...going to the registry and we're... going to get legal...

New Buffalo - I've Got You And You've Got Me 

We decided quite early on that being married by a wedding celebrant that was not someone close to us, in front of all our friends and family, was not for us.

Unlike in the US where it's possible to have a friend of family member 'ordained' online by the Universal Life Church or in some states, get a Quaker wedding certificate where the couple marrying can witness their own certificate (and therefore have whoever they wish to lead a ceremony if they indeed have one), Australia's laws aren't so flexible.

It's understandable. They want to uphold the serious consideration marriage should be given. You need to submit a 'Notice Of Intention To Marry' at least one month before your intended wedding. Legal marriages can only be performed by registered civil marriage celebrants or an authorised minister of religion. And there are certain wordings of a legal marriage ceremony that registered celebrants or authorised ministers of religion MUST speak in order to fulfill the legal requirements to make the ceremony and marriage recognised in the eyes of the law.

We had some issues with that. Firstly, if we had a friend who was a registered civil marriage celebrant, then we'd have had them marry us. If we were religious or had a family priest we grew up with, we'd have them marry us. But as it turns out we had neither and I've always thought it felt odd going to friends and family members weddings, the most intimate of all personal occasions, with all of the couples' nearest and dearest there... and then this marriage celebrant who has only met them a few times lead this tremendously important ceremony.

I think this can lead to two kinds of awkward:
1. The celebrant does their job in an understated way. It feels slightly stilted that everyone there knows the couple so much more than this person marrying them. Though they may take their job and role on the day very seriously, it can sometimes feel a little false - just another wedding for this celebrant, but a incredibly intimate and personal occasion for everyone else there.

OR

2. The celebrant acts like they know the couple... and this can be even more awkward. They talk about this couple, how they met or their decision to marry... and then imparts their own words of wisdom to the married couple.

Basically, we wanted do our ceremony OUR way. We decided we wanted to get a close friend to lead a ceremony that we wrote from scratch, that we felt was the perfect reflection of ourselves, our relationship, represented why we were getting married and what we hoped for our marriage in a way that was intimate, personal, sincere and felt real, comfortable and true to ourselves.

But first, for the legal part!

So we decided it would go like this:
Friday - super basic registry wedding, no readings, no exchange or rings, no fancy vows. Just the basic requirements to make us married in the eyes of the law, with just our immediate family as witnesses.

Sunday - fancy big wedding up in The Dandenong Range with 80 of our nearest and dearest, in a private garden ceremony we had written ourselves, with our dear friend Stefan leading the ceremony.

Now, we realised it was a rather unorthodox way of going about things so we sat quietly on it and approached both of our sets of parents to tell them what we wanted to do and why. I have to admit, despite being 30, living interstate, having been in this relationship for almost 8 years... I was rather nervous telling the folks and the soon-to-be folks-in-laws! But they took it really well. Mum exclaimed 'GREAT idea!' The in-laws were a little quiet on the other end of the phone line and my paranoid self feared the worse. I think they were a bit hesitant at first as they had been invited to a nephew's 'wedding' - only to turn up at the Botanic Gardens on the day and have the 'bride and groom' just arrive in wedding gear and have no ceremony at all because they actually had been married already in Japan. So everyone arrived with their gifts, saw the couple arrive and then stood around confused and not quite knowing what to do with themselves so they just wanted to ensure that what we were inviting people to would indeed be a wedding.

But the lesson learnt there was - we really should let people know what was going on.

It's interesting though. Most people were completely into the idea and think it was brilliant (or least tell us that's what they told us they thought!). While we did have the odd friend or two who gave the distinct impression they thought that the wedding in The Dandenongs would just be for show and the real one was the one in the registry. Which is not the way we were thinking about it at all. Legal requirements, but for us, getting married and having a wedding was all about having a ceremony where we make lifelong vows to each other with the most important people in our lives as the witnesses, to support and hold us to account of these vows through thick and thin.

We mentioned what was happening to a few friends here and there along the way. Really, our ceremony was written in such a way, I don't think most people would have noticed that S wasn't a registered marriage celebrant. The only difference was we weren't signing any documents straight after the ceremony. But we wanted people to know before the day. My sister and brother in law asked if we were letting people know or whether they should keep quiet about it on the day, which was when we realised,  most definitely not, there was to be no sneaking around! So we wrote all our guests an email about it a fortnight out from the wedding to explain what would be happening. It was received really well, I had friends say they teared up reading it already and it made so many of them look even more forward to sharing our wedding!

