A Honeymoon Hiccup

Remember way back when, when I mentioned we were going to Peru for our honeymoon?

Well, now, maybe not.

We have been having a really hard time finding a trip to Peru that works with our work schedules. September would be great for Kenneth, but terrible for me because we're launching things at work and I have a 4 day trip to New York in September too. October doesn't work for Kenneth because of the REI sales at that time of year. November is ok for both of us... but in Peru, rainy season can start as early as November.  (It's warm, but still, lots of rain). Last night, we talked about maybe something else might work out better, and just for informational purposes, we took a look at other trips REI offers.

And then we saw this picture of Belize...

Soooo pretty! But now we don't know what to do.

Here are the pros and cons:

PERU:

Click on "Peru" to read the REI itinerary.

Pros: cultural significance (love that! The ruins! The people! The history!), it's a once in a lifetime trip, hot showers and hotels the entire time.

Cons: It doesn't work well with our schedule (it could work, just not ideal), it's more expensive than Belize (in airfare), it's certainly not a relaxing vacation. Doesn't exactly say "honeymoon."

BELIZE:

Click on "Belize" to read the itinerary.

Pros: it's sunny, warm and beautiful! Just look again at the picture--- who doesn't want to spend time there!? It's cheaper  (HUGE plus!!), more relaxing.

Cons: For 4 days of the trip we would be in those tents on the beach with access to showers (not necessarily hot ones) and get this, "modern, compostable toilets," (I read that as code for fancy port-o-potties... do you interpret it differently?). There are no cultural experiences to be had--- they mention Mayan caves and culture in the description, but when you read the itinerary, there's actually nothing involving Mayan culture.

One last thing--- Ken thinks that Belize has more of a romance factor, and it does *sound* more romantic to go to Belize, but I'm not so sure yet. During the part of the trip that should be the most romantic (the 4-5 days on an island with pristine beaches),  "modern, compostable toilet" doesn't say romance to me. In terms of romance, I think the trips are pretty even.

We are VERY blessed to have 2 such wonderful options for our honeymoon, but we're still baffled as to which will be better. Where would you go? Peru or Belize? 

Wedding Pictures Part 12: Ave Maria

Mom didn't make any demands about our wedding, except one. Ave Maria had to be played during our ceremony.

I had no objections to Mom's demand. Ave Maria was sung by my great-grandfather at the weddings of each of his children. It's been played at many family weddings since then.

We asked Kenneth's cousin to sing it originally, but she couldn't come to the wedding... which was disappointing, but our musicians did a fine job. 

It's a song that honors the Virgin Mary, and asks for her protection as well as God's. But it's not just that to us. 

Granny was a strong, Catholic woman. The kind that had rosaries in every purse, a well-worn one next to her bedside. Pictures of saints, missals, and prayer books scattered on her nightstand and bookshelves. She went to confession if she even had a bad thought about someone. She loved her family and we all loved her. She was a saint on earth.

And Kenneth's grandma was also a strong, Catholic woman. She loved children so much, she had 10 of them. I don't know much about her since she died over 10 years ago. But if a woman's children speak of her like she was as much an angel before she died as she is now, I'm not sure I need to know much else. And she had 10 children!

What better song to honor them than Ave Maria?

We wanted to honor them in a personal way. So, the roses I carried up the aisle with me were left at the statue of Mary as our musicians played Ave Maria. We left the altar, and stopped at the niche to pray a silent Hail Mary and remember our grandparents.

 (I had wanted to have copies of their bridal bouquets done for this, but it was too hard to figure out logistically. But the roses made good substitutes.)

When I think of Granny, I think of her faith. In turn, her faith inspires my own. When she was unable to come to Seattle for my Confirmation a few years ago because of arthritis in her back (the car ride was too hard anymore), I thought she could at least come to my wedding someday. I wanted her to see me make a sacrament as an adult, to witness just how much she had influenced me. 

I believe Grandma H., Granny, and Granddad were there with us in that moment as we prayed alone at the back of the church. When I look back at our ceremony, I think we must have made them happy and proud. 

(And that, my friends, is the last somber moment of the day. Thanks for sticking through some posts that were pretty hard to write. The rest are all fun stuff, like kisses, and cake, and dancing!) 

Wedding Pictures Part 11: Communion

Possibly one of my favorite pictures ever.

Some people have strong feelings around Communion being served at Catholic weddings.  If you're curious about the rules around Communion, you can read more here. It might also give you some ideas about why people have strong feelings about it (rules around who can receive Communion, why, etc.).

You all being nice people, we decided that none of you would be grumpy because you love us. We're both Catholic, so receiving Christ on our wedding day seemed fitting. Why would we not invite Christ to be part of our ceremony? Anyway, Kenneth's family always has Communion at weddings. The more we thought about it, the reasons to have Communion were more compelling than not and agreeing to have Communion was one of the easiest parts of planning our ceremony.

