Wedding Part 2: Sign a ketubah and break a glass (or two)

After waiting inside for the rain to clear, we walked out to the yard where we had built a chuppah. My dad had built it out of tree branches a few weeks before we arrived, but the day before the wedding, Inspector Climate, my sister in law, and my bestie decorated it with tree branches. Basically this is a collection of photos (from Ms Kyle Hepp of course!) that show case the chuppah.

Despite what the pictures may imply, there were more people at our wedding. In fact, the first shot is one of everyone sitting on hay bales just as the ceremony was about to start. However, because my blog is a secret from my family, and I cannot ask them if it's ok to put their photos on my blog, I've tried to select photos that they're not in or at least not recognisable.

My dad is a Justice of Peace and he officiated our wedding, not that it mattered because we were already married.  Because my dad was waiting for me at the end of the aisle, my mom walked me down.

One of the things my mom insisted on was us writing and saying our own vows.  Now while I can be a total sap here on my blog and in writing, speaking that 'sap' is NEVER what I think of as a good time. To tell you that I had trouble writing my vows would be the biggest understatement ever. Inspector Climate and I shared our vows with each other before the ceremony for two reasons. 1. I knew Inspector Climate's vows were going to be really sweet and then I'd cry, and if I hate speaking 'sap' I hate being a sap more - crying in public is NOT something that makes me happy. 2. There was a ceremony that I found online that I loved and we unabashedly stole some of the key phrases. One of the phrases we both ended our vows with "I vow to continually ask how can I be more loving to you? How can I be more kind?"

Anyway, my point is this, a few days before the wedding we drove to Boston and on that drive we spent about an hour and a half trying to write my vows in which I cried not once, not twice, but thrice. I don't know why writing my vows was so hard. Maybe because expressing my love for Inspector Climate cannot be done in a few short words. It would need paragraphs, a thesis would need to be written.

We got there in the end. Our vows expressed us each quite perfectly.

Inspector Climate's did make me cry: he vowed to clean the food out of the sink, which is basically saying that he'll save me from all this evil in the world (it's just gross). He told me that when he met me, I made him fully him (and as he said it, his mom said 'Oh c'mon IC' as tears came to her eyes).

I vowed to swap sides of the bed every night, hey! That's important to some people Inspector Climate. I promised to cook his favourite meals and discover new ones too. And I vowed to experience new things and travel to new places with him (which is harder than it seems because he's a workaholic). But most of all, I vowed to be as generous and kind to him as he has always been to me.

My best friend read out our Ketubah (which we didn't know how to pronounce until the day of the wedding).

We kissed.  On Kyle's blog when she posted this picture she wrote a story of how before the ceremony she told me that I needed to hold the kiss so she could a get the shot. After we kissed, I looked at her and asked if it had been a long enough kiss, and she laughed. But the truth is, I just wanted an excuse to kiss him again.

One of my favourite shots of the day - seriously. I think I like it so much because while in these pictures my hair looks fairly contained, normally it's wild and crazy and sticking out in all directions just like the chuppah.

We laughed.

We walked down an aisle of gourds.

Inspector Climate tried to warm me up as I shivered in my short sleeves.

And we broke lightbulbs while our family shouted Mazel Tov!

Our ceremony was filled with things that meant something to us, the heart shaped rock next to Inspector Climate's foot in the above picture my parents found early on when they moved to the farm. The pumpkins and gourds were from my mom's garden.  We helped me dad write a ceremony that oozed DecoyClimateness. We had our hand made ketubah that involved all parts of our lives: my best friend read it, Sister Climate helped me crochet flowers and vines, and a blog friend Belinda helped me with the Hebrew.

I know some of you don't like all these wedding posts, and I'm sorry really (I'm not that sorry)! But there is still one more coming and it involves cake.

PS who's doing NaBloPoMo?