wedding mishaps

we had 3 pretty major mishaps go wrong in the 3 weeks prior to our wedding:

1. just about 3 weeks before our wedding was to take place,

i got an email from the site manager at the studio near downtown minneapolis that we were supposed to have our ceremony held at. he indicated that due to construction projects our ceremony would not be able to be held there. through some of gina's photography links, we actually found out that the building itself was not up to code and the inspector had come in and said that no events could be held there. so it wasn't the guy or his studio, it was the building and it's owners...

so i let that news sink in for about a week (while gina searched and put out some feelers for another studio) which freaked my mom out. she was way more nervous and uptight about this than i was. for some reason i just let it be and knew something was going to work out. my backup plan was to have the ceremony in mom's backyard but she put the kabosh on that. so my "real" backup plan was to have it at the reception site.

way back at the beginning of the wedding planning stages, i had contacted my church to see if i could have our ceremony in the old chapel of the church that holds tons of family history for me on my dad's side (my dad and his siblings were baptized and attended chruch there, i had been baptized there, and my grama's funeral was held in there). althugh, i had an aversion to using one of their ministers as i didn't know any of them any longer (i grew up with one minister for my entire church life and he had retired, so not using him felt too strange). so when the building manager told me i would have to use one of their ministers, i chalked it up to it was not meant to be.

after finding out our news and letting myself feel what i really wanted to do, i decided to try once more. i told the building manager our situation via email and waited. gina had a couple of other studio ideas but hadn't seen them before and was travelling for a week so could not see them until the week before the wedding. yikes! i got an email back and the building manager told me she had asked the pastor if us using our own officiant would be ok given our situation, and it was approved! horray! it was meant to be!!

so we got to have our ceremony in a place where my heart, mind and soul was happy. where my grama's presence was felt which ended up being so much more important to me than i had expected. i knew my grama would be there in spirit either way, but having my grampa say to me "mum is smiling" was beyond words & feelings for me! i'm so glad we got to have our ceremony in the chapel.!!

all pictures in the post care of our awesome-sauce photographer: leah

we even got to ring the VERY old bell in the steeple after our ceremony! the coolest thing! i hadn't rung this bell since i was very young, maybe 8 and it doesn't get rung often. loved it!!

2. somewhere in that 3 week prior time frame, i got word from my mom that her mom, my grama had fallen and was transported to the hospital. a little while later, we found out she had broken her pelves and would have to be in the hospital for at least 4 weeks. that meant no wedding. :( now, my grama is 94 and she loves to dance and have her ice cube. :) she would have been on the dance floor the whole night and would have had a blast! i'm so sad she missed it but so glad she took care of herself and is now back home. she was greatly missed.

3. one week before the wedding, al got a call/email from one of his groomsmen, ryan brohmer, who had just moved to south dakota from rhode island and taken an assistant track and field coaching position at a college. turns out, the head coach of the track and field team had been fired and brohmer was to take his place until they found someone else to coach (likely not to happen within a week). that would have been great for brohmer, except the track team had a meet in california the weekend of our wedding and brohmer had to go because they had to have a coach... down a groomsmen; and with only 3 on each side, we needed a replacement fast!

al quickly called a few of his close friends that were next in line to be groomsmen and they all had some excuse why they couldn't step in. all seemed viable excuses except for the fact that it was our WEDDING, not jsut some small thing that was not important. although we understood that our wedding being at 1 pm on a friday posed a bit of a problem for those 9-5 jobs, it made me feel so bad for al that no one was willing to step up and try to pull some strings to be a groomsmen for him... finally his college friend don, that i had never met and had been on teh track team with al, said he could do it but wouldn't be able to drive up from eau claire until after his test the morning of our wedding. luckily, don got his measurements in in time and made it in time to catch the bus to our ceremony! we cannot thank don enough! especially considering he didn't know anyone there except al and shane.

surprisingly, i was very calm and not too stressed about any one of these things. and guess what, the day went off without a hook and it was fabulous! everything worked out in the end: perfect ceremony site, sending grama pictures of the wedding, and we had enough {drunk} groomsmen! you'll have to excuse my tall brother's drunk lean in this last pic; he's pretty gangster. :]