Anyway, so at this point, Monica and Erin (Kenneth's cousins and our altar servers) waited with Fr. Dick for the gifts to be presented (I think that's how it's described).

 Aunt Mary, Uncle Bruce, and their daughter Elizabeth brought them up.

Fr. Dick consecrated the bread and wine.

We prayed the Lord's Prayer, and our guests raised their hands in prayer over us... no, that's not a gesture common in Germany during WWII, despite the look of things.

Next came what I call "the peace-be-with-you," but what's actually called the sign of peace. Which, at a wedding, is another chance to get hugs in. We were all about the hugs on our wedding day... if you escaped being within 10 ft of us without a hug I'd like to know how because I would be pretty darn impressed.

And, after all that, we were all ready for receiving the Eucharist.

Phew. Ceremony is almost over. Just a song, a few detail shots that didn't find their way into a previous post,  and a kiss to be had, then off to the party.

Wedding Pictures Part 10: Prayers of the Faithful

After we made our vows, Uncle Chad stepped up to say the prayers of the faithful-- prayers on behalf of the congregation. This is the part of the ceremony where we were given the most freedom for creativity--- and so we did:

For leaders of Church and state, that they guide us in the search for peace, environmental stewardship, equality, health, and love, let us pray to the Lord.

For Brianna and Kenneth, and all who share a mutual love and life together, that through the help of God, they may savor love, children, long life, family and friends, let us pray to the Lord.

For those who have died, especially Joan Hebert, Robert Ellis, and Johanna Ellis, and also for those who could not join us today due to their health, we pray to the Lord.

For the unspoken prayers we hold in our hearts, we pray to the Lord.

Not the most beautifully crafted prayer in the world, but we felt it covered all the bases.

I insisted that an Ellis family member had to read the prayers of the faithful because I wanted Granny's name to be pronounced right--- (YO-HAWN-UH-- it's a Dutch name and the name Johan/Johanna goes back many generations).  Even at Granny's funeral the priest mispronounced her name and that bothered me so much that I didn't want it to be mispronounced in such a public way again. Little things get under my skin, I guess.

 I also remember how Kenneth's family chokes up at weddings when his grandma's name (Joan Hebert) is mentioned. We knew Uncle Chad would be able to pray for Granny and Granddad with a steady voice-- Uncle Chad is good at keeping his cool that way. I, on the other hand, started tearing up at Granny's name. Before the wedding, I had worked on de-sensitizing myself to the things I knew were going to affect me most-- these prayers and the song Ave Maria. It didn't work and I still cried.  A quick dab of my eyes and a few deep breaths and Chad was done.

Chad stepped down from lectern, and the preparation for Communion began.

3 Month Anniversary

Today, we celebrated our 3 month anniversary by unwrapping the bulky package we found left in our freezer after our mini-moon. Which one?

This one:

We know that you're supposed to save the top tier from your wedding for your first anniversary. But our baker offered to recreate our top tier for our 1st anniversary, so we weren't planning to save the top tier from our wedding cake. We forgot to tell people though, so my super-awesome friend Margarett took our top tier to our apartment after the wedding, wrapped in plastic wrap and foil, and stuck it in the freezer. And here's the rub-- our freezer is ALWAYS bursting at the seams. When I make food (really make food, not sandwiches for dinner or frozen pizza), I make the full recipe, even just for 2 of us. I freeze the leftovers in 2 serving size containers and bam--- quick and easy dinner-- just reheat and serve. So, our freezer is full of frozen vegetables, ice, tons of green chile/homemade marinara/whatever I made last week.... and the top tier of our wedding cake.

We thought maybe since Margie did go through the trouble of wrapping up and freezing the cake for us, maaaaaybe we could save it for our first anniversary. Well, our freezer situation put the kibosh on that. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. 

Hmm.... frosting is very smudged, but it looks ok otherwise.

So, we decided we would eat the cake for our 1 month-iversary. And we promptly forgot about the cake on our 1 month-iversary. And then we forgot about it on our 2 month-iversary. And then we came to today, our 3 month-iversary, and we remembered! 

We were scared. Was it going to be chocolate cake with cookies & cream filling, which we both loved? Or lemon marionberry, which only I would like? Would we be romantically sharing this top tier, or would it fall to me entirely to eat that HUGE top tier?  The moment of truth....

Bummer. That, my friends, is lemon-marionberry. If my butt looks bigger next time you see me, now you know why.

Nothing left to do, but eat the cake. OOooohhh, spooky eyes for Juniper. I think that means she was trying to use the Jedi laser eye trick to move the cake from the counter and into her belly. It doesn't appear to have worked though. Too bad, Juniper! No cake for you. 

But if you are in the mood for 3 month old, but still tasty lemon marionberry cake, come on over.  Don't leave me to eat the top tier of my wedding cake alone!