In the interest of 'how to tell everyone the news' I'll share with you the email we wrote:

(click image to enlarge)

So it was off to the Old Treasury Building for a Victorian Marriage Registry for us:

It was all very simple to organise, everything was up on the Births, Deaths and Marriages site.

There are 2 rooms to choose from - one seats 55 and one seats 8. We were going to go with the one that seats 8 til we realised there would be 9 of us and Occ Health and Safety wouldn't let us all fit! So it was the big room for us.

On the site they even have the two services they have available. We wanted the basic of all basic ceremonies - so we opted for the 'Alternative Marriage Service' which is so basic, it's usually reserved for couples who don't speak much English! But that's exactly what we wanted, we were saving all the 'good stuff' for our friend-led ceremony in Olinda.

We literally spent MONTHS writing our 'proper' ceremony. But I'll tell you about that another time. But other than booking the registry wedding, going in to lodge our Notice Of Intention To Marry, and emailing through our amendments to the ceremony so we would not have any readings, nor exchange of rings and have as basic wording as possible, we hadn't really thought too much about what would happen at the Registry Office.

In fact, we only settled on what we would wear to this legal ceremony the week beforehand, and mainly because our family kept asking what we were would be wearing so they could dress appropriately too!

(As you can see from the photos, I'm in white. I actually just chanced across this second wedding dress when I was at the Geelong Mill Markets looking for some 1920s jewellery to go with my vintage wedding dress. It was only $35 and fit like a glove, so I figured it couldn't hurt buying it.)

So this is how the actual Registry Wedding unfolded. It's quite funny in hindsight but at the time it felt surreal and bizarre!

Firstly we were led in to the large room filled with beautiful chairs. It felt rather formal and I felt a little giggley.

We seated ourselves and facing us was a large wooden desk and great big leather armchair behind it. We waited for several minutes, it kind of felt like we were in a waiting room... and we weren't 100% sure what we were waiting for!

Eventually a woman came an introduced herselves to us, she was to be our celebrant. She asked AA and I to follow her into a side room to check over the paperwork. So we got up and left our family waiting in the room with quizzical expressions on their faces "where are they going?" and "I thought A said this would only take about 10 minutes?"

In the side room we checked our names were spelt correctly on the marriage certificate and that all the other details were correct, our parents' names, our place and dates of birth etc etc.. The celebrant confirmed we weren't exchanging rings or having a reading... I felt a bit embarrassed saying no so I tried to explain we were having a second ceremony... and you know telling someone who is a registered marriage celebrant that you're having another ceremony where your unregistered friend is marrying you... doesn't go down that well! Or maybe it was just my paranoia. I felt a little self conscious and awkward about it... but at the same time thought "it really doesn't matter what you think, it's our wedding!"

So after confirming we were having the short ceremony, no reading, no exchange of rings she explained was going to go back out and introduce us. We were to follow her back out into the room. AA was to walk first and stand in front of the desk and I close next to him. So we did... and felt rather silly... standing up there on display in front of our family who were wondering why this was all taking so very long... "I thought they were just going to sign this piece of paper?"

She began the ceremony and talked about how she had the "authority by law" to officiate our marriage. Indeed!

Then... SHE DID A READING! Yes, she did a reading after confirming with us just minutes before that we were having the short ceremony with no reading. The reading was very nice though - The Apache Indian Wedding Prayer. I was just rather embarrassed that we had intended to have this super basic wedding and told everyone that we would have no readings etc at the marriage registry because we were saving that for Olinda, but now we were right in the midst of quite an elaborate reading! But there was nothing we could do of course. I couldn't butt in and say "Excuse me! Excuse me! Would you mind not reading that! We're not having a reading!" so we just had to go with it. This is me looking at her thinking "ummmm???"

So we just stood there with grins on our faces. Though when I later explained to my sister what happened she said "OH - I was wondering why you had such a funny expression on your face!" I think it was embarrassed bemusement. I was also rather embarrassed that we had told our family this was going to be a super short ceremony and we were clearly getting delivered the wrong ceremony so who knew how long this was going to take now. Just hopefully she didn't ask for rings as well!

Then she asked us to turn and face each other, take each other's hands and prepare to make our vows.

In line with our intention for short basic vows at this legal registry, our vows were meant to be just:

In front of our witnesses here present, 

I [Groom/Bride’s name] take you 

[Bride/Groom’s name] to be my lawful wedded husband/wife.

