It’s complicated. Isn’t love always?

Sometimes real life love stories are better than anything found on the pages of a fairy tale book.

Next week I’ll marry the man I love. I won’t call him the man of my dreams because who wants to marry a dream? He’s a real, big, hairy, annoying, funny, intelligent, loving, frustrating, sweaty flesh & blood man and there is no one else I would want to share the rest of my life with.

People keep asking if I’m nervous. I’m not. Excited – yes! Impatient – sure! Scared? Not at all. I don’t expect a perfect marriage but I know this man so well, and he knows me – really knows all my stuff – and the fact that knowing all that he STILL not only wants to marry me but considers himself lucky to have me (as I feel about him) is awesome.

I feel safe with him. Taken care of. Loved. Accepted. Sometimes even adored. It feels completely right. And the time feels right.

Who would have thought an unplanned pregnancy, a messy, ugly break up, 7 years of watching him fall in love with someone else and be in another relationship and have another child – 7 years in which I remained single, a long time! – would bring us to this point – marrying each other with our amazing son and my beautiful step daughter singing to us on a beach, surrounded by the people we love?

It’s been a long time coming and it’s been a long and winding road to get here.

And now we’re on the threshold of a whole new leg of the journey – a wedding shortly followed by our buying a beautiful plot with a sea view followed by starting to build a home for our ready-made family to live in…

Life is complicated. Love is not always easy. But these are the good years and I am so ready to dive right in.

A Hippie Tent and a Bridal Bouquet

Not the Actual Tent. 😉

Two things..

With 2 weeks (and 1 day) to go, more things are coming in to place…

1. Last night I collected a very colourful Bedouin tent from a friend of MrsR that is our ‘Plan B’ should the wind be a-blowing on The Day. So much for February being the hot, wind free month in Cape Town – it’s been blowing a gale and even got rather chilly the past 3 days and I’m not impressed… but yes, I remember my mantra ‘everything will be awesome’. Rain, wind or shine.

So as I was saying… I picked up the tent from the very helpful S who also assisted me (i.e Iwatched while he worked) to put all the poles on the roofracks. When I say poles I mean bamboo kind of sticks with various old sponges attached. The tent itself is made up of very bright stretch squares of fabric in a multitude of colours. It’s massive and comes with ornamentation! Scrawled messages saying ‘Africa Burn 2010’ etc, and bits of old paper plate made into ‘art’ by party people no doubt high at the time. It was also full of last month’s party’s grass and sand, and when we shook it out on S’s lawn to have a look, a hippie fell out and crawled away.

It’s not what I had in mind for my pretty wedding day but hey, it comes free! And if it stops the wind from sandblasting the guests I’ll take it! Besides it’s really rather funky. If we need to use it we’ll certainly stand out a mile!

2. In other news, while at the beach this morning I bumped into my friends J and G who are invited to the wedding. While we were chatting, G (an artist from Kalk Bay) suddenly offered to help me with any flowers as, she told me, she’s very good at it. Being an artist. And I realised that I still haven’t decided on a bouquet. When I told her that she immediately offered to make one for me – a natural, beautiful one that she will design after seeing my dress. So, she’s coming with me for my last dress fitting on Sunday. Yay! I was going to just grab whatever they had at Flowers for Africa on the day I collected the baby’s breath for the tables and tie a ribbon around it. Now, it would seem, I’ll have an artistically made-for-me bouquet – the one thing I hadn’t gotten around to figuring out.

🙂

Having been unmarried for 40 years it’s really strange to think I’ll be a Mrs in just 2 short weeks.

Strange, but awesome.

Staying calm and keeping it together

So there are just 2.5 weeks to go! Two of my sisters and a brother in law arrive in Cape Town from the UK tonight and my bro from Israel arrives on 8th so that’s going to make it all so much more real and exciting!

To stay fit and to keep serene I’ve been doing yoga almost daily for the past 2 weeks and plan on not missing more than a day here or there until the wedding day. It really helps me to stop thinking about all the things I need to do, takes me into a different headspace and helps me remember to breathe.

Thanks to a suggestion from MrsR and the help of my assassin/wedding planner K I now have a printed out a calendar filled in with everything I need to get done over the coming days up till the 18th and that has helped me feel even more calm as every time I think I must remember to do this or that (order the flowers, collect shells for the aisle etc) I just schedule a day to do it and can then not worry about it till that day arrives. Simple but very effective way to deal with things, better than the countless lists I had in various notebooks and on bits of paper lying around the house!

