To all that have just arrived, hello, welcome, usually I don't give you much insight into my chest, but apparently today's the day. Anyway, I don't think I've ever been so excited about a piece of clothing that nobody except Nic will see, but there you have it.
So after a fair amount of badgering last night, I managed to get Nic to email me his priorities for the wedding. In fact, he spent about 20 minutes over on his laptop madly typing away, to the point where I didn't actually know what he was doing and had to double-check to see if he had understood the assignment.
Here they are, more or less, with a little editing from me. This is almost kind of like a guest post, but one that took much pestering for the guest to write.
1. Location
2. Not having it uptight, not getting focused on the details, and just letting it go. Be as it will.
3. (Maybe this should be part of two) Feeling like a 'real person', or that the day is about us, and not worrying about what everyone else is thinking or doing, or if they are happy or not. Maybe - acknowledging us for us?
4. Having some friends! And friends that aren't my friends or Em's friends, but friends that are ours.
5. I want for it to be colourful, happy, and to be like a big friends/family get together type of thing, with some formal aspects, like the vows and actual 'marriage' i guess, but also just like friends, sitting around, dancing, eating, drinking, being merry. A campfire would be fricken awesome. And not HAVING to do stuff, but choosing to dance and be silly, and wear cool shoes that don't necessarily go with a suit, and wearing a hat... Cool stuff.
But at the same time- how cool would it be to just blow off the immediate family, and the not so immediate family, and the people that you are obliged to invite but that you don't really want to invite cause they'll be lame, judgemental, and sucky?! Like, wouldn't it be great to just invite the people that we want to invite?
So to come out of all of this musing - I would say Intimacy, Honesty, Relaxed, Open, and Free (in the hippy, not caring about what other people think of us dancing retardedly, wearing bright colours, wearing crazy shoes, and have wok food if we want, Free).
I do love the fact that he's mentioned 'Wok food' in there, after I saw a great idea from a company that does like, noodle box in front of you... cooks up the noodles and puts it in a box, right there. Fun and cool and sort of healthy, kinda. When I told Nic about this idea he thought it was lame. He maintains that sometimes he needs time to come around to these ideas, but apparently now it's right up there, go figure!!
So after having spoken with Nic a bit further and having read this, I'm thinking what if we keep our guest list at say, 40. Close family, close friends. At the moment I'm working on the system of: If you don't bother to keep in contact with me (and vise-versa) then you're not invited. If I arranged a catch-up with you last, and I haven't seen you for 3 months since then, you're not invited. This sounds really harsh, but I don't have that many close friends. Some of those who I would have considered close would fall into those categories. I figure you can't be that good of my friend if you don't bother to get in contact with me.
At the same time I like what Nic said about them being our friends. Which is something we're so on about- our wedding, our friends... And we still have 20 months before the wedding. I have a year of Uni, and will have a few months of teaching, probably, at a school. Things can change between now and then. Friends come and go, others get stronger. So, I think at this point, we pick a number, say 40. And work with that number. That number makes me feel much happier than 85 ever did. Look at it this way... even if we take everyone to a big restaurant, even if they charge $100 a head (we were looking at max $65 a head before), you'd only be paying $4,000 for that. Which is "only", but it's better than $8,500, which it would have been, at the same price.
Plus, we don't need to worry about inviting everyone. About the traditionalists not 'getting' it. Our immediate family should get it, if they know us, and if not, should love us anyway. Cousins? Cousins from wealth who can afford to spend $10,000 on a wedding dress alone? Mightn't get it. So maybe we forget about aunts and uncles, cousins, random people we used to see every saturday and don't any more, or who we used to live with, but don't now, and don't keep in touch. Forget about them. Invite the people we want. The awesome people. The people who come for dinner, or who offer support and love through crappy assignments at Uni. The people we want.
I feel so much more at ease with this change. It's not a huge change, not really. It's not an elopement - we're still having a wedding, but it's something else now. It's smaller. It's going to be intimate. We can rent a holiday house and get married under a tree with mountains in the background because it's probably going to be ok to have 40 people there to do that. And if we want to go to a winery or a restaurant for the reception, we can probably just go out and do dinner, instead of subscribing to a 'wedding package'... and even if we do, it won't be as huge and expensive as it was going to be.
I can't imagine having a wedding with 250 guests. Good lord.
Speaking of people coming for dinner, that's happening tonight, so I'd best go tidy up, lest they think I slouch around in a shirt with no bra on, watching period dramas and cuddling endlessly with the kitten. (She's the fricken best cuddler I've ever met by the way. There's not much that can make you feel as loved as when an animal chooses to sleep on you. Out of all the available couch cushions, cat-scratch-platforms and beanbags available in our house, she decided my stomach was the softest, squishiest and warmest place to lay her little tired head. Oh, how privileged I feel.)
What's better than one? Two! And one terrible photo of me in Elmo PJs. Laaaaame.
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