So, I got married last year (6-6-09) and it was a beautiful wedding (in spite of a few hiccups the week of, more on that later.) But first, a little bit about us: I am a total Disney nut, and have been since I can remember (my parents got the Disney Channel on cable as soon as it was available for me... I was 2!) My fiance... not so much. But, he loves the Pixar movies, and is getting more and more excited about our WDW Honeymoon (more about that later.) We met online, and pretty much fell in love immediately. He proposed on our 6 month anniversary (we are from the Detroit area and had taken a weekend trip to Chicago.) He tried SO hard to make it a magical proposal, but unfortunately I kinda screwed it up. We went to a BEAUTIFUL fondue place for dinner (Geja's Cafe, I highly recommend it) and the only problem with it was that it was much further from the EL station than my DF originally thought, so we had to walk quite a ways and I was in high heels. Then we went to Second City which was hysterical. We got back to the hotel, and needless to say, my feet were KILLING me so I was a bit cranky and tired. My DF said "Let's go to the Sears Tower" (do you see where this is going? I had no clue!) and I said, "I really don't feel like it right now.. can we chill out for a bit?"
DF: "Ok, but let's go tonight" Well, I don't remember exactly how it went, but I was annoyed, and my feet hurt, and I was cranky, and he was being SO insistent that we ended up getting into a bit of a fight.. and during said fight I said something like.. "you know, when you're like this it seems like you doubt our relationship!" And then he sat up on the bed and said, "Come here" and he pulled out the ring! And I looked at him and said, "Shut up!" And he said "will you marry me?" and I said, "shut up! Are you serious?!" Needless to say, not the magical proposal on top of the Sears Tower that it could have been... just my luck! So, anyway, I cried, and said yes, and then I said, "can you please get down on one knee and ask me again?" So he did.
Let me give a little bit more background... When we first got engaged, I really wanted to go to WDW. I brought it up a bunch of times and DF always said no. (Even though I am a huge fan, I have only been to the World once, and that was 10 years ago!) He kept saying that he would maybe go once, when we had kids. Anyway, we had at first talked about going to Croatia for our honeymoon, because my family has a house there, and DF has never gotten to go out of the country (except for Canada, which is so close to us it doesn't exactly count as leaving the country!) I wanted to go too... But the closer it came to reality the more freaked out I got about it. I have lots of family there, and I love to go. My mom usually lives there 6 months out of the year.The problem I had is this: My dad died 3 years ago from colon cancer, and he is buried in Croatia. He was there when he passed away. My brother and I went to visit him when he was near the end, and he passed away a week after we left. None of us could be there for his funeral because they do things much more quickly there and even if we could have gotten flights, we would have missed the funeral. So, I haven't seen his grave yet, and I didn't want the first time I saw his grave to be on my honeymoon.
Anyway, after we discussed that, I felt really bad for denying DH his first chance to go to Europe and I told him he could pick where we would go for our HM. He started thinking about an Alaskan cruise, which I was excited about since I've always wanted to go there too. DH came home one day and said "I've been think about alternatives to an Alaskan cruise," and I perked up and said "
Disney Cruise?" and DH said "um, no." That was the end of that conversation. However, a couple days after that, he said "So, I've been looking into this Disney Cruise thing..." I was SHOCKED! I couldn't believe it! DH said that I should know he researches everything, and I shouldn't be so surprised, but going on all the reactions before, I never thought I would get anything close to Disney! Anyway, after further research, we discovered the buy 4, get 3 nights free deal. DH and I talked and realized we couldn't go somewhere where all we did was lay on a beach. We like to DO stuff. So, I told DH that if he found anywhere else that he wanted to go more than Disney that we could do stuff and get as much bang for our buck, then we would go there (all the while I had my fingers crossed for WDW!) and lo and behold, he booked Disney!! I cried when we officially booked the trip. And for the Valentine's Day right before the wedding he surprised me by upgrading us to the GF with the Platinum Package! (this intro was shamelessly copied from my aborted PJ!)
Anyway, on to our wedding. We were set to get married in my church (which is a Croatian Catholic church, Croatian being my family's nationality.) Unfortunately, The Wednesday before the wedding (we got married on a Saturday) my priest called and said "we have a problem..." My heart stopped. See, DH is divorced, but his first marriage was only a civil ceremony, he didn't get married in a church. His ex wasn't Catholic, and neither is he, so it shouldn't have been an issue, right? Well, apparently the Catholic church does not recognize civil marriage ceremonies if one of the party is Catholic, but if neither of the couple is Catholic, then they do recognize the marriage. Yes, I know, it made no sense to me either. So my priest, (who knew about the divoce, obviously, but failed to file the proper paperwork until right before the wedding) informed us of this 3 days before our ceremony and said "We can't marry you in the church, because your fiance needs to get an annulment and that takes a few months. When you get an annulment, we can perform the ceremony then. 3 DAYS BEFORE MY WEDDING!!!
Needless to say, our response was basically "Screw you, we'll find somebody else to marry us!" My FIL is a Lutheran Pastor (he was newly ordained at the time of all this) and we asked him to perform the ceremony and of course he said yes. We changed the ceremony time from 12 to 1, called everyone we could get a hold of, and told them we would be getting married at the reception site (which was outdoors.) Needless to say, it was chaotic! If we hadn't have been trying to please my mother by trying to have a Catholic ceremony in the first place, we would have asked FIL to do the ceremony originally, but we were trying to do the proper Catholic thing. That has totally gone out the window now, and I haven't been back to my church since.
Another lovely hiccup was our tent. There's a pavilion and hall at the ceremony site, but we had too many guests to use the hall for the guests, so they were seated outside under the pavilion and tent. I had gone to reserve the tent a few months beforehand, and said "I need to reserve a tent for my wedding." No problem, right? Well, it was Thursday, and I arrived at the reception site to do some prep work, and wait for the tent to be delivered. Well, they start to put up the tent, and... it's a yellow striped tent. Yes, yellow. Of course, I flipped out. I called DH and told him to go to the rental place and figure out what the &$)%@! is going on! He said that the rental place said I had never specified a white tent, and so the yellow stripe was the default tent. I didn't even know they offered anything but white tents! All of their pictures had lovely white tents and I said "tent for a wedding." Who in their right mind would take that as "a yellow striped tent!" They had also sent me yellow walls! Well, they didn't have any more white tents, but they did replace the wall with white walls with windows.. So at this point I had no church, a changed ceremony time, and a yellow tent. Yup, I was majorly stressing! The day of the wedding was completely beautiful, though. I think all of our bad luck was used up during the preceding week! My cousin went to the church to tell any guests who didn't know of the changes to go to the reception site for the ceremony. The ceremony was gorgeous. My 2nd cousin (who was also a bridesmaid) is a trained opera singer, and she sang "Ave Maria" which was gorgeous. My FIL performed the ceremony, and everything went off without a hitch! I'll post a few of my favorite wedding pics next.