Gam and Sarah's wedding, part 1.

Finally, a proper wedding post! What with family around, it's hard to get any time to ourselves, let alone to the blog, and we've been literally looking through thousands of photos (thanks to my wonderful Uncle James, who took care of the photography side of things at the wedding- most photos will be his work). Plus Gam had an exam today, but I'll have a little bitch about that later.

Where to start? At the beginning, I guess. This will probably be two posts... two looong posts.

Some photos from the afternoon and evening before the wedding:

Gam and my Uncle Richard's partner, Leslie.

Mum and Leslie.

My brother's girlfriend Priscilla with Gam's sister Delali.

My cousin David and Leslie's son Ben playing Xbox

Gam and I with Dad

Gam and I stayed up past midnight the night before our wedding because all our family members came over and squeezed into our flat and onto our balcony for a late afternoon tea that turned into a dinner- Gam and I had spent the whole day cooking. There were 17 of us in all. Gam's father wasn't able to come thanks to some of the people he's currently doing some work for heavying him into not going. We were all pretty disappointed about that- Gam and I and Mummy (Gam's mother) because we all wanted him there, and my parents because they were really looking forward to meeting him. Needless to say he was probably more disappointed than any of us. Gam's brother decided not to come but didn't bother to tell us that he wasn't coming, meaning we'd confirmed numbers with the restaurant and were set up to pay even though he didn't show. We weren't impressed. Mummy convinced herself that he was staying home to 'look after' Daddy, but notwithstanding our doubts about the likelihood of that scenario, it didn't really excuse the fact that he couldn't be arsed to get on the phone, MSN or email and tell us that he wasn't coming. I suppose the fact that Daddy is still planning to have a full-on catholic wedding in Ghana at the end of this year might have meant he thought he wasn't missing anything important, but it still seemed rude. I suppose we were already a bit upset by the fact Daddy couldn't come. Regardless, at the almost-impromptu family get-together everyone seemed to have a nice time. Grandma came along, but she apparently came around to the idea of us getting married in the nick of time, meaning that the promised tantrums never eventuated- instead, she was once again the archetypal sweet little old lady. She still cornered me (meaning she literally backed me into a corner!) in the kitchen to talk about that stupid 'Second Coming' book she wanted to give me, though, so it's not as if she's changed. Still, that was a relief. I didn't fancy having to explain to Mummy that my grandmother was a racist and didn't want me marrying Gam.


After everyone left, we stayed up making our bombonniere boxes and filling them with Jelly Belly jelly beans (until we ran out of beans!) and then used the 'past-midnight' excuse to open up the wedding present from my brother Richard and his girlfriend Priscilla. We'd asked everyone not to bring presents, but they did anyway... from them we got a picnic pack with a couple of bottles of wine and two Donna Hay cookbooks. Gam and I have been saying to each other for ages that we should get one of those things and go on picnics, but we've never got around to it, so that was a really good present... I suspect Priscilla chose it! Richard's card was a classic:


The story behind the card was that one day during my HSC, in the way of little brothers everywhere, Richard decided to engage in his favourite pastime: tormenting me. On and on it went, with verbal barbs going back and forth, until I snapped. I picked up a 1970s portable radio (roughly 20cm by 15cm by 7cm, weighing a kilo or two) and pegged it across the kitchen at his head. My aim was deadly, but Richard ducked and it went over his head, smashing into a cupboard. The radio still worked after that, but the plastic casing over the dial had cracked, forever serving as a reminder of the day I totally lost it. So in July 2002, when Gam and I had been together for a few months and he'd accompanied me to Kempsey for a few days, when he commented on the radio, Richard regaled him with a story that went something like this:

"That's from where Sarah chucked the radio at my head. Yeah, she was a heroin addict. It was really messing her around. She was high one day, just sitting at the breakfast bar, when I came up and I said 'Sarah, you've got to let me help you kick this addiction. Jesus loves you, Sarah'. And she totally went off her head and started swearing at me and then she flipped out and chucked the radio at my head. I was only trying to help her."

Heh. It was so outrageous that even I cracked up. Gam has teased me about it ever since. I'm not the sort of person who's quick to engage in physical violence, but to this day I maintain that the little brat deserved it (even though I can't remember a single detail of the confrontation prior to the point where I chucked the radio at his head!). Hence the card. Cheeky bastard. I couldn't stop laughing when I read the card- so much so that it took me 4 or 5 goes to get a photo that wasn't too blurry to use!

