The Wedding: TL;DR Version
by Scott Hardie on April 6, 2014
This is an extended version of a blog post about my wedding. Please comment there.
Kelly and I put off marrying for years for financial reasons: We (primarily I) wanted a big wedding, and that started with a big ring, but I spent years trying in vain to save up a lot of money before we finally agreed that it's better to stay modest with our plans. We would borrow nothing to pay for the wedding: If we couldn't afford something we wanted, it was a sign that our tastes were growing too large. With the proposal behind us, we set a date of March 15, 2014: We had long celebrated the ides of March as the anniversary of our first date, and it would fall on a Saturday in 2014, so it felt like a good day to get married. (We're obviously not superstitous.)
One of the hardest decisions was how to accommodate our dual lives: Many of our friends and family lived back in Illinois where we grew up, but now we had a new life with lots of friends and family in Florida. Asking either group to travel across the country for such a small wedding didn't sit well with us. Two weddings wouldn't have felt right, so we settled on the idea of two receptions instead, one occuring before the wedding. We called it an engagement party because "preception" sounded weird, and we had a great time at it.
Unfortunately, we ran into a big unforeseen problem: Kelly's mother became very sick in early 2014 and would not be capable of attending the wedding, much to everyone's disappointment and frustration. After several long talks about the situation, it seemed like no amount of delaying or moving the venue would have made it possible for her to attend, so with heavy hearts, we decided to proceed without her. Her absence was easily the one big regret of the whole affair.
Here's breaking down our decisions step by step, with some of my favorite photos. Many more images are available in the official album and Evie's album.
Venue
We didn't want the extra fuss of a beach wedding, and we're not religious so churches didn't appeal to us, and we wanted to marry and party on the same spot so city hall wasn't an option. When we explored banquet halls in the area, the Signature Room kept impressing us. They were friendly, eager to work with us, inexpensive, open to doing anything our way, and relaxed. Their event coordinator even had prior experience as a wedding planner that we could count on. They were a great choice! The space was really designed for corporate getaways and private parties -- we would be the first wedding there, in fact -- but something about this space just put us at ease and felt like the right vibe. We're grateful to Michelle and her staff for making one of the most complicated aspects of the wedding into one of the easiest and least stressful.
Decorations & Flowers
The venue had cabinets full of glass vases, but otherwise we were on our own for decorations. Here's where the modest budget helped: We couldn't stress about the perfect flower choice because we didn't have money for fresh flowers anyway. :-) With a few hand-made decorations by Kelly and her bridesmaids Gina and Mirly, the room came together just fine.
Officiant
We hired a local man who had a background in theater and a good sense of humor. He counseled us against the very silly ceremony that we had wanted, suggesting that a few gentle jokes by the officiant worked well in moderation, but that people expected the bride and groom to be serious (and that we'd be too nervous to pull off comic timing anyway). His draft of the ceremony was almost perfect, and took care of a big part of the wedding that we would struggle to handle by ourselves. Ultimately our officiant was double-booked, so the ceremony was performed by his associate.
Vows
After Kelly walked down the aisle to "Rose of My Heart" by Johnny Cash, it was time for the ceremony. The one part that we wrote ourselves was the vows. We had originally planned to go much longer, but after writing a few sentences, we could tell that they were just right and needed no further embellishment. During the ceremony, I misread mine out of nervousness, but managed to recover.
How precious you are to me.
You are my treasure, the great meaning of my life.
Everything that I do is for you.
I promise to support you, to help you, to comfort you, and to love you, for the rest of my life.
Scott, thank you for handling the gross parts of my frog dissection for me. That's when I knew you were a keeper.
Today, I promise to love you and respect you, and to be there for you on every step of our journey together through the rest of our lives.
Bridesmaids and Groomsmen
Kelly immediately chose her longtime best friends Gina and Mirly as her bridesmaids, asking them to drive in from Illinois and Texas respectively. I didn't want to name groomsmen or a best man because the idea of ranking my friends made me very uncomfortable, but Kelly insisted on a balanced party, so I asked Kelly's brother Andy and my old friend Jeremiah to be my groomsmen. The one compromise that we made was that there was to be no best man or maid of honor: All four were equals.
Clothing
While we wanted our guests to be comfortable in whatever clothes they preferred, we knew that we needed to dress up. Kelly shopped online and found shoes and a dress that she liked with silver jewelry in the waistband. (I'm not very good at technical terms for this stuff.) I already owned a black blazer, but for years it had been too tight for me to button, so I was delighted to try it on in December and find that I had lost enough weight for it to fit me perfectly. Unfortunately, by the time I put it on again in March, I had lost so much additional weight that it was now too loose, and I shed it after the ceremony. For the bridesmaids and groomsmen, we chose a simple emerald green.
Recording
Our plans for a photographer and videographer fell through two weeks before the ceremony. Luckily, some friends who were already invited were part-time professional photographers, so we enlisted them to take a few pictures and a simple video of the ceremony itself for Kelly's mother to see. They went above and beyond, bringing in his mother, a professional wedding photographer, to create for us an entire Photoshopped album of great photos. Talk about a happy accident! I just hope that they got time to enjoy themselves as party guests too. Aaron, Kimmy, Tena, thank you so much!
Dinner
The wide variety on the menu was another reason why we chose the Signature Room. We were pleased with all of it, especially the make-your-own-s'mores station which proved to be a hit. The only thing they couldn't provide was a wedding cake, so we turned to Publix for a simple cupcake-based cake.
Fun
We knew that we didn't want dancing, and there was no room for it anyway, but we liked small self-guided activities. A game using Apples to Apples cards to answer questions about our wedding worked well at the engagement party, so we re-used it at the wedding. We also asked guests to write a one-word wish on a stone to make a decoration for our home, which (as expected) led to roughly 50% real wishes like "happiness" and 50% joke wishes like "tacos," although to me that's kind of the same thing.
Guests
We were happy to be joined by local friends and family, along with a few dear people from out of state. Everyone had a good time as far as I could tell!
Social Media
One major error that we made was opting for an web-based mass invitation instead of printed invitations sent in the mail. I pressured Kelly into trying something modern and different and easy, and I underestimated how offensive the idea would be to some traditionalists, and it's one of the few details that I would change if I could do it all over. That said, the web offered one highlight: I shared a "throwback photo" on the morning of the wedding that I think turned out well.
Reflection
Kelly and I are very pleased with how the day turned out. We made mostly good choices, and what carried us through various problems was a relaxed attitude that the day didn't have to be perfect for us to really enjoy it. The ceremony went off smoothly, the party was fun, and it's better late than never to cross this milestone in our lives. I'm so glad to have taken this journey with Kelly.
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