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!