Weddingbee Blog

Now that we were half-married it was time for our vows:

The Exchange of Vows

Kristin and Wojtek, we now come to your vows.

Wojtek, please repeat after me:

I, Wojtek, take you, Kristin, for my lawful wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part.

Now, Kristin, please repeat after me:

I, Kristin, take you, Wojtek, for my lawful husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part.

While we had a relatively lighthearted take on the expression of intent and consent (which you can catch up on here), we stuck with very traditional vows. Simple, time tested, and pretty straightforward.

Reading #2

My little sister/Flower Girl wrote us a beautiful poem for the wedding. It was really lovely and sweet.

At this time in the ceremony it was time for our wedding jewels. We struggled with how to word the language for this in our ceremony and program because since Mr. Knitting has a watch, we didn’t want to call them the rings. In the end we ended up calling them the wedding bands!

I had been a bit nervous about this moment because I’m notoriously bad at figuring out how things like mechanisms work, so I was concerned that I’d have a lot of trouble with the watch clasp. Luckily, I had thought to practice a number of times beforehand and the watch moment went smoothly.

Affirmation and Declaration of the Marriage

Kristin and Wojtek, you have made your marriage vows to one another, witnessed by your friends and relatives. You have sealed your vows with the giving and receiving of the wedding bands. So now, by the power vested in me, I pronounce you husband and wife and invite you to kiss one another.

Yay! Now we were married. Time to recess to an instrumental version of this awesome and very true (and, okay, slightly hilarious!) song:

I was really happy with our ceremony. I loved that it was pretty short (about 20 minutes), and very personal to us. I got similar feedback from others afterward and that made me really happy. Even though we didn’t write the entire ceremony ourselves, it was really special to edit and adapt the ceremony ourselves to fit us and our relationship. For example instead of saying “Wojtek, you may now kiss the bride,” we used the phrase, “I pronounce you husband and wife and invite you to kiss one another.” We preferred the greater equality implied by this phrase as it better reflected us and our beliefs. I really enjoyed the process of completely personalizing our ceremony and highly recommend it if this is an option for you.

On a more hilarious note I also have to give major kudos to our photographer for getting some great shots of our ceremony. In addition to working with extremely low lighting, (the room was actually a lot darker than it appears in these photos) he also had to deal with a relative who didn’t seem to know that it is completely inappropriate to get out of your seat and steal the prime photography spots from the official photographer! I’m not exaggerating. He was literally blocking people’s view of the ceremony at a number of times. I still can’t believe that happened. Oh well, it just kind of makes a funny story now!

All photos by the amazing Josh Levinson

Missed a Knitting Recap?:

• First we yoga-ed
• I spent the morning being anti-social
• Mama Knitting figured out how to dress herself and I turned into a bride
• We had our first look and snuggled in the snow
• We played in the snow with our friends and then spent an hour doing some unexpected set up
• Our guests arrived and we looked at some ceremony details
• We walked down the aisle and got half married