I am also drawing up a schedule for D-Day for everyone who is kindly helping me set up and get ready – with times, names and cell numbers of all concerned. I’ll give a copy to each helpful person and that way they all know what time they need to be where, doing what, and what they need to take along. Some of us (me included) will set up the reception while a second group (G included) will set up things on the beach for the ceremony.

Then there’s a group of us who will be at the guest house later when I’m getting ready – hair, makeup etc

Next I need to work out how we’re all getting there and who will be responsible for taking down things before the ceremony starts (R’s guitar, the feather confetti, out vow cards, the rings etc)

The one thing I have no control over is, of course, the weather! I’ve been concerned for a long time about the wind but I have my family praying and MrsR visualizing a perfect day. But as a control freak in certain ways (as relaxed as I am in others) this is the biggest niggle for me and the hardest to let go of.

So when I saw this pic I decided to take it as my affirmation for the next 2.5 weeks 🙂

 

 

 

 

Photos as decor

I had an idea (not very original but still) to have strings of photos up around the room where we’re having the wedding reception. As our ready made family has 4 people in it and as G and I have rather an interesting history going back 14 years I decided to select photos where at least 2 of the 4 of us were featured and ended up with 50. (Can you believe there isn’t a single photo of all 4 of us in one pic??? And as G arrives back the day before the wedding we won’t have time to get one taken and printed – oh well…)

I am spending this evening transforming all 50 pics into B&W images and then ‘Polaroidizing’ them to tie in with the Polaroid style pics I used on our invitations.

Then am going to string them up using actual unbleached string and wooden pegs.

Was rather pleased to see a similar idea used in my fav musician’s latest music video last week!

Also just an excuse to post this video…

some inspirational (aka soppy but sweet) words

Bunting!

One of the things I wasn’t sure about was making bunting for the ceremony because frankly it’s been so overdone – you can’t find a wedding online these days without it – but when I had to change my seating from haybales to white boring and frankly unattractive chairs I decided that I still love bunting (it’s so pretty) and it seemed a good way to decorate the chairs.

So yesterday my lovely friend R joined me with her sewing machine and the pinking shears and we spent a happy few hours cutting, ironing, pinning and sewing. Apart from having to doctor the pinking shears a number of times with a monkey wrench and knocking on neighbours’ doors to borrow things all went well. We’re about half way through the amount we need.

The lovely R, sewing

Sewing paraphernalia

Planning

The boys kept out of the way...

 

Ta daaaa! One string done!

 

 

 

flowers

Following last week’s rant (not to mention a FAB Bachelorette party with big thanks to the awesome friends who surprised me on Saturday night at Beefcakes!) I spent some time trying my hand at a scruffy looking hair halo.

As per the photos on the last blog post I didn’t want a ‘full’ halo so here’s what I managed to make up in a few minutes (I need to work a bit slower and neater if I decide to make one fot the actual event…)

Here’s my flower girl (& future step daughter!) trying it on…

And me 🙂 (note my very new tattoo, which I had done in December). And yes the halo needs a trim but it was just a quick try out 🙂

I took the opportunity to try out my lace & jar vases with the rest of the baby’s breath. Looks pretty don’t you think?

Rant (and some pretty hair halo pics :-))

I mentioned before about how it annoys me that you ask for a quote on anything wedding related and the price goes up. Here are more examples…

• Got a quote on a wedding cake – not a very fancy one either – over R2000!
• Got a quote on a bedouin tent and they want to charge R5500 (but I hear they are expensive anyway) So no tent for us. Have to hope my mom and G and @MrsRdxber are right asnd it will be a beautiful day
• Got a quote on having my feet painted with a SIMPLE Henna design – R300 – (really? It won’t take more than 20 minutes max)
• And worst of all, was quoted by a florist on a simple baby’s breath halo for my hair and the florist tells me ‘Baby’s breath is quite expensive’ – when I KNOW it’s one of the cheapest flowers you can buy – will use less than half a bunch and she wants to ask for R200. So I went to get a quote on a bunch of baby’s breath from Flowers for Africa – R45 for a whole bunch. Lucky for me I found an online tutorial on how to make your own baby’s breath halo so I’ll do that. Even with a trial run ahead of the actual wedding to see if I can make it right it’ll only cost me R90 in total. And yeah I know she has to make it up etc and it’s her skill & time but really even the tutorial said 1. Baby’s breath is super cheap and 2. It’s REALLY simple to make the halo

It’s flipping annoying how people just slap on the zeros when they know you’re planning a wedding.

