Yesterday, Hubs and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary. Being a Monday, we kept it low-key and stayed home and shared a bottle of wine we brought back from Italy (where we spent our honeymoon) after the baby went to bed. In a couple weeks we’re going to Kauai (where we got engaged) with my in-laws. So we’ll leave Quinn with Namma and Poppa one night and go have a romantic dinner somewhere on the island.
On October 3, 2009, our wedding was very small and exactly what we wanted. We held the ceremony on a tiny beach just north of Half Moon Bay, CA. Our guests, less than thirty close friends and family, gathered there just before sunset. We knew it would be short and sweet, so we didn’t even set up chairs. Instead, our guests were given bamboo mats as favors that they could roll out on the sand while they waited for us to start the show. They were also given lots of champagne.
The ceremony was simple and untraditional. My dear friend from college got ordained online and married us. She did such a good job, many of our guests thought she was a practicing reverend. Music played from an iPod hooked up to small speakers. There were no bridesmaids or ushers, no maid of honor or best man. Our wedding party was a party of two, Matt and me.
Matt picked me up before the wedding so we could have a few moments alone together. We arrived at the beach and walked out onto the sand, barefoot and arm-in-arm, to join our guests and start the ceremony.
September and October are the best months to be on the ocean in Northern California. The fog that envelops the coast most of the summer vanishes and the sky is almost always sunny and clear. So the backdrop for our wedding looked perfect. Key word, “looked.”
You can’t tell from the photo above, but it was freezing, which was uncharacteristic for that time of year. The sun was warm, but the wind gusted at 35 miles per hour. You may have noticed in the photo that I am not hooking my arm gently through my groom’s arm, as most brides do. Instead, Matt is gripping my arm that is holding the flowers while I use my other hand to hold my dress down. I wore a short dress (because of a dress catastrophe that I will tell you about next time), and the wind whipped so strongly, I had to hold onto my dress so it wouldn’t blow straight up!
We wrote our own vows. Not sure any of our guests could hear them over the wind, but Matt’s vows were so sweet they made me cry. Then I accidently tried to put his ring on his right hand instead of his left and it got stuck. Yep, that happened.
So our guests didn’t freeze or blow out to sea, we kept the ceremony even shorter than originally planned. Then we all headed over to the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company for dinner where we had rented a small room in the back. Six tables were elegantly set up for our guests and paper lanterns hung from the ceiling.
Keeping with the theme of untraditional, we didn’t have a wedding cake. Instead, we put a tower of cupcakes on each table as centerpieces. (Our little nephews still talk about those cupcakes.)
A few weeks before the wedding, I went to the beach and drew the numbers one through six in the sand with a stick. I took a picture of each number and put the pictures in bamboo frames to place on the guests’ tables.
We didn’t have a D.J. or a dance floor either. Just music playing from the iPod – playlists that Matt and I carefully created from our vast music libraries. The quiet, intimate setting allowed our small group of guests to talk and get to know each other, and Matt and I were able to spend time with everyone.
Aside from the gale force winds, the wedding was perfect and the day was beautiful. Tomorrow, for Not-So-Wordy Wednesday, I’ll show you a short photo montage from the wedding day, and on Thursday, I’ll tell you how I ended up with that dress.
Happy anniversary to my husband, my roadie, my Triple H. You’re an incredible husband, father, partner and friend. And I love you to pieces.
