Monday, June 13, 2011

Meeting up with our Celebrant / Church Minister

We finally met our Celebrant for the first time last Thursday. He is Reverend Graham Bradbeer from Scotch College. As we are holding our wedding there and he's the school's Chaplain, it's one of the terms that he will need to be leading the ceremony in accords with the Christian wedding service. We are really happy about that anyway as he's got quite a lot of experience and he's also warm and friendly.

Being a catholic, I would also like some sort of involvement from the catholic church and so Fr. Paul Gurry from St. Peter's Bentleigh will be our supporting celebrant. Our wedding might not actually be considered valid under the catholic church, but I'm not too sure about that so have to check with Father. But we have plans to renew our marriage vows in a catholic church anyway sometimes next year and so it should all work out alright.
Rev. Bradbeer explaining to us the readings and hymns that we can choose from.
After talking to us and reinforcing to us the purpose of a marriage, he said a prayer for us at the end.
Rev Bradbeer is a knowledgeable and wise person and he's been with the school for over 20 years. He has this huge board on the right of his office, and when you walk in you can see lots of photos, notes and other stuff on it. Of course I couldn't help but noticed the different wedding photos and thank-you notes from couples he had married before.

He actually had a copy of Darling's year book and took it out to show me Darling's photo. Tubbs looked so geeky in high school, but it was a warm fuzzy feeling to see the photo though; to know that little boy has all grown up now and is my hubby-to-be.

The session was a little stressful but fruitful. Rev Bradbeer told us all about the marriage sacrament and wanted to make sure that we were not wanting to get married for the wrong reasons. He also asked us questions that were never dawned on us before like:

1) How did we get to know each other and why did we choose each other
2) Why did we decide to get married and if we shared the same thoughts and values
3) How many kids we want in future and so on...

It was much like what a pre-marriage counsellor would ask a couple. But there were certainly some questions that got us(or me at least) dumbfounded for awhile. I wasn't someone who could answer something spontaneously and under pressure and so I think I beat around the bush for a couple of questions and didn't really get to the point. (^.^)

It was all good as it made us ponder about things that we have never thought about and we got some help with past samples of the order of ceremony. He also gave us a list of suggested hymns, readings and wedding vows that we can choose from. He encouraged us to do a pre-marriage DVD course with booklets to fill-in so we didn't actually have to go out and attend a session.

We'll be seeing him again in August and so hope we've at least got some things sorted out then.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Ceremony decos, Flowers and Invitations

We finally made an appointment to drop by the events company last week. As mentioned before, we have engaged the services of Your Knight Events / Delightful Occasions. They are two different companies but owned by the same owner, Nicole who has more than 10 years experience in the events planning and organisation industry

They recently moved to their new warehouse in Carrum Downs and welcomed us to pop by and have a look. Also it was much easier to discuss wedding decorations and other plans face to face rather than through email or on the phone. It took us about 40 minutes to get there and they had quite a few different wedding set-ups for couples to view.

Flowers and floral arrangements
They also do wedding cakes
Beach theme set-up
Formal red/black theme set-up
Simple pink / black theme set-up
Tree topiaries which are used as decos
Our wedding invite design - red paper
And a flower-like pattern page overlay
Darling and I were really happy in what we managed to sort out in the short one hour plus we were there. We decided on the following items:
  1. Decorations for the ceremony
  2. Flower bouquet for myself and the bridesmaids, corsages for the mums, button holes for the groomsmen and flower head garlands for the two flower girls
  3. Invitation Card designs
  4. Wishing Well Rental
All of the above for just over $1000. For us, that was real good value and certainly a tick on our budget. I realised a couple of days later that I forgot to add on the flowers for car deco as well and that just added an extra $50+ on. We opted not to go with them for the cake as we've already made a decision on Three Sweeties and we figured it was better to some things spread out between different suppliers.

Nicole was really helpful and friendly though, she offered quite a bit of help and advice. And so that was a few more items ticked off the list. For now, the next hardest part will be to get the guest list sorted out and compiled. She said she'll bug us in a few weeks time as invitations should be sent out only about 2 months to the wedding anyway. So yeah, that's it for the decisions for now! :p