We got married!!

It’s been a little while since I’ve done a chatty life update, or any posts at all for that matter, but I have been away for a good reason, for which I’m sure you’ll forgive me! Especially as I have some exciting news to share… we finally got married!

I feel like years have passed since my ‘let’s catch up’ post – in fact, given that it was back in March I suppose it was actually quite a long time ago! So much has changed since then. Back when I wrote that post we were 11 weeks away to traveling to Tennessee to have a beautiful wedding and finally get married. Travel from the UK to USA was still happening at that time, but we were unsure as to whether or not that would continue to be the case.

Obviously the seriousness of the virus became very apparent in the weeks that followed that post and we ended up making the difficult decision to postpone our American wedding for a year. It was just as well we did really given that it wasn’t long before our hands would have been forced and travel was stopped, which would have made our trip impossible even if we did still intend to go.

 

We had planned to have our wedding in two parts, with America being the side that looks like a conventional wedding, with the dress, the bridesmaids, the groomsman, the guests and of course the pretty ceremony. Shortly after arriving back home in the UK we were going to them pop down to the registry office for the legal side, which would just consist of signing the paperwork and getting our marriage certificates, but not really be considered to be 'important' compared to the side taking place in Tennessee.

Having ‘two’ weddings did mean we could hold out a little bit of hope while lockdown was starting to take hold for the UK portion of our wedding to still go ahead and we’d get something, even if it was just a marriage certificate, but sadly it couldn’t. This was probably more frustrating, given that it was the time that many clothing and ‘non-essential’ stores were opening back up. So we could go to Primark with  hundreds of other people, but we couldn’t go with two witnesses to have our wedding.

 

After our weddings were pulled we waited, having been told by our local council that they would contact couples in date order to re-book ceremonies as soon as they were able to go ahead with them again. The announcement finally came from the government that weddings could go ahead, but our council didn’t open them up right away as they wanted to take more time to plan. We continued to wait, but with the end of our notice period approaching we were worried that we were going to have to pay and go through the process of giving notice all over again. Bearing in mind couples can’t currently give notice in Norfolk, that would potentially mean waiting for a very long time.

Finally in late August we finally managed to get a new wedding date set for 1^st September!

We only had two weeks to get something together, plus as I mentioned before, this side of the wedding really is only intended to be the formality. Our ‘proper’ wedding will still be going ahead in Nashville, Tennessee as we had originally planned, just not quite at the time we planned it.

Despite being extremely strapped for time we managed to pull something together last minute. We borrowed a gazebo from a friend of a friend, and my bridesmaids and I spent the day before decorating it with banners, flower garlands and lots of fairy lights. We have a little bar area our in our garage which we decorated as well. Not having an kind of wedding dress, I ended up ordering a duplicate of the bridesmaids dresses via ASOS next day delivery, but in a lighter colour so that I had something that at least looked kind of like a wedding dress. We even had a friend bring along a birthday cake which they had scrawled ‘just married’ over the top with writing icing!

 

Whilst the day certainly wasn’t quite what we had originally planned, and our trip to Nashville next year is very much still going to be our ‘wedding’. As far as we are concerned what we did have was an absolutely wonderful day full of smiles and laughter. There’s many people we’d have loved to have spent the day with, and we hopefully will do exactly that next year but for us it was perfect just as it was none the less. Our friends really pulled together and were a fantastic help (especially my bridesmaids!) in getting everything in place and making it a truly special day.

Now the countdown begins again for America!