But before I knew it she was asking AA to repeat line and line after her:

In front of our witnesses here present, 
I [Groom/Bride’s name] take you 
[Bride/Groom’s name] to be my lawful wedded husband/wife.
I promise to love you, 
to care for you 
and to respect you 
for as long as we both shall live

Admittedly at this point my mind raced a little between "this isn't what we wanted to vow... we're making legal vows... that I didn't want to vow" to "OK, you're getting married, don't worry about it, be in the moment" to "oh my god, we're doing the vows, that means I'm up next... concentrate, concentrate, you'll have to repeat line after line next too!" whilst looking at my fiance transforming into my husband with water slightly beginning to well in his eyes.

Then it was my turn. She had been standing behind me when she read the lines to AA, then moved and positioned herself behind AA to read the lines for me to repeat.

We were verbally wed! Then it was time to sign the paperwork.

Our mothers signed as witnesses

Ta da!

Then we were legally married! Not quite how I expected but c'est la vie I guess. Sometimes you just gotta roll. Seemed metaphoric somehow. Wasn't what we had planned but we just smiled and went with it, and we got there in the end.

Then we headed to the iconic Melbourne pasta bar Pellegrinis for a light celebratory lunch. 

To start our newly wed careers as partners in organised crime





A fitting end to our 70s-esque registry marriage


"John and Yoko"?

a week long festival of wedding!

[via flickr]

So much to tell! Where to start?

I *love* all the wonderfully unexpected but delightful things that unfolded in lead up to and after as well as during our wedding. Of course there were some surprises that I could have done without but they weren't worth dwelling on.

One of the things I hadn't thought about was how our wedding really ended up turning into this mini wedding festival! It really felt like Christmas Eve... except... for a wedding - OUR wedding!

Both AA are from Adelaide and both sets of our parents are still there. Which meant that when we chose to get married not only in Melbourne but in The Dandenong Ranges - an hour of our Melbourne, we had to pretty much do all our wedding planning on our own. But when it came to our wedding week, we were able to count on our families to come over and help out when we needed them most.

They've always been great like this. A few years ago when we bought our home in Melbourne, my Mum flew over the week before we were to move to help pack and clean our rental ready for the most as neither of us could afford the time off work to do it ourselves. On top of this AA had just had surgery a month beforehand and was unable to lift anything heavy. But his parents drove all the way over from Adelaide (9 hour drive!) to help us move. Amazing huh! They helped pack, move and unpack us, move in the furniture, all on the one weekend! If they didn't, I just know we probably would have some boxes around now that we still wouldn't have unpacked!

TUESDAY NIGHT
So during our wedding week my Mum came down on the Tuesday night, stayed at our place and started figuring out what to do with the flowers and a few other things. We picked her up from the airport and immediately started feasting! Straight into Footscray for a celebratory Vietnamese meal. The next day, Mum went to the markets with our housemate and bought prawns, oysters, crabs for 2 days of pre-wedding celebratory feasting!!! Woohoo!!!

THURSDAY NIGHT
It was a huge emotional rollercoaster of a day. Lots of rushing around, and right in the midst of it, Mum lost her wallet. Being of a different generation, my parents don't use ATMs. I find this baffling, I really don't know how they get by without them, but unfortunately this means that when they travel either interstate or overseas they basically withdraw massive wads of cash and walk around with it in their wallets. This disturbs me no end and I try not to think about it. I've tried talking and arguing with them about this but to no avail. Well... as it turned out... Mum lost her wallet with well over $1000 cash in it. We live in the inner west, we retraced our steps, we rang the shop we had just been in, we visited there, we spoke to the sales people we had seen, we rang them again, we looked and looked and looked and looked... it was no where to be found. Nothing worse than that sick to the stomach feeling you get when you know you've lost something like this. And of course on top of all that cash, also lost in the wallet was all of Mum's shared credit cards with Dad! Meanwhile Dad was on his flight about to land in Melbourne. We felt even more ill thinking of what his reaction would be once we told him. We came to the conclusion Mum must have dropped it somewhere and there was no way it was coming back. We started ringing all the banks to cancel the cards.

We picked Dad up from the airport, Mum had to break the news to him when he arrived, it wasn't too bad. There was nothing that could be done.

But then at 9.30pm I got a phone call on my mobile, from a man who introduced himself as "Police Constable..." and wanted to know how I was related to [my Mum]..." and I knew they must have found it.