We also opened a card from my Aunt and Uncle James, whose present was a cheque (which will help us pay off wedding expenses we've put on the credit card! Yay!). There was a touch of the old 'You're a heathen but we love you anyway' sentiment about it:



*sigh*


Two days before the wedding we tidied our garage and found a stash of clothes. Most of them were crap, but there were a few gems in the form of shirts from Ghana that Gam's dad had bought him at various times over the years. One caught our eye as a potential wedding shirt- Gam had long ago decided that he wasn't going to wear a suit, but we hadn't really got much further than that in our planning for what he was going to wear. When we picked up the dress on Friday afternoon it became clear that the shirt would go nicely with my dress, meaning that Gam would inadvertantly comply with Dr Maria's fashion advice. I'm sure she'll be thrilled when we show her the photos.



On the morning of the wedding, I had somehow managed to avoid sleep for all but a few precious hours. Delali and Mummy were staying in a unit in our complex in the tower next door to ours, and Delali's voice woke me around 6 in the morning and I never got back to sleep. It wasn't their fault for keeping odd hours, as Mummy was horribly jetlagged (and still is). Plus I was excited (about the wedding) and stressed (from having all those people around the night before). I required an IV drip of coffee for a few hours, so Gam went to buy some more Jelly Bellys for the bombonniere. I sat around and played Xbox while waiting for the caffeine to kick in. Then everything happened at once. The hairdresser showed up just as Gam, my cousin Rach and my Mum arrived back. So I was sat in a chair, had a bunch of hot curlers stuck in and was told to go and do my makeup with the curlers in so I didn't later mess up the hair. As it was, my hair wound up fairly messy anyway... I also paid (with Mum's help) to have Rachelle's hair done. I was happy with mine, but a little jealous that Rach's stayed so neat through the night and I wound up looking my usual scruffy self!

The florist had phoned me that morning to tell me that she couldn't get hair flowers to match my bouquet, which was fine by me because I'd never really wanted hair flowers to match the bouquet- I asked her for pale yellow flowers for my hair and she came up with Chrysanthemums. The flowers arrived while the hairdresser was doing her stuff... Daisys Toowong, they were from, and I think they did a great job- I asked for specific colours, including as many native flowers as possible, and preferably flowers that smelled nice... I think it wound up looking really pretty. Apart from a bouquet and hair flowers I had ordered 3 corsages- one for Mum, one for Mummy and one for Grandma. I must admit, I'd been thinking mainly of how much Grandma loves that sort of stuff when I ordered them (this was at the time when I was thinking we'd have Tantrum Grandma on our hands), but also as a way of making my mum and Gam's mother feel special. I ordered them to match my bouquet as I had no idea of what everyone was wearing: we'd specified that there was no dress code.

Uncle Richard, Leslie and Ben, before the wedding.

Delali and Mummy before the wedding.

Speaking of dress code, one of the most interesting parts of the day was seeing what everyone else wore. I was really happy to see lots of bright colours. Mum was successful in talking my brother Richard out of wearing a suit, but my Uncle Richard's partner Leslie was totally unsuccessful in talking him out of wearing shorts- he'd made a concession by not wearing stubbies! Gam and I thought it was pretty cool he was showing up in shorts- I'm not sure I've ever seen Uncle Richard wear long pants in my life... he lives in the Southern Highlands, working as a gardener/landscape artist/horticulturalist and wears shorts even in winter... he just wouldn't be quite himself if he didn't wear shorts. Mum also failed in talking my dad out of wearing joggers- she sent him out to buy some black leather shoes and he came back with some spiffy new joggers and decided to wear those to the wedding.

Empty chairs before most people arrived.

Despite the uniformly shithouse weather Brisbane had been having in the months leading up to the wedding, there was no sign of rain. Nonetheless, I kept an eye out for it the whole day, not quite believing that our luck would be in.

Uncle James, Auntie Anne, Grandma, Dad and Nat (with Mum hiding behind Dad!).
Uncle James did most of the photos, hence he's not in a lot of the pictures. Much appreciation goes to Uncle James :)

Gam had come home, got dressed and dashed off to the duck ponds ('Lakes'), getting a lift from my brother, where the ceremony was to be held- he'd lost the morning because I'd begged him not to ride his bike to Toowong to pick up more jellybeans. I'd had visions of some idiot driving on the wrong side of the road on the bike route to Toowong (as they so often do) and hitting him. My mum was there to take my side, so he gave in to the offer of a lift, only to be dragged around and forced to wait for all the various family members who'd also decided to do a spot of shopping... it was a much more stressful morning for Gam than for me!