Wedding Pictures Part 9: Vows and Rings

Where are we? Hmmm....I got my hair did with my ladies while Kenneth and his men obliged me by putting on their jackets for some faux getting ready shots. We took some family photos. We took some photos of just us. We processed into the church. We prepared our hearts, minds, and souls with the readings from scripture. We listened to a homily.

Right, so now, we get to the point of this whole shin-dig. We vow to love each other unconditionally for the rest of our lives, and get some new bling to remind ourselves of what we promised.

Love Lexi's face on this one. 

I wish I knew what Nathan was smirking about...

Look, Spencer is kind of smirking too. Natalie is just trying to stay awake. 

Gratuitous cute baby shot. Because it's our blog, and we like babies. And I think this shot was taken around the time of our vows anyway.

One last blessing before we get to the vows and rings...

Oh, wow. We look love-sick and happy there, don't we? Well, if you're ever going to be sickeningly in love, it should be on your wedding day, right?

Ok, noooooow, is the part where James does his most important job during the ceremony. I was really nervous about how the rings would go down the aisle since we didn't have a ring bearer. I didn't want James to carry them in their boxes in his pocket, since that would be bulky and weird looking. I also didn't want them to be loose in his pocket-- too scary! We could lose them that way! So, I asked Kenneth  to have a ribbon tied around them the night before. That way, if they dropped, there would be a long piece of ribbon attached to them and they'd be easier to find. This picture shows James untying the knots  and letting the rings fall off the ribbons and into his hand. James was an awesome best man, putting up with my paranoia and all.

A little holy water to help bless the rings. 

Funny tangent, because I have those sometimes: Usually, during Mass, I have to work really hard to keep my mind from wandering since I'm a visual person, and I don't follow things well when I hear it. I always use the Missal to follow along with the readings and songs.  And I'm lucky if I can keep my mind focused on the homily for the whole 20 minutes. So, this, (and the fact that so many of our guests weren't Catholic) is why I insisted on those incredibly lengthy programs-- I wanted y'all to be able to follow along if you weren't good at following along without visual cues to work from (like me). Anyway, I did well at staying focused during the ceremony (thank goodness! Of all times to stay focused and in-the-moment during worship, that's a high priority one!) EXCEPT, I couldn't let it go when Fr. Dick blessed our rings, and told us about the precious gold metal symbolizing the value of our vows to each other. I was thinking "Wait! They're not gold! Go back and fix that part! The blessing of our rings should be accurate! It's important! Ahhhhhh!"  My brain stalled there, and it took a moment or 2 to re-focus on what was going on and remember that this particular thing was far from important, and I should pay attention to what was actually going on. And now you know what goes on in Brianna's brain. It's a bit scary, but you're reading this still, so I guess I haven't entirely scared you away yet.

Looking at this again, I guess we didn't want to stop holding hands, once we were doing it again when my wedding band was on. Our fingers on my left/his right hand are still intertwined. :)

So, now we were married. With that, Kenneth has gained a wife who writes fairly incoherent blog posts at 1:00am on a Saturday morning, rarely vacuums, and never hears the dog whine to go out in the middle of the night. And I get a husband who wakes up with the dog in the middle of the night, and makes a great big breakfast while I sleep in every weekend. Sigh... I love his pancakes him. 

Anyway, here's a shot of those rings we exchanged:

And now, I feel like I should apologize if you had M&Ms after this picture was taken. I didn't know they were put in the M&M bowl. But I don't actually feel THAT bad since I haven't heard any reports of people getting sick from the wedding because of it. That, and I LOVE that picture.

Enough rambling from me for one evening (morning). To bed with me... more pictures later this weekend, hopefully.

Wedding Pictures Part 8: A Little Help from some Cousins

Perhaps when you have a cold and you're stuck at home, you do reasonable things like sleep, drink lots of fluids, and maybe read or watch TV. I'm not good at that "taking care of yourself" thing, because after I get bored with sleeping, reading and TV, I started to vacuum, make a few phone calls, and work on our wedding album.  At one point, I actually tried to do some yoga, but I caught on to that being a bad idea fast, so that's when I started vacuuming... which also turned out to be a bad idea. Oops.

Anyhow, lessons learned.  So, while I was not resting like I should have tonight, I came across this photo:

Which brought to mind what happened just before.  When we arrived at the reception location, I wanted to touch up my lipstick before things really got started. I ducked into the restroom, and ran into my cousins Ashley and Patty. They offered to help me take care of other things while I was in there.  I feel pretty lucky having cousins willing to hold my wedding dress in a bathroom stall for me.  I was able to get by just fine on my own, but they hung around, just in case. I love them. Not just for what they were willing to do/did on my wedding day, but because that memory made me laugh a little on an otherwise miserable day. Yay for Patty and Ashley!