Can you believe a man found her wallet in the shopping centre car park after finishing his shift at the shop we had just been to. He saw how much cash there was in it and tried to look for contact details of the owner of the wallet but couldn't find any. He was about to bring it to the shop but had hesitations after seeing how much money was in it and so instead took it to the police station! AMAZING! So good to know there are still good people in the world. My Mum got his details when she went to pick up the wallet - which had all the cash still in tact - and rang him to thank him. He didn't want a reward, said he believed in karma and that one day he would need someone to do the same for him, but she sent him one when she got back home anyway.

Anyway, this all happened the day before we were due to go to the registry office - what an emotional rollercoaster! It was HUGE relief though.

Dad was in *great* spirits. We had an eye on the weather seeing we were having an outdoor ceremony, though keeping in mind that it was out of our hands really so if it rains it rains! And as it was in Autumn, in the mountains, it was going to be cold - forecast was a chilly 13 degrees. But Dad exclaimed '13 degrees isn't cold it's PERFECT!' haaaaaa. Well I suppose this is a man who doesn't feel the cold!

I was testing out the music mix in the loungeroom, Dad was hanging out, our friends had driven over and had dropped over, Mum was cooking in the kitchen... it felt like the family Xmas Eve I had never had! In our family Christmas had always been going over to our grandparents or going to my sister's for lunch... we have never really had Xmas Eve celebrations - we had a family restaurant, we had always been working!

Only when I met my now husband and started spending Xmas with his family did I learn the joy of their intimate Xmas Eve dinner. It's their favourite part of Xmas and something I had never experienced - basically just the family chilling out together, music playing, milling around, having a sip of a glass of wine, reading a book, helping out in the kitchen - gently enjoying each other's company. And here we were enjoying the very same atmosphere, except it was our marriage registry eve :)

Also completely unplanned on our marriage registry eve, AA and I as well as our housemate made our television debut! Just pure pot luck that it ended up screening that night. We had been involved in a shooting of a segment for Costa's Garden Odyssey back in December and had heard it would air several months afterwards, but as it happened, our wedding week truly ended up being our "15 minutes".

On top of the TV screening, we also had a community newspaper photographer around on the morning of our marriage registry to take photos to accompany a story on how we asked our guests to contribute money towards us getting a rainwater tank in lieu of a tradition gift registry, complete with cheesey heading "Tanks for the memories".

Sometimes it's funny how the stars align!

new and approved

In case you haven't noticed, the blog has undergone a revamp and has also relocated from Wordpress to Blogger.

Though www.abluebirdbride.com will still indeed land you here, any old links will no longer be working I'm afraid. Please drop me a line if you're after a link, but the whole blog's been moved so if you do a search what you're looking for should be here.

I have a bazillion links and sites to share with you now that I've more time up my sleeve and the wisdom of married lady. 

In the meantime here's a beautiful video and tune for you --

Magnetic Fields - The Book Of Love

that's *missus* to you!

We did it! It was truly THE MOST FUN EVER and I still have to pinch myself from time to time coz I can't quite believe we managed to pull it all off and it was even more fabulous and fun for EVERYONE than we expected it to be.

So much blogging to catch up on but for those of you who have been dying for an update, here's some photos of the day

les fleurs part deux

Day 2: The yellow gladiolis are starting to open already. They look so pretty but I'm actually a bit concerned about what state they will be in by next Sunday if they are already opening now! Anyone know how long gladis last?

In the meantime the green gladiolis and white lilies are only just starting to open their tips.

Am diligently changing their water everyday and adding flower food.

Will be getting some extra sachets of the stuff to get them through to the wedding.

les fleurs

Ah, bless the internet! I love how everything is just at the tip of you fingertips really. Even top quality fresh flowers!

So the flower situation was sending me a little cross eyed. There was much to and froing going on. Lucky me has a Mum who has an eye for floral arrangements, in particular Ikebana. We won't be having Ikebana arrangements at our wedding (no room in the reception venue really) but Mum is putting together my bouquet, our buttonholes and corsages, wrist corsages for the girls and 2 vase displays for the reception.

Slightly trickier for me though is that Mum's interstate so she wasn't able to just go out and source and order the flowers herself. So I've been trying to find out what's in season in Melbourne, where's good to get them from, whose got good quality and prices etc etc.. Which would have been fine if it was just a job on it's own but as anyone getting ready for a wedding knows, there's about five billion jobs that need to be done, all at the same time.

We WERE going to get them from a wholesaler in Olinda (The Dandenong Ranges, where we are getting married) BUT the flowers wouldn't be open already and didn't fancy a trip out there 10 days before... to get the flowers... to bring home and get them to open... and then bring them all the way back.

