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Monday, August 4, 2014

Wedding Week: Ceremony & Venue

Welcome to wedding week!  Richard and I will be celebrating our third anniversary on Wednesday.  Since we got married before I started blogging, I never got to actually write it all out.  So this week will be 100% wedding related since it is still the best day of our lives and I wish I could relive the whole thing! 

Today we are staring out with the ceremony and some venue details.  We planned most of our wedding on our own.  It was stressful yet exciting.  Since we were still college students, we had a very limited budget to work with.  So we cut corners where we could and DIYed a lot of different things.  More on that later. 

Back to the ceremony.  The only requirement I had for our ceremony/reception venue was that I wanted the ceremony to be outside.  We ended up renting the Eagan Community Center in Minnesota for our reception and ceremony venue.  They were fantastic.  There was a patio outside that overlooked a pond and a fountain that we could use for our ceremony.  Inside they had a huge dining hall with a giant dance floor that we could use for our reception.  As an added bonus, we did not have to go anywhere else either.  It was an all in one deal, which made the price even less.  Perfect for us. 

We rented the chairs from the community center and they did all the set up and tear down.  We rented the trellis from Midway Party Rental and then had our florist (a friend of the family) add some flowers and greenery to it.  We also had Instant Request as our DJ for the night and we had the option to add on ceremony services for a small fee.  So they provided the microphones and the music. 

The bridal party started inside while everyone sat down outside.  Since the blinds were drawn, we had to peek around them to see what was happening outside. 

Our officiant was Pastor Chris who was actually my youth pastor when I was younger.  We had some premarital sessions with him and we got to know him better.  We had discussed some of the ceremony wording at one of the sessions and we told him that he could not say that the ring is a circle because of the movie I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.  He had never heard of the movie before so we ended up finding it on you tube to show him. 

Well, he ended up saying it in the ceremony as a joke for us which made us laugh.  This picture is still one of my favorites from the day.  Gotta love it. 

We also chose to do unity sand because we figured that a unity candle would not work so well outside.  One of my good friends Rachel sang My Valentine by Martina McBride while we mixed our sang together.  We poured at the same time to try to mix the colors and when we were done I told Richard that it did not look very mixed so he picked it up and shook the vase.  Ha.  Love that man.  I love watching that part in our wedding video. 

At the end of the ceremony when we were walking back down the isle, we had the groomsmen hand their birdesmaid sunglasses and we danced down the isle to the song Stuck Like Glue by Sugarland, perfect song for Richard and I. I had imagined it differently then it ended up being because our isle was so short that it was pretty much non existent.  Oh well.  Once we got down the isle we had our photographer stand on a ladder with a fisheye lens to take a few pictures of everyone who attended.  These pictures are some of my favorites and I think everyone should do something similar at their wedding. 

Oh and you see those dark clouds?  Rain was predicted for the day, but it ended up working out.  Someone told me that it rained at some point, but I don't remember it raining so it obviously happened while we were inside.  So that was our ceremony!  More wedding fun coming for you tomorrow!