really, really long wedding post that is solely for my memory and probably boring to everyone else
Lets start with Thursday, because that was when my holidays started from work. I had my hair appointment at 9am. Drove on up to Leura, ordered some juice and a banana bread from the café next to the hairdressers. They brought it over to me when it was ready, which was cute! I had to get my hair bleached before they could dye it. They piled so much bleach on my poor head that I couldn’t hold my head up. I had to get them to pile it up on top of my head because it was dragging my head down uncomfortably! Was undecided on what colour I wanted to go and ended up mixing two, a reddish chestnut brown with a lighter golden coppery colour. The colour turned out really RED, unexpected but nice. I think it suits better than the black. I went off to a café when they finally finished because I was starving again, and realised it was 1pm! I’d already wasted 5 hours of my day just on my hair & travel! So I got some takeaway and gulped it down in my car before I drove home.
A few hours later my friend Amy came over and saw I wasn’t doing so well with my planning. I was flustered and on edge and scatterbrained, gluing photos into albums. She played the militant mum role, pushing me to start packing a bag, listing all the things I needed to remember. Incredibly helpful, we didn’t end up forgetting a single thing! More friends showed up around 9pm. I showed them what we’d managed to do with the photoframes thing (disastrous) and got them to make it a bit more structured and more like a net. We had a few drinks while we worked and somehow it was 1am before we went to bed.
Friday morning Nathan and I ran through the celebrant’s draft and picked out the things we didn’t want in there. It was LONG. There were only a couple of things we didn’t really like in it and easy to take them out. Then we packed everyone’s cars up with all our wedding stuff and got to Glen Davis at 2pm or so. It was so rainy and wet and I thought welp, don’t think we’ll get to have everything outside like we wanted. But everything was so green and misty and it was really lovely, so we weren’t particularly upset about it.
My gumboots got a lot of use, definitely the smartest thing I packed! Mum and Bill managed to forget loads of stuff, and I had to roam around trying to find a single bar of service so I could call my sister and get her to pick everything up. I remember standing out on the balcony with a few friends just enjoying the quiet and hearing mum yell up the stairs ‘Mirannddaaaaaaa!’ and all I could do was sigh. Every little thing, people would yell for me and expect me to fix it. Ask the chef for some icecream for Nathans brother, he doesn’t like this dessert. Ask the lady for the badminton set. What time is dinner? And so on. It was totally exhausting!
A handful of Nathan’s friends were staying in this cabin just down the road. Mum drove them over there and it was apparently the creepiest goddamn thing. There were like… 50 cows, just milling about on the road and in front of their cabin. The guys went inside and the cows surrounded mum’s car, started trying to eat the windscreen wipers and headbutting the glass! Inside the cabin was super creepy too, there was one room that was super long and completely empty save for a set of bunk beds right up the back. So there were lots of jokes about the guys huddling together all night long, surrounded by cows and ghosts and empty beer cans.
I went to bed at 10.30, lots of people stayed up drinking but I knew I’d be awake early. And I was - 5am actually. I woke up scratching my ankle and my forearm, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. I fumbled around in the dark and turned my phone on to check the time. Tried to get back to sleep but there was another mozzie buzzing around. Every time I got relaxed it would buzz up in my ear. So I got up at 630, made a cup of tea, and started working. My sister had pulled all the roses off mum’s shrub so we could use the petals in the ceremony, but left them in a soaking wet bag overnight. So I sat down and started plucking the petals off, discarding the yuck ones. Mum came down and joined me not long after, then N got up and helped too.
After we had the petals all done, Mum wanted to start on the bouquets. I helped for a while but then more people got up and I let them take over so I could go start on other projects. I was just getting annoyed because mum would say ‘how long do you want this?’ and I’d go. ‘err, this long’ and she’d shake her head, so after the 3rd or 4th time I said ‘don’t ask me if you’re going to do that, clearly I’m not giving you the right answer so just decide for yourself!’
It looked like it wasn’t going to rain so we decided to stick with outdoor plans, but had to pick a new ceremony spot because my little magical garden was too boggy and marshy. We picked a big tree to hang the photo frames on and worked around that. My friend who bossed me around with packing on Thursday grabbed me and said ‘show me everything that needs to be done’ so I left the ceremony set up with a group of my friends and we went over everything. Each job I’d think of, she’d be like ‘yep cool, I got this, show me the next thing plz’ so awesome <3. My friend Richard came and found me because ‘that photoframe thing is fucked, please give me a different job.’. My stepdad had some guys helping him with the fairy light canopy, which looked very complicated and difficult so I steered clear of there. I was talking to someone at one point and looked over their shoulder as one of the poles came crashing down with a pile of fairy lights and thought ’oh god they’re going to hate me for making them do this’
The hairdressers showed up at 10, recommended I totally change what I thought I wanted to do with the girls hair, and I pretty much gave them free reign. They started on two of the girls, I realised that I should probably have a shower. N kept bursting into the bathroom to ask me questions about plans and stuff and I was like ‘seriously can I just have 10 minutes to wash myself and shave my legs?!’ Noap. I threw on a dress and went right back to it.