So then we were going to get them from our favourite local florist in West Footscray. We went there with our list of bouquets etc we needed and when we arrived our jaws dropped... the FLORIST IS NO LONGER THERE! They have completely vacated and VANISHED! I was stunned and quietly devastated. I loved those guys! They had nice flowers, were super friendly and helpful, family run and nice Westie prices. Apparently they hadn't paid their rent... damn... I could have kept them in business a couple more weeks. Oh well.

NEXT we searched various other local florists. Some had some nice stuff, some were closed (it was a Sunday). So I did a quick whip around on Tuesday morning and one was closed though I went back twice and they were supposed to be open, one wouldn't really help me coz they said their bridal person was only there on Fridays and I really couldn't leave it that long so that didn't help me. And another florist close to work was really good with fantastic looking and unusual flowers but SO EXPENSIVE!

I was beginning to feel a bit at a loss. So that night at home I had one last google and... just HAPPENED TO stumble across FlowerBunch and Floriculture. Two online businesses run by the same mob. They have flower farm in Silvan (right near where we were originally going to get our flowers anyway, in fact I bet they sell supply the wholesaler we were going to go to).

FLOWERBUNCH is the retail flower delivery site. BUT they also have a wholesaler site FLORICULTURE that sells to the public! They have a fantastic range, and BRILLIANT website with answers to any question you could possibly have, a great video of how their pack their boxes so you can be reassured of what you will be getting, and the helpful blog with so much information. I was really impressed by their videos and website. And I was incredibly happy to see that they are pro Sustainability. They source locally as much as possible, minimise imports (yay! low flower miles!). They have their own greenhouse and use hydroponic organic flower production practices. See? They were ticking all the right boxes for us. They are obviously passionate about what they are doing and providing the best possible flowers to their customers. AND their prices are very competitive.

If we were after more 'cottage style' flower arrangements and bouquets etc I would definitely go for their GROWERS "SURPRISE" BOX:

They come in small, medium and large sizes ranging in price from around $65 to $160 and look like a really great way to get a selection of IN SEASON flowers, locally sourced - a selection of both flowers and foliage and really fantastic value!

I did umm and ahh about possibly going that option, but after a good couple of weeks going cross eyed trying to figure out what it was that we wanted, getting my head around how many bunches of which types of flowers we'd need, when we'd need to get them in order to be open in time etc... decided to just go with what we originally planned for. We've got 14 buttonholes to do for example, and I just didn't know if the surprise box would have flowers suitable for the buttonholes.

So I ordered online... after about 5 phone calls to their florist Sally. Their customer service was excellent, they were super friendly and very helpful and answered all my questions and kept telling me to feel free to call back if I had any more questions. And call back I did! They were very patient with me, not even a hint of getting sick of me calling up with yet ANOTHER question. And it was greatly appreciated.

I ordered 2 packages because some flowers take longer to open than others. For our reception displays we're going for a mixture of white lilies, green and pale yellow gladiolis - both take longer to open, and also cream and cream w/ pale yellow centre chrysanthemums. So I ordered the lilies and gladiolis to arrive today.

Is is how they arrived and how they look. Their website has lots of info for caring for your flowers and what to do once you get them and how to make sure they open and look their best. So that even dummies like me can't get it wrong! Plus I rang them twice once they arrived as well just to check I was doing everything correctly.

We will be having the roses, rose sprays, rose petals, and chrysanthemums arriving next week, closer to the wedding as they don't take long to open at all.

That's right people THE WEDDING IS NEXT WEEK!!!!

i take my cake back

So, we've totally caved on the cake scenario. In fact, I can't quite remember what caused me to ramble on about being against cake in the first place to be honest. I think I just didn't like the whole posing and cake cutting thing. But hell, so much of the wedding tradition IS cheesy and posed, we're doing away with much of it, but at this point in the game I've run out of energy to be put my foot down on things I might have had feelings one way or another about a few months ago. Ha!

Funnily enough the only person who really pressured us to have cake is the reception caterer! And it wasn't really pressure it was just like - why wouldn't you? And I couldn't really think of a good explanation other than 'we're not that into it' so we're just going with it.

PLUS I came across these custom made wedding toppers thanks to the fabulous A Mountain Bride blog. So we ordered some ourselves. Check it out, it's a mini-me and mini-AA!

TOTALLY WORTH HAVING CAKE FOR!