Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get ma-a-arried...

Rebecca's "I Do" carnival couldn't have come at a better time for me. We just celebrated our five year anniversary this past Saturday! (I'll be telling my proposal story as my Flashback Friday post this week, so come back and check for that!)

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It was more than two years from the date we got engaged that we actually walked down the isle.
There weren't any cold feet or anything like that to speak of, but we were paying for the wedding ourselves, and it was rather important to the both of us that we not be buried in bills from the wedding afterward. So I got a second, part-time job selling PartyLite to pay for it, and it was wonderful!

As the big day finally neared, I'm proud to say I wasn't a bridezilla. I was an, "Eh, whatever," type of bride. I knew what I liked but that whatever happened at the end of the day we would be married and we would have had a lot of fun. Those two things were what mattered. I bought one of the first wedding dresses I tried on and really liked, simply because I didn't want to be stuck in a panic over spending thousands of dollars last-minute. Instead I got one for less than $400 and paid around $50 to have the long sleeves made into short ones and that was that.

I joined online wedding groups, and created our "wedding web page" on theknot.com. (Little did I know this would start what seems to be my obsession of online memberships.) I ordered things for the wedding online for a bargain. My veil, our invitations, our engraved cake knife and a box full of disposable cameras - one for each table at the reception - were among my many online steals.

I designed myself our rehearsal dinner invitations, our church programs and our memory book pages. (I read stories online how folks asked for guests to write down memories of their wedding day to read on their first anniversary. I hand drew the scrolls and hearts that made up the sheet's border, and copied them onto white and purple paper. We really stuck to the rule and we read them together on our first anniversary - it was really fun!) The pics we got from the disposable cameras were a hoot - we got some real memorable photos we would have otherwise missed, along with a shot up some one's skirt and pics of the bartender. Priceless.





We had a traditional wedding by all standards. Church, limo bus, thousands of photos, reception with DJ, cake, you name it! Two hundred guests for dinner, a late night dancing, the whole nine yards. But it had a certain, overall air of casualness, which is so totally "US".

The gem of the evening? A little joke for our loved ones...At many weddings of our friends, the groom was made to do a "sexy dance", which was required to meet the approval of the bride and/or bridesmaids before he could retrieve the garter. Jay & I plotted a little, uh, surprise. With the help of one of our good friends, April, we bought a pair of satin-y boxer shorts and a set of iron-on letters. She ironed "JUST MARRIED" across the back, then outlined the letters in glittery puffy paint. Next, she took a pair of Jay's old suit pants, cut along the seam on the outside of the leg and sewed in Velcro. After dinner at the reception, Jay put the boxers on over his regular underwear, then changed into the "stunt pants". The deal was that I'd send him back, saying his sexy dance wasn't good enough twice. On the third time, the pants would come off.

It was the single most hilarious thing some of our wedding guests had ever seen. That's what they said, anyway. We told NO ONE (April and her hubby knew, of course) so the photographer didn't even see it coming. He was on Jay's other side, and his photos show the crowd of people laughing, purple in the face, and Jay doing a geeky/goofy dance in his skivvies.

I remember the DJs coming up to me just afterward, saying, in hushed tones, eyes wide, "Did you know he was going to do that?!?" Once I'd said yes, they laughed out loud (hadn't wanted to piss me off further if I was made - SMART!) and said that was the funniest thing they'd seen in all the wedding's they'd ever done.

It was a memorable night - everyone danced and had a good time, the dance floor full when the DJ played the last song. It wasn't perfect but it was everything I wanted it to be!

Want to see more pictures?