Jiajia and I enjoyed a fabulous wedding celebration today. Ava coped admirably with the daunting task of meeting 100+ friends and family, and maintaining her smile. For me it was trying to place the multitude of guests from so many different spheres of my past life - college, work, social, relatives, etc. It was so kind of so many folk to travel large distances to join with us on our special day. If you were one of them - thank you!
Despite minimal preparation (on our part, at least) the day went really smoothly and was full of memorable highlights - the venue (unorthodox perhaps, but with plenty of space to spread out), the bouncy castle (which kept young'uns and a few young-at-hearts happy), my brothers' drama "speech" (all lies, I tell you), the costume changes (Jiajia got through three dresses during the day and looked stunning in all of them - thanks Jo and Krista!), the picnic (guests bringing their own food saves so much hassle and expense!) and the ceremony (mixing formal and informal, traditional and less traditional, Chinese and English, religious and secular - thanks Dad for juggling all that!). Thanks too to all the youngsters who helped with the dress-holding, confetti throwing and car-mangling!
The decorations were expertly arranged (thanks, sis-in-laws) - no mean feat in a building that size. And the cake that my parents sorted out was a fabulous creation, and tasty too. Dave and Andy did such a great job planning and running the day. I doubt many folk would have realised that the final schedule was only decided on the evening before, and the ceremony itself was rehearsed for five minutes just half an hour before the first guests arrived!
The day rushed by for us, but is full of happy memories, aided by the 1000 photos the guests kindly copied for us before they left. Despite having technically got married a couple of months earlier in China, this will be the day we look back on in future as our wedding day.
For more wedding photos, click here.
