Weddingbee Blog

Wedding Day Part I: The Girls Getting Ready
Wedding Day Part II: The Boys Getting Ready
Wedding Day Part III: The Guests Getting Ready
Wedding Day Part IV: Bridal Portraits
Wedding Day Part V: Moments Away
Wedding Day Part VI: The Processional 1.0
Wedding Day Part VII: The Processional 2.0
Wedding Day Part VIII: Here Comes The Bride
Wedding Day Part IX: The Ceremony

I have to admit, I didn’t put much thought into the ceremony itself. About one week before the wedding, I asked my brother to officiate the wedding. It was kind of short notice, and I didn’t give him much direction, except a link to Mrs. Penguin’s post for some ideas. He also lives in Miami, so he couldn’t run anything by me until we met up in Cancun two days before the wedding day. While we were in Cancun, he was always saying, “Can we go over the ceremony together?” I was always preoccupied with something else, like making sure all my guests we happy, eating, etc… I kept telling my brother, “Don’t worry, it’ll be great, you don’t have to run anything by me, I trust you.”

At one point, I told him, “Why don’t you run it by Mr. Lovebird, cuz I will be fine with anything you say. He might have input.” So the poor guy tracked down Mr. Lovebird down in the resort, who was probably preoccupied with pool basketball and other shenanigans with the groomsmen, only to be told, “Anything you want to say is fine.”

The result was that poor Brother Lovebird was stressed out the whole time leading up to the wedding, and managed to catch me and the bridesmaids in the bridal suite a couple of hours before the wedding was supposed to start, with his MacBook in tow. He read me what he had down so far, which of course brought tears to my eyes, and managed to get a few more insider tidbits to add to his speech. You could tell he put an immense amount of thought and time into the speech, which was not only heartfelt, but included so many great moments from our 7-and-a-half year courtship, many that I had forgotten about until my brother brought them up. Basically, we finished the ceremony speech moments before the wedding was about to start, as evidenced here by my BMs copying his speech moments before the ceremony started:

I had to literally shoo him out of the room so he could get ready. I handed him the vows to hold onto, and sent him on his way. The poor guy was so stressed about the speech, maybe even more than I was, the whole day.

Everything was going as planned. Until… dun dun dun…

Brother Lovebird: “Yili and May have written their own vows and will now share them.”

::: Silence :::

I turn to Brother Lovebird: “You have them, right?”

A look of complete horror comes across Brother Lovebird’s face.

All I could do was laugh! What do you guys love more? An ugly cry face bride, or an ugly laugh face bride?

Below you can see him fanning out his speech as he frantically looked to see if they were on there somewhere, and to show that the cards were all he had on him.

The whole time, he was giving death-stares to my cousin Denise, the bridesmaid who was responsible for giving him the speech before the ceremony started. Here she was saying, “I was only supposed to give you the speech. We already gave you the vows back in the room.”

After I was finally able to stop laughing, I handed the microphone over to Mr. Lovebird. I love the picture below, cuz it shows the horrified look on my brother’s face.

Mr. Lovebird said, “Uh uh uh… I guess I’ll wing it.” And wing it, we did. The reason we wrote our vows down was because both of us didn’t want to bother memorizing them.

Here he’s probably thinking, ‘Damn it, what did I write?’

To be honest, the whole time Mr. Lovebird was saying his vows, I was trying to memorize what he was saying. You see, one of the few responsibilities I gave Mr. Lovebird was to write our vows,which he did on his own days before the wedding. And he did a great job, I might add. It was short and sweet, and very us. I read it once and just printed a copy out and brought it to Cancun. The night before the wedding, crafty BM Michelle took two sheets of the goccoed place cards and some ribbon, and created a little booklet for our vows. The booklets were about the size of a credit card. I guess when I gave them to my brother before the wedding, he was too stressed about officiating that he wasn’t paying attention to what I gave him, and it wasn’t obvious that the little orange things I gave him contained our vows.

Needless to say, I had a really hard time, having only read the vows once before, and tried really hard to remember what Mr. Lovebird said just moments before. They weren’t the most eloquent vows, but they were still special. At least it made the ceremony interesting, right? Everyone got a good laugh out of it.

The next day, Brother Lovebird came to our room and handed me the little orange booklets. He said that it turned out that they were on the table in his room the whole time, and that we did give them to him, after all.

I have to figure out how to upload parts of the professional wedding video so you can see the actual ceremony, but here’s some footage our friend Kevin took in the meantime, for your enjoyment. It’s around the 1:40 marker.

Every time we watch our wedding video or when we look through our wedding photos, we always laugh at how utterly horrified my brother looked. I glad things happened the way they did. I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

What’s the funniest thing you’ve seen during a wedding ceremony? Will you be memorizing your vows?

*Please credit all photos to del Sol Photography