1.14.2015

The {Re}Wedding 9.10.11

Re-wedding.

ok so I admit…..this is 4 years after I started this Re-Wedding Blog. oops- I have no defense other then, life happened. But oh, has it been good! Jesus has been faithful in His promises and His partnership in this marriage that He put back together. More on that to come but for now I will finnish the Re-Wedding story.

  The excitement of putting together all the details that we had been collecting and planning for months was so much fun! All the details being so loving lovingly placed by friends who love us well. We had dear friends who stayed well into the night covering every window with Sears and Roebuck pages and Antique Silver being laid out to be filled with flowers.  The Flower adventure itself was a treat! The days leading up to the wedding were a frenzy of Hydrangea collecting. We were knocking on peoples doors when they had a bush out front and telling the story of our Re-Wedding. People were so gracious to just let us have what we wanted. We trucked over to a house and climbed their wooded hillside to collect flowers. My fun loving adventure seeking friend and I stumbled across an abandoned office complex who had landscaped the parking  lots with Hydrangea bushes- so we took them all!! In all there were 4 van loads of flowers we collected for the wedding. They were beautiful and free and we got to spread the word about the amazing work Jesus had done to heal a marriage and give us a new life.  
   The tables and chairs came and it all started feeling so real! oh-The love that was poured on me when I realized the amount of tablecloths that needed to be ironed and the women showed up- irons and boards in hand to press them so they would be perfect for our day. There was a late night bamboo harvest that had to happen when we needed to  somehow hang all the string lights- the bamboo was literally twice as long as the van and it hung out the open trunk door as we drove it the 2 miles it needed to travel. In our still, silent valley you could hear it coming the whole way, I was told- we were laughing too hard to notice.  
  I had finished sewing Adi's maid of honor dress 3 nights before the wedding. We were both almost in tears when we saw that somewhere along the line I had done something really  wrong- it was just wonkey, something was off in a big way and I couldn't get it to be right. Finally because Adi is the best teenage daughter you could ask for she said  " its fine mom, I will look weird  but your's is perfect and thats what counts". When I look at the pictures from that day and see my beautiful daughter my heart always remembers the miracle that happened- when she got dressed for the wedding that day, the dress fit PERFECTLY. I am telling you- something changed in that dress!  In the busyness of the day we just stopped and looked at what Jesus had done; there was no other explanation - He had altered her dress. He is in all the details- they are important to Him, not that the dress had to be perfect for Him, but for the heart of His teenage daughter- He altered it. 

  The morning of the Wedding was busy with decorating the reception - there were so many things that we had planned and envisioned and it was so much fun laying them all out and piecing them all together. Friends were there loving us and laughing with us. One friend so kindly noticed that Teagen really needed a haircut and we had somehow missed that fact so she grabbed him and took him to get cleaned up- she asked me specifically how long and what style he was to have and she stood next to him as the lady cut it- guarding my vision and making sure that he didn't end up with one of "those" haircuts. Because we all know, like school picture day, if you run in for last minute haircuts thats when you are going to come out with a dorky too short or crooked bangs. But not Teagen, he got the perfect cut that day. I know its trite and obviously any picture of my kids is precious- but being the visual perfectionist I am, his hair being right was a sweet addition to my perfect day.
  So one other place that almost got over looked in the busyness was- the Church! Around 2 ( the wedding started at 5) Micah looked at me decorating tables and arranging flowers and he said  "go home! you have to go get ready- you haven't even showered yet!" So I started home- but between the reception barn and my house is the church- with everything piled at the door ready to be taken on and used to decorate. Oops. So Standing in the parking lot ready to get in high gear and decorate ( quickly- since I was supposed to be in the shower by now) my new neighbor's mom pulled up. She was literally a God send. (We have a beautiful tale about how God has brought our families together, I'll tell another day) But In case you havent realized it by now- I am kinda a visual control freak, not to mention just how much I have loved being the one who got to make and design and create all the details of this day - and since I literally had a dream about what the church would look like before we even knew it was going to be in this church, letting someone else decorate the main place of the whole wedding was not in my plan. But Jesus had my back. I had not at that point spent too much time with her, as our families had just recently met, but I knew enough to know that she and Jesus love to create art together. So, I took the unexpected gift and went home to shower and do all the stuff a girl does to walk down the isle.        
   As you will see, Jesus took the dream He gave me and he put it in her hands and she decorated the church EXACTLY how I would have- without any instruction and just a pile of supplies. The simple beauty of the church was perfectly accented with the details I had left in a pile. It was perfect, and an extra special gift and blessing from Jesus through my sweet friend.

 From that point on the day was documented by our sweet photographer Kristin Sweeting at www.kristinsweeting.com and since I just looked again through our Re-Wedding album and it tells the story of the day so perfectly I will just put a slideshow of that in now.  The only word that can sorta sum up the day is "Perfect!". Everything was. The weather was beautiful, the details all came together, our friends devoted their hands and their hearts to us and helped us create the perfect environment to celebrate the amazing work Jesus has done in our life and in our marriage. . . everything about the {re}wedding was detail oriented and the whole thing came together to celebrate HIM so you get a slide show with 100 pictures where you can walk through the whole day with us. Hope you enjoy the pictures as much as we do. It is the visual reproduction of the miracle that Jesus has done in our life and with our marriage.

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The making of the {Re}Wedding (pt 3) THE CAKE!!

                                                            The Cake was AMAZING!!!

  So, I already mentioned that Micah and I agreed that my creative powers stopped at baking the cake. Really, at cooking anything- but luckily thats where his super powers kick in so we don't all starve in our daily life. Diane Thompson of The Vintage Apron stepped in to bless us with an amazingly YUMMY cake. Visit her Fb page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Vintage-Apron/173509756043869



  The part of the cake that I wanted to do was the decorations. I had seen some beautiful sugar flowers on a cake in a magazine so I bought all the supplies and watched some videos online and went to work. I grabbed my girl Leilani to help me with this big job.





 We made tons of little hydrangea flowers out of gum paste and colored them with this really cool edible powder. Once we got the hang of the shaping and the blending it was so much fun. After about 20 hours of little flower making, we were done...and a little tired of little flowers so we moved on to the cake topper.



These were our grandparents pocket watches. His Grandmother's on the left and my Grandfather's on the right. We nestled them into a bed of moss and propped them up with gears and coo coo clock parts. 
                                    (Thus representing generations off coo coos? Probably.)






We used my Great Grandfathers Civil War sword to cut the cake.



  Almost the first detail that I thought of for the wedding happened while walking with Micah in New Orleans. I thought "Lavender Pear!" that sounds amazing- thats what I want for the wedding cake. We also decided to make that the wedding punch for the reception. So we came up with a drink called Fizzy Pear- ginger ale, pear nectar and lavender...yummm



 
       I knew I would love it for the cake,  but Micah wanted chocolate.  Diane Thompson of The Vintage Apron stepped in to save the day. Diane, being wonderful- did both and blessed us with an amazingly YUMMY cake. Visit her Fb page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Vintage-Apron/173509756043869  For the top layer of the cake she made a gluten free, dairy free, egg free, full flavor Lavender Pear for me. The rest of the cake was a deep chocolate espresso ( she used our favorite- Lavazza espresso). Both flavors were wonderful, I have the most vivid memory of the heavenly flavor from the next morning, when Micah and I went back to the reception site to have our morning coffee and I ate the rest of my cake for breakfast. The perfect stillness of the morning after.... snuggling on the porch, drinking coffee, looking over the misty pond, eating cake and soaking in the perfection of it all. That is one of the dearest memories we have of our wedding weekend.