We rolled the dice big time and planned a small, outdoor, southwestern rustic wedding in the Colorado foothills the first weekend of November knowing it could be awesome or it could be freezing and snowing. I rained and blew with highs of 50 the two days before. I got very nervous. It was 70 degrees, sunny, and not a stitch of wind the day of. From my mouth to God's ears. It couldn't possibly have been more beautiful. HUZZAH!
Obligatory pre wedding pictures.
Not a single thing went wrong. Unless you consider DS refusing to walk me down the aisle a problem. We had no processional at all and 10 minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to start everyone left DS and I alone in my dressing room to go down to the site to get their seats and prepare to start. I had no clock, no idea what time it was, was at the mercy of our coordinator coming to tell me it was time, and then DS turned to me, sprouted horns, and declared, "I am NOT holding your hand." Not a soul to be found to just take him and let him sit down. I tried to negotiate with him by offer to link fingers. Nope. This is a very small snippet of what ensued when we first came in before he decided to hide by walking behind me instead. Probably a good thing because I was able to laugh with everyone else and shake some tension off. If you can't be flexible, just don't have children in your wedding.
DH waiting for me while our officiant plays his flute. I still have no idea what the music was I came in to.
Shaking the nerves off was short lived. I about lost my crap when I got up front where DH was waiting. Our officiant did an awesome job stepping between us and the guests to do the welcome so that we could look at each other and have a couple of moments to calm down. Then he started with a sage blessing that allowed us to just hold hands, close our eyes, and take deep breaths for a few minutes. Back to calm.
Then on to the family sand ceremony. DS was fine again by then and it went off without a hitch.
Then on to the really important stuff. Our officiant did something called the four directions blessing (if you haven't figured it out by now, we aren't traditional kind of folks and fall on the fairly hippie dippy side of the spectrum.) That was followed by our vows. Which both of us pretty much ugly cried all the way through. Thank goodness we wrote our vows to be repeated. I barely got through them.
And then we were married.
We got about five quiet minutes alone before diving into the next part.
And then it was time to party at cocktail hour in the courtyard.
Then dinner. Do you really want pictures of that? Too bad. I don't have any yet. I think it was delicious but can't swear by it. I really didn't have time to each much all day between taking pictures and talking to guests. I wish I had.
I guess you could say there was a glitch for our first dance. Apparently it is a tradition at our venue to open the champagne with a tomahawk so they rounded everyone one up and sent us back out to the court yard for that part. The toasts were great and my brother made me cry again.
But instead of going right into the first dance, like planned, half the guests stayed outside to smoke cigars around the fire pit while our bluegrass band got started inside. Oh well. They just started jamming because that's what they do best, those that were inside loved it, and eventually they played our song for us.
Dessert was a cheesecake buffet and dark chocolate mousse cups.
We wore dead animals on our heads. Another wedding tradition at our venue.
Someone gave a replica of the champagne axe to DS and made his night. Don't mess with him. He will cut you.
Sixteen years, three months after we first met I can finally call this man my husband. I have not a complaint in the world about our day at all.