Anyhow.

Here are the pretty pics I mentioned 🙂 Will see if I can manage to make something like this…

6 and a half weeks to go!

So with Christmas / Hanukkah and New Year behind us we have just over 6 weeks till the wedding day (eeee!) and with G only home for another 2 weeks before he flies back to Angola (and then comes home less than 52 hours before the wedding!) we have lots to do… not to mention back-to-school stuff for both the kids (R is going to high school in a week!)

For my own sake I’ve written down our To Do lists at the bottom of this post.

One thing I am finding is how chilled I am about details.

Who cares if all our clothes (mine, G’s and the kids’) don’t really match or even ‘go’ together?

Who cares if I arrive in my own old beat up car – everyone will already be seated on the beach and no one will see me arrive in any case…

Who cares if we don’t have huge amounts of tasteful details or old typewriters or whatever it is people think a wedding this year should have?

Or if the kids go out of tune when they sing as I walk up the ‘aisle’?

I really can’t find it in me to get into a state about everything being picture perfect, I just want to marry the man I love and hang out with our family and friends and eat some good food, drink some beer and play music we like even if no one else recognises any of it.

Maybe it’s to do with being 40. I’m just not fussed about the details. If there is love and laughter and no wind or rain I’ll be happy 🙂 I want our wedding day to be about who WE are and what WE like not some idealised photoshoot wedding crammed with show-pieces.

But don’t think I’m blase about getting married. I AM excited. Also about those members of my family who will be flying in WEEKS before the day – having them here will make it more special than any amount of tiers on a cake. I don’t even know what cake we’re going to end up with yet! (see G’s list below).

I’ve already planned my own speech (yes this bride will be speaking at her wedding) and I even got all emo rehearsing it to myself the other day – then had to laugh at myself about that 🙂

The most important part of being ready for this day is the fact that I am so ready to marry the man. I’m excited about the day but I’m REALLY happy about what comes after that – the rest of our lives together.

G’s list:

• Pay deposit on honeymoon night (we went to view a place… close enough to walk to from the reception! – yesterday. Lovely big room and gorgeous beach view)
• Get quote on bedouin tent (I’m panicking about the wind being blowy on the day) & decide if we can afford it as a backup plan.
• Make an archway (he told me to leave him to it and not tell him what it should look like. That’s quite hard for me but I agreed! In the end I don’t care how it looks really as long as it’s got 4 pillars and a ‘roof’)
• Come with me to the pastor and the lawyer (both appointments booked for next week)
• Decide which friend to ask to be best man and who to be the MC – and ask / tell them!
• Take R to buy wedding clothes – I’m over trying to find something he likes! The rest of us all have our clothes already
• Contact his friend K and decide on the cake. (Yes that’s his baby, I don’t care what he chooses, he loves cake and I can take it or leave it so he gets to organise that! K makes stunning yummy cakes so I’m sure it will be fine, whatever they decide on.)

My list:

• Go for my next dress fitting (booked for this Saturday)
• Book trial app with hairdresser & choose final hairstyle
• Get quote on flowers for tables and hair
• Find out from Table Mountain National Park about the extra cost for a tent (if applicable)
• Make vow cards for G and me, K&R and the parents
• Design and print order of service leaflets
• Get wedding ring re-sized and engagement ring polished
• Organise seating (haybales turning out too expensive / too difficult – where to store them?)
• Buy white flipflops 🙂
• Collect feathers from PO (paid and ordered yesterday)
• Make feather bags
• Make playlist for reception
• Print B&W photos and buy string and pegs
• Make bunting for chair backs with R
• Book leave!
• Go with G to pastor and lawyer
• Try making my own hair halo
• Order flowers
• Decide on bouquet
• Collect shells for aisle
• Buy batteries
• Pay for dress
• Try out tent
• Pay for cake

from Angola for me :-)

 

Thinking about you
leads to missing you
nothing is for ever
everything is change
I choose you to be
the constant of my life
by being my wife….