Weddingbee Blog

In the last installment, you saw us walk down the aisle. Now it’s time to do the actual ceremony and getting married part. It’s really self explanatory at this point, and since we had a traditional Catholic ceremony without all the interesting personal touches that most of the other bees had in their weddings (kinda jealous…), I’ll let the photos do most of the talking.

After we got down the aisle and sat down, we settled in for the long ceremony. We didn’t have a “full” Mass, which would have included communion, for different reasons. Most importantly, Mr. Dumpling is Catholic and I am not. I might have forgotten to mention a while back that I have been in the process of converting to Catholicism. It’s quite a long process actually, and I’ve been in the process since March 2008. I asked why I couldn’t just “sign up” to be a Catholic—you know, like why wouldn’t they want more members or whatever? They told me it was about quality, not quantity. Okay then. Anyhoo, I’m not finished going through the process yet, so they considered us a “mixed religion” couple and we couldn’t have communion. (Side note: non-Catholics can’t take communion during Mass. Don’t kill me—I’m just reporting what I learned.) So instead of a priest performing our ceremony, we got a Deacon (who also can’t say Mass). This turned out to work in our favor in the end though, because the Deacon and his wife (yeah, Deacons can have wives) did our marriage counseling/prep courses and we got to be pretty close with them. They have been married for something like 52 years, so they were really great to work with.

Ramble ramble…

Right. Even though we didn’t have a full Mass, we still had a 40 minute ceremony. It went like this: prayer, reader, song, reader, song, prayer, deacon talking, prayer, song, vows, kiss, prayer, rings, unity candle… asome other stuff (not necessarily in that order), and POOF! We were married.

Here are the pictures:

Settling in and getting comfy while holding hands:

Laughing at the funny thing the Deacon said that I can’t remember for the life of me:

Standing during the Gospel—I was so nervous—I thought my legs were gonna lock and I would faint, so I kept shifting my weight. It probably looked like I was doing the “I have to pee pee” dance.

Here we were not paying attention, and having our own conversations. We talked about stupid things. I asked him if he brushed his teeth, ’cause I didn’t want a stanky kiss, and he told me he forgot to eat and thought he was gonna pass out. I asked him if the best man remembered the rings (and then I looked over to the best man and “mouthed” to him, “You have the rings, right?” This is actually on video), and I might have mentioned something about TiVo. Don’t judge us. I have a short attention span and he was hungry and couldn’t focus. And we’re stupid like that.

This is my favorite shot from the whole ceremony. I told you it was long:

But then things got more interesting when the Deacon gave his sermon and spoke about the Marriage at Cana, and then told everyone the story about how Mr. D and I met. It was pretty special and we could tell he put a lot of time and effort into it—not to mention, love.

Time for the vows: (look at my pretty sister… I love how she’s looking over at me).

Kissy kissy. We practiced our “church tongue” a couple of times but in the end decided on lips only:

Our unity candle- this was a craft project that really wasn’t worth blogging about. I bought a $3 candle from Michaels and Scotch-taped (I mean, I didn’t even use a hot glue gun… what kind of Bee does this??) a brown ribbon around it.

Slipping the ring on his finger, AKA, the “lock down” moment:

The blessing: Oops, they got me looking down at my chest… I stuffed my “something old”—my grandma’s hanky—down my dress and it was giving me a rash. I am allergic to lots of fabrics and detergents and I had a bad rash on my chest from it. It was hot.

Presenting Mr. & Mrs. Dumpling! Heading back down the aisle:

YESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKK!!!!!

I’m not sure whose hand he is trying to shake… wasn’t everyone in the church? Did we have some late arrivals???!!! DON’T BE TARDY FOR THE PARTY!!!!

We’re in the car and ready to PARTY!!! Mr. D: Wanna kiss me some more? We just got married, so pucker up!

Our wedding ceremony was kind of awesome. We take our faith pretty seriously (no really, we do… this post was written a bit tongue-in-cheek), and we felt like everything from the music to the message spoke to us loud and clear. We wanted to do it again the next day. Thanks for letting me share it with all of you! Next up: the reception and the portraits.

Oh yeah- I’ve been a little bit MIA for a while. Remember when I told you I was preggers? Well, I popped HER out about 3 1/2 weeks ago and life has been… well… to put it in the simplest terms… BETTER THAN IT HAS EVER BEEN. How did I live my whole life up to this point without this child? Labor sucked big time (15 hours and 3 hours of pushing after the epidural wore off completely), but the reward was worth it. She’s not ready for her blog debut, but here’s a little something for you guys…

FEET! They smell really yummy.

I promise to be a good bee and not wait 2 months before my next recap, but it’s hard to get online between feedings and poopie diapers… and then cleaning the spit up from the feedings and the poop from the poopie diapers off of me.

Smooch!!

All photos by The Cohens