Day 5 – Wednesday

DH and I met with the minister on Wednesday around noon. He lives with his minister wife in a really nice house in a really nice neighborhood. It made us want to be ministers too. The meeting was ok, but we found that he continued in the trend of many of the wedding vendors we had been working with. Very opinionated about how things “should” be, and trying to make our wedding his own, even though he kept saying we could do whatever we wanted. He advertises a non-religious ceremony, which is what we asked for. He didn't like that idea. We had to discuss prayer, level of prayer, type of prayer, until we thought we had reached a compromise. Of course, you can't control the guy once he's actually performing the live ceremony, as we found out later...
Then we had to discuss “add-ons” to the ceremony, or rather, our lack of them. I don't even know what a “rose ceremony” is, but it sounds cliché and stupid and we didn't want it. Nor did we want a unity candle, hand-washing ceremony, or sand ceremony. They didn't like this. Thought we should have one of these add-ons. We had written our own ceremony about a week and a half prior to the meeting, as the minister had requested, and had emailed it to him. He had not checked his email until we told him about it the day before. But he had it that day, and I thought his role was relatively straightforward, as in, read the ceremony from start to finish, and when you get to the end, stop. But he kept wanting to change things, interject here and there, and there was a lot more compromising in that meeting.
I did not think that our ceremony was very unusual, as we really hadn't written it ourselves from scratch. We had cut and pasted from 2 sample ceremonies that the minister himself had provided to us, and then added a few more things here and there from other pre-existing samples. Yet we had to keep correcting the minister as to how things were going to run, and this turned out to be a preview of a similar conversation that we would have with the wedding coordinator later that week.

After the meeting with the minister, we headed over to our wedding venue to see it with our own eyes for the first time. Our rehearsal was to be Friday, but I really wanted to see it before Friday so we could get an idea of how big the dance floor was, and check a few details. I'm glad we did, because the ladies turned out to have a long list of questions for us as well. They had already started decorating for our wedding, which was to be a Christmas theme. Evidently I am the first bride who had ever requested such a thing. But they were thrilled to do it and they did a beautiful job with the decorations, and though they ran very few of their decisions past me, I was totally fine with that since I agreed with all of their choices. Of course, it had helped that I had sent several pages of photos of things I liked and did not like over to my sister a couple months back, and she printed out the whole thing and took it to the decorator. They said they had never had a bride as prepared as I was. I don't know if by “prepared” they meant “opinionated”? But I certainly did have strong opinions about the decorating, and since I would not be there to do it myself, I wanted to make sure they knew what I liked.

My dad arrived Wednesday night, and we all went out to eat at Mimi's Cafe, my favorite! I wish they had one in Oregon!