Weddingbee Blog

My friends and I have this phrase. I’m going to share with you, I promise, but first I want to tell you how the phrase came to be.

Do you have a tendency to over-document your life in photos like I do? I actually have an all around problem with over-sharing, but that’s another story entirely. What is it that prompts me to take 100 pictures every time I am with friends? Why do I always feel validated once they are posted on Facebook? I don’t know. I’m confused by it myself.

Although I do find that I am taking less and less pictures these days. However, I always feel a smidge sad when reviewing the pictures and realizing there aren’t as many as I hoped. Long gone are the days of printing them. Should I blame the digital camera for my crazy picture taking or should I blame social media for seducing me into sharing? I’m going to blame both because Uh UH, no WAY, not MY FAULT.

So back to the story at hand—every year our friends take a weekend trip canoeing on the Saco River in Maine. It’s basically heaven on earth and we all look forward to it each year. I assume that my over-sharing via pictures caused the problem in the first place but we found more and more people wanting to join us. That’s fine…until the year we had 26 canoes: that’s 52 people. There is no way to please 52 people all the time and the trip, for lack of a better phrase was ruined. So a small group got together to do a Secret Saco—3 canoes, no drama. It was better than chocolate! We had a blast but made a point to not take many pictures. We didn’t want to hurt or offend anyone because we took a trip without them. So on Sunday morning, as we were preparing to pack up and take off from our glorious riverbank campsite, something unbelievably funny happened. It was a moment that only a camera could capture and as I reached for my memory seizer I realized that I missed the photographic opportunity. So instead of crying about it, I filled my glass to half full, looked at my friends through tears of laughter, and said…

“That’s for us!”

That moment isn’t for other friends, or relatives, or that weird kid I cheated off of in high school. It was for us, and nearly 3 years later I still laugh about it. I guess I’m also trying to say that we rely way too heavily on technology. Ahhh, but this isn’t a public service announcement and if I ain’t gonna practice what I preach I should just shut the front door.

Anywho…Zeb and I knew right away that we weren’t going to take lessons for our first dance. Don’t read too deeply into this, either. I was a dancer, I appreciate the work that goes into a choreographed first dance. I love when couples put thought into their first dance but I knew it wouldn’t be right for me and Zeb. I’m looking for a moment. I’m not looking into counting steps in my head or spending the first half of the day going over the routine in my head. I don’t want to take time to practice during our cocktail hour or worry about him stepping on the train or whether my dress will stay up. It just wasn’t going to work for us. We both agreed on the 6th grade sway.

I know, people are usually on the opposite sides of the fence. Some be hatin’ on the sway and some people are dead set on the choreographed first dance. Here’s the thing though, for us, the choreographed first dance would take away from our little moment there. The routined first dance is clearly for the audience. Whether the audience is the 60 year old version of the couple trying to figure out how the hell that antique DVD player worked back in ’10 or the guests at the wedding. There’s something about that moment that I romanticize in my head. Something about whispering excitedly into each others’ ears, shedding a joyous tear, taking in the moment. I certainly don’t want to ruin that moment (again, for me only) by putting too much thought into it.

That moment? That moment, well…that’s for us.

You can imagine how excited I was when I opened my email last month and saw that our DJ, Brendan Lafferty, had sent us the edited version of our first dance song. We chose our song for the first dance. You know, that song. The song that every high school couple picks for whatever reason kids need to assign a damn song to a stupid relationship. Except our stupid relationship turned into THE stupid relationship. So we’ve got a song already—have for years, 8 years and 9 months give or take a few days. Our song is Everything by Lifehouse. I was actually pretty shocked to know that some bees had heard of it. We always thought it was obscure because whenever we mentioned it to anyone, they had never heard it. Anywho, as some of you already know that song clocks in right around 6 minutes long which is definitely too long for Uncle Mike who will get up to go to the bathroom because he can’t stand looking at the couple sway until they drill a hole in the floor AND his drink is getting pretty low…

So I received the song and couldn’t wait until I got home to listen.

…And I cried at my desk. I had a moment while my coworkers thought something was wrong. It was edited so beautifully perfect that I (who have been listening to the song for a long long time) couldn’t tell where he edited it. Needless to say, I’m more and more excited about our first dance each day.

What is your first dance song?