The Wedding

Since I’m locked up in an airport because God has deemed flight delays to be something I find pleasurable, I will go ahead and do what I can to do a quick recap of everything since just before the wedding.

Mostly I would have to say that the whole wedding was a huge surprise. While there were a few crises here and there (like one of my groomsmen arriving at about 30 min till), everything seemed to go really smoothly. Most of the day was just spent hanging out with friends and family slowly working our way to the wedding which was that evening. There’s nothing better than a little Guitar Hero to get your mind off of the wedding (btw, Guitar Hero II comes out in a few days and even has the song ‘Woman’ by Wolfmother and ‘Trogdor the Burninator’ by Home*Runner). Mostly with the whole wedding prep I was really impressed by how everybody stepped it up for us. We have some amazing friends and every one of them did their own part or even more for us. So for those of you who I have yet to thank….Thanks so much!

Alright, so we’re getting closer to the actual moment. I’ve now prepped, gotten on the fancy underwear, slipped on the tie, and omg! It’s time to get out there. Am I sure I want to do this? Yeah, I do, she’s great, quit scaring yourself. So I walk my mom up the aisle, place her down inn her little seat and stand up there with the minister and simply wait. One by one all of the people start walking their way up the aisle and with each one my level of nervousness rises a bit more. Here I am standing up here the focus of attention, waiting on the woman that many of these people have never even seen before and agh! Fortunately all of the people get up, the flower girl does the cute stuff of dumping the petals in one spot and running to her mom, and the stage is prepped. Queue music, the doors open and then Bam! There she is…absolutely gorgeous and completely elegant in her dress. Her and her dad start walking up, I finally get to catch her eyes and do what I can to reassure her that everything is going to be great. Then the real moment to know whether or not this can go on. Will her dad actually hand her over? Fortunately he does (still not sure what you’re supposed to do at this instance. Is it a hug? Perhaps and kiss on each side of the cheeks? Maybe you just shake hands and say, thanks for relinquishing her to me? Still don’t know what I actually did.).

So we work our way thru the ceremony but I’m focused on 3 things

1. Look at Andrea – Minister – Crowd – Repeat
2. Hoping that people get a kick out of the funny things that we had prepared for the ceremony.
3. Praying that Andrea don’t notice the huge array of ginormous insects that my dad so graciously placed in the archway thing.

Everything seemed to go off without a hitch. My favorite parts were the quirky things that we added to the ceremony.

1. 1. For our first reading we had KLove read a poem that I read to Andrea on one of our first dates. It goes something like this:
   
   I love and oh.
   Oh oh oh oh oh
   Oh oh oh oh oh…
   .
   .
   ohohohohohohohohohohohoh
   .
   oh!
   
   
   From Come Love with Me and Be My Life: The Complete Romantic Poetry of Peter Williams.
   
   It’s absolutely awful. How this guy was able to pen those words with a straight face and think that people would actually want to buy it, I’ll never know.
   
   I think most of our guests had no clue how to actually react to the whole thing, but after the first 10 lines of ‘oh’s’ I think they realized it was a joke and loosened up a bit.
   
   
2. Next up for the funny stuff was our scripture reading, brought to us by Mr. Juicebox, the man that introduced me to this gem:
   
   Ecclesiastes 9:9 – Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun— all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun.
   
   Such an inspirational message! He pulled it off with the class that he somehow adds to almost any situation.
   
   
3. Finally, the one that almost nobody knew about. When the minister said, “You may kiss the bride” my 3rd groomsman Chris Mac (of EuroTrip fame) jumped out of line and said, “Whoa, hold on! Time out.” He then ran behind a tree and pulled out a little collapsible stool and placed it in front of the now Mrs. Otis so that she could come up and kiss me. This went over incredibly well, and I’m SO glad we decided to do that, it was the perfect touch…and made for non-awkward looking first-kiss photos of us being about the same height.

From there everything was just a total whirlwind. We went off to the bridal suite, signed the actual marriagelicense, tried to soak in the realness of everything, then went out and were introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Otis, and sat down to eat. Or at least that’s what we thought we were going to do. Instead, person after person kept interrupting us. I wanted to be like, “Look, if you just leave me along for a sec, I can eat, I’ll be a bit less cranky and then we can talk all you want!” Unfortunately that didn’t happen. After a few minutes we gave up on the whole getting food into our bodies thing*, and went around the tables.

That was the hardest part of the whole thing. We wanted to spend so much time, but there were literally TOO many people that we loved there. I could have easily spent days just talking with all of the different people and still wouldn’t have caught up. Some of them I hadn’t seen in years either, so it was really sad to have only a minute to give to them. Within short order though, we found out that we were running out of non-dancing music and would have to do our first dance. It was great. I think most of the people thought that we were really good dancers…definitely good times.

So the evening went on, and there was cheesecake cutting (the biggest crisis of the night was actually should we cut the cheesecake first or dip strawberries in the fondue fountain first? …I can’t remember, which, but they were both delicious although the chocolate always wins in my opinion when competing against non-chocolate deserts.

More talking more chatting, more laughing, more awkward new relatives…great evening. But then we realized that it was time to go so it was off to do the bouquet and garter toss. Fortunately we switched this part up too. Having been to a lot of weddings where increasingly fewer and fewer of our friends were still single, Mrs. Otis and I realized that the bouquet and garter toss simply isolates single people, makes them feel like they have to get married, and in the case of the garter forces you to look up the skirt of your buddy’s wife and then touch something that was on ‘his territory’.

So instead we had “The Piñata of Singleness.” This new tradition (hopefully it will become a tradition, I would love to see it happen at another wedding) was spawned because I was thinking about how much the tosses sucked, and realized that one thing everybody enjoys is beating things with sticks! So what better thing to beat than a piñata? It ended up working out really well, and I think people had a lot of fun, even the kiddies. Then BAM! Eric busted the thing off of the line, and stuff came pouring out, including little Mexican candies and a few gag gifts. The gifts included, “Wash your sins away towelettes”, “Grow a Boy/Girlfriends”, and my favorite the book of “Everything Men Can Say to Women without Offending Them” which was completely blank on the inside. Funny thing happened with the Mexican candies though, some of them were small round caramel candies, but for some reason the adults with kiddos had a quick panic attack and thought, “Omg! Those are condoms!” Well they weren’t, but it definitely added to my amusement.

From there it was off to leave, but Tim had us watch a nice little video that he made for us first, and then we ran down an aisle of friends and family holding sparklers and dove into the car.

And that’s pretty much the end of the wedding. It was a ton of fun, and thank you so much to all of our friends and family for making it a day neither of us will ever forget.

Appendix:
So this little part is about the honeymoon night. No not like that! Well, kinda. You see we got this room at what we thought would be an amazing hotel, the San Jose Hotel on South Congress. Little did we know that despite the $300 price tag that all of the people there were pretty much yuppie trash (light beer people with too much money). Most of our evening was spent listening to a bunch of them RIGHT OUTSIDE OUR WINDOW yelling and getting drunker as the night went on. Fortunately they finally went to bed…unfortunately; they went to bed with each other. Let’s just say, noisy people + thin walls made for a very miserable night.

For those of you planning something special and unique for your wedding night…just get a nice quiet hotel room. You’re too tired to enjoy anything fancy, and frankly, just because somebody says something is nice, doesn’t mean there is any class involved.

*Major props to the matron of honor who packed up 2 plates of food and put them in our car so that we could eat it later. If you're ever in that position, make sure to save some food for the couple, cause they likely will not get the time to eat anything.