Nevertheless, I was only just ready in time. I did Mum's makeup before she went back to the motel to get dressed- Mum never wears makeup (and has never done so in her life, to my knowledge!) so it was fortuitous that my newly-bought Clinique something-or-other (very good, replaced my crappy overpriced Dior something-or-other) was an exact match to Mum's skin-tone. I went very light on her, adding just a dash of mascara and a dab of lipstick as I still wanted her to look like the Mum I'm used to, and besides, she's naturally very beautiful :)

After doing all that, I'd realised that the time had gotten away from me and I had neither finished my own makeup nor gotten dressed. I only decided at the last minute not to wear flat shoes, as I remembered a pair of low heels stashed in the garage that I hadn't worn for years. My flat sandals were more attractive, but I felt the dress was brushing the ground a little too much. And who can deny the fact that an extra 3-4cm of height feels rather good?

I also hadn't paid any mind to what sort of jewellery I was going to wear, so at the last minute I decided on a pair of cheap, sparkly (my favourite kind of jewellery) pink butterfly earrings that Gam gave me as a present ages ago. Then my brother started ferrying us (Mummy, Delali, Priscilla and I) two at a time in his and Priscilla's little Peugeot 206, complete with magazines and assorted car crud on the back seat. Good fun- I didn't even get my dress caught in the door.

Brisbane's 'steel drums guy' Desmond.

Mummy and Gam before the ceremony.

When we got there I could see people milling around the bottom of the stairs, and Uncle James came up to take a few snaps of Richard, Priscilla and I. It felt a bit weird having all that done without Gam, but I thought about how much he would like the photos, so I relaxed. I'm sure the fact I'd fixed cosmopolitans for Rach, 'Cil and me while we were all getting ready probably helped too. Yum.

I used to be taller than him...

Me with Richard and Cil, just after arriving.

With Mum and Dad.

My cousin David (wielding our camera), Ben, and my brother Richard.

Afterward, Richard and Cil disappeared down the stairs and Mum and Dad met me about half-way up and Uncle James took a few more photos... eventually we got to the bottom of the stairs (it all seemed to happen so quickly) and Gam and I were standing at the front of a bunch of seats wondering what to do with ourselves. My heels were sinking into the soft ground (haha- should have worn the flats!) and I kept having to shift to pull them out.

Standing around just prior to the ceremony.

Next thing we knew, everyone was seated, the celebrant was doing her thing, Gam and I were standing too far apart to hold hands, I was constantly shifting from side to side to avoid getting stuck in the ground, and when he said "I do" I got teary. I felt it coming on and no amount of lip-biting or mental distraction could stop it! Oh the shame! I thought the worst case scenario would be someone else (probably Mummy) crying and me winding up with 'contagious crying', not me setting off a whole bunch of people! I somehow managed to get out my vows- we wound up saying only the bare minimum legal requirements, and it still felt like it took forever before I could go across to Gam. Glad I hadn't planned on anything long-winded, or I'd never have got it all out.

That, the crying, was probably the cutest thing I've ever seen. You big sook :). She nearly made me cry, would have ruined my 23 year record. Just to clarify, we weren't standing apart the whole ceremony. After sooky started up the waterworks I went over and gave her a hug and just held on to her till the celebrant was done telling us how our lives were going to change after the wedding (as if). When I turned around practically everyone was bawling, it really was a special moment.

Rachelle doing her prayer.

Rach did her prayer-thingy. I think she might have read something from Corinthians. To be honest, I can remember just holding onto Gam and being a bit overwhelmed by how grateful I was to have him with me. I can recall perfectly the picture of Rach giving her short speech, but I can't for the life of me remember a word of it. Rach is like a sister to me, so regardless of how little I can remember, the fact that she got up there and did it means a lot. Afterwards we had a few emotional hugs with Rach and Mummy, who'd got a bit teary thanks to my antics up there.

Everyone loved Desmond's music- even my grandma was raving about him!

Then we got straight to the signing bit, sat down at a little table and signed in triplicate, at which point the UQ Staff and Graduates Club manager who'd been standing around through the ceremony brought over two glasses of champagne. Boy was that exactly what we felt like!

Michael, the S&G Club functions manager, brought over champagne- impeccable timing! We had no idea we would be served champagne, so it was a nice surprise :)

Our Uncle Richard and Amelia being witnesses for the official stuff.

We hadn't arranged for witnesses, so we sort of did a 'hands up who wants to be our witness!?' thing from the table- our friend Amelia was quickest off the mark, and next was my Uncle Richard, so they witnessed our marriage certificates! I think we were sort of expected to have one of our parents do it, and I hope none of them felt miffed- I definitely gathered that Grandma thought Mum should be one of the witnesses, but parents are special no matter whether they sign a piece of paper, so it felt nice for us to do it in a more spontaneous way.

I've bored everyone enough for now, plus I can scarcely keep my eyes open, so I'll do the next half tomorrow :)