We did it for fun! And it was fun for both of us. We have a picture of one of my coworkers, a crazy, fun-loving guy who paid to dance with me... sadly, the pictures are damaged because of the mirror behind us catching the flash. I hope I can repair the picture enough to save it, I'd love to post it later. Then I paid off the Maid of Honor to dance with the bride myself (really cheap, 'cause I got the money back ). I actually met quite a bit of the bride's family I'd never talked to for even that long before. I think in the spirit of fun it's a fine thing to do at a wedding. After we did some general mixing & socializing came the garter and bouquet toss. The garter toss is nothing to look at on photos, but this shot of the bouquet toss is perfect. What you can't see in this photo is that the bouquet is actually heading straight down. If you look at the full photo you'll see a bit of the cieling above. The bouquet actually hit that, and you can see some of the single women who braved the toss starting to react, while the bride is actually almost turned around to look at the women, which is the wrong place to look. We had to redo it. The girl with the yellow dress in the front got it... well, I think it may be a while yet before she gets married! Kind of unfortunate for some of the others up there We also got to cut the cake, which was just beautiful. A friend of my mother's made this one and it's great. Purple and white were the colors of the wedding, and the purple flower decorations on the cake were perfect. BTW, the oldest meaning of purple I know of is for royalty, which comes from the fact it is difficult to make a deep purple dye thousands of years ago... only a somewhat-rare shellfish around Greece made the necessary pigments, and only kings could afford it. We didn't get crazy about it, but we had a sort of Precious Moments theme, which started when we saw this great looking cake-top in a local Hallmark. The guestbook also has these two on it... aren't they cute? They'll last a lot better then my parent's cake top too, which is cool. We can actually display these two. All good cakes must come to an end. No, we didn't stuff the wedding cakes down each others throats (it's not always fun and games )... I don't mind being informed by tradition but I didn't want to bound by it, and that's one tradition that can just take a flying leap [off a cliff] for all I care.And oddly enough, many of the weddings I've been too have actually done this... the Locomotion! It's a lot of fun, but you have to let the bride lead so she can hike up her dress . Also, as Heather used her mother's dress, it didn't quite fit and she actually couldn't lift her arms above her shoulder (which might also explain the bouquet issue).It was a really happy day for me and we only left and went upstairs to the "complementary" rooms at about 11:00p.m., exhausted.As much as I enjoyed it, I am so glad I'm only going to do this once... (even should the worst happen and I do somehow remarry those ceremonies are generally far less elaborate.) it's a LOT of work! (But only the beginning, of course.)