The celebrant turned up at 11.30 and we changed the ceremony layout a bit. We ran through a rehearsal and I was suddenly overwhelmed with nerves/emotion. Just so tense, and I kept doing this strained grin that makes my neck tendons stand out in a very unattractive way. Mum’s going ‘please stop pulling that face for the love of God’ haha. But I think it finally hit me, after 2 years of planning ~an event~ I was actually about to get married, and isn’t that kind of a big deal? Suddenly its after 12 and I’m still wandering around with my hair in a messy bun and no makeup on, and people are looking at me kind of concerned. Flashback to the recurring nightmare I kept having about everyone waiting for me to walk down the aisle and I don't even have my dress on!
Then it was my turn to get my hair done. I sat down and they started putting rollers in and I was like Christ, I need a drink. Nathan brought me a really strong gin & cranberry and someone brought me some lunch which I only nibbled at a tiny bit. I was still so on edge and just busy suppressing emotion I think. I asked Jess to paint my ring fingers with her pearly polish and looked down ten minutes later to see I’d somehow smudged the shit out of them and had to get them redone.
They finished my hair, I ran off to get dressed and put on my makeup. My sister’s asking me a billion questions about her makeup and I was like ‘just do your makeup however you like ffs I’m busy’ And thinking I really should have paid for their makeup to be done because apparently nobody thought to practise or anything. I had false lashes sitting out and I was like Jesus Christ, I cannot put those on right now. Maybe brides get their makeup done because they’re too nervous to do it themselves. I did ok though, left the false lashes off as a safe bet and the hairdresser Kellie came back in to put my veil on. I’m trying to fix this chicken fillet plastic bra thing that I’ve got on and using doublesided tape to hold the dress in place, I’m calling out to my mum and bridesmaids ‘please fix my boobs!’ and the only code word we could come up with was ‘BO!” for boobs out, which was probably worse than just saying boobs out. Then suddenly I’m READY and the guys are there with us and the song is playing and our 20month old flower girl starts crying and screaming. Everyone looked at me and I just say real calmly ‘can someone go get her mum, we’ll just leave her out of the ceremony’
We went walking out with linked arms with the boys, rather than the guys waiting at the ‘altar’ for us. I was happy with that because the attention was on me and Nathan together instead of just me. And I could cling on to him for support and to help with walking on the sandy ground in heels. My nan was like, sobbing, and so many people had tears in their eyes. Really felt overwhelmed! Then I looked down and saw that I’d managed to get a ladder in my pantyhose already. Typical me. Also in loads of the pictures I'm pulling this stupid tight mouth face.
The celebrant gave her big speech thing. My stepdad got up and did a reading and I turned around to see all my bridesmaids sobbing. It felt like everyone was except me! I was too nervous to cry. The celebrant finished, we exchanged rings, went off to sign the registry and everyone else was handed out flower petal cones and glasses of champagne. We finished with a wine ceremony and a toast. And this huge burden lifted off my shoulders. I was just happy and ready to have a goddamn good time. We had some fun shots with people throwing the rose petals. I saw one of Nathans friends take his petal cone and start eating them. Lol. Jesse & Meredith, who had the amazing wedding the month before us, came up about 20 minutes later and threw their petal cones on our feet, which made me laugh a lot too.
We gathered everyone for family photos under a tree and the photographers were really efficient and organised, got that part over with quickly, and we went off and did some wedding party shots with bubbles and just had some fun. I had everyone on boob alert the whole time and had to keep adjusting my dress. We walked past the reception tables and I was so happy I wanted to cry. I’d had no part in setting up any of it and it looked perfect! THEN just me and naff went off to the Glen Davis town, for some romantic shots. I’d drank enough to be ok in front of the camera, woo. Hopefully we’ve got some good shots! We started on this dirt road with a beautiful background, but we were pretty much standing in a giant bull ants nest the whole time. Then we went over to some of the creepy empty buildings and did some hipster shots with them. We just walked back over to the hotel afterwards and started the reception right away.
Whoever set up the tables goofed with some of the names, but people were ok swapping around. Me and Nathan had our own little table, which we pretty much abandoned right away and went and mingled with all our friends and family, just like we planned. No awkward bridal tables thx! Nathan wasn’t drinking, and I was like ‘r u kidding, imma get tanked’ because I felt like I deserved to after all the hard work I’d put in. I was a bit sad that he didn’t want to drink with me! But hes like that at those kind of functions, doesn’t like to drink. Luckily everyone else was happy to get hammered. We cut the cake and then went over to the dancefloor and had our first dance, where we spent the whole time going ‘ok I’m going to spin out on this arm, ready….go!’ and it was pretty fun. Nathan’s little brother Rene danced up a storm all night, we all had lots of fun dancing with him.
Mum made herself a strong drink and didn’t like it, gave it to me, and next thing I had gone from merry to hammered. I managed to fall over in a spectacularly bad way, bringing a couple of chairs with me, and I’ve got a whopping bruise down my entire right thigh. I was just glad that happened after the important stuff.
Some things didn’t happen properly. The guestbook was given to Nathan, he thought it was the hotel’s guestbook not ours, and went and put it away somewhere. So Sunday morning when I checked it, it had all of 3 entries in there. Also the suitcase the cards were meant to go in, nobody really saw that, so we kind of got handed a lot or got them on Sunday morning. I forgot to put the photo albums out on a table for perusal. And people kept going ‘the alcohol has run out!!’ when it hadn’t at all, I don’t even know. But they were the only things that didn’t go perfectly. Otherwise it was absolutely spectacular and I just really hope that all our guests had as much fun as we did.
i just.. can't even be bothered writing about sunday. this is long enough!