"I do" is not strictly necessary, apparently.

Hi! I'm back! Tan and surprisingly un-grumpy about the fact that it's cold and gray here in DC!

Originally my thought for today was to do a honeymoon recap complete with photos, but we had some travel issues and got home a day late, exhausted, and our internet was broken and blah blah blah, apparently the honeymoon didn't do anything to teach me to get to the point any faster, but the damn point is, I don't have photos uploaded yet and so the honeymoon recap will have to wait. For now, suffice it to say, the honeymoon was awesome. AWESOME. And so relaxing. And now I want to start planning our next tropical vacation, like, STAT.

So! Since I don't have a honeymoon recap for you, let's talk about some wedding stuff! I'll have pro pics for you soon, but not yet, so for now we're all going to have to survive without photos.

To answer the recurring question about the goat cake, it was chocolate and hazelnut, NOT red velvet, because the idea was NOT to create a lifelike, bleeding dead goat! It just turned out way more realistic than I thought! But it was way yummy. Also, I broke with tradition and did not serve it at the wedding itself--instead I used it as dessert for the rehearsal dinner, which worked out well because that was at a Thai restaurant which didn't have much in the way of dessert options.

Oooo, let's talk about the officiant at the wedding, shall we? Because he was... well, he was special. We really struggled to find an officiant we liked (anyone remember the lewd 90-year-old man?), but we were really happy with this guy once we found him. We had similar values and a great meeting with him, and he was very helpful in terms of providing us with materials that helped us write the ceremony, but as the wedding got closer, I started to get worried about him. He canceled a few meetings and he seemed sort of absent-minded--misspelling and mispronouncing Torsten's name, and needing to be reminded of things we'd already discussed. I told myself that I was just being silly and that he would be fine on the day of once he'd reviewed our file more closely, but it turns out that I should have listened to my instinct.

I mean, he was fine, mostly, and the issues are things that probably only we noticed. But there were four problems with him. First, he kept pronouncing Torsten's name like "Tursten" ("Torsten" is pronounced phonetically: TORE-stin), even though in our last meeting we had very carefully gone over the pronunciation of the name with him and he had even written it down. Every time he said it wrong, I winced. Finally, while a friend was performing a reading, I whispered to my sister (the maid of honor) to please correct him. She did, and the next time he pronounced it correctly, then went back to pronouncing it wrong.

Second, he just seemed... off. A practiced wedding officiant should be able to make the ceremony run smoothly, and he seemed a little awkward. There weren't transitions. After the reading, we went straight into the part where Torsten and I read the words that we had written to each other, and it seemed like the officiant could have said something explaining that, like, "Now the couple would like to say a few words to each other" or something, but instead when the reading ended, he just whispered to us that we should do it, and then there was awkward silence while he handed us the copies of what we'd written. And at the end, instead of saying "You may kiss" so that everyone could hear it, as we'd discussed, he just sort of nudged us and said in a quiet voice that we could kiss. He just wasn't adept at managing the flow of the ceremony, and that was kind of his job.

Third, he added a big chunk to the ceremony. He stepped out in front of us and started rambling about how a marriage is like a building, and requires hard work by artisans over time. It wasn't bad, per se, but it was a bit cheesy, and also totally startling because we had gone over the whole ceremony with him beforehand and he just apparently decided to throw this bit in at the last minute.

Fourth, and most important to me, he skipped over half our vows. We spent a lot of time crafting those vows, and we made sure that we had a part in there where we promised to love each other and grow with one another (remember that?), and then we were supposed to say "I do." After that, we went into the part where we repeated after him "I take you to be my husband..." etc. But for some reason, I think because he lost his place, he skipped the first part and started straight with the second half. I noticed, but I thought maybe I had the order wrong, and by the time I realized that he had skipped that part entirely, we had already moved on to exchanging the rings and it just seemed like it was too late to do anything about it. So we got married without ever saying "I do," and without those carefully chosen words about loving not just the people we are now, but the people that we will become over the course of our lives.

It's not the biggest deal. The ceremony was still lovely and amazing, not just because of what it meant and the fact that we were there declaring our love and commitment to one another in front of our families and friends, but also because of the words we wrote for each other and the personal emotion that was contained throughout the ceremony. The little mistakes that the officiant made didn't ruin the ceremony, and we wound up married at the end, which was the biggest thing. Plus, it makes for a good story. And it was pretty much the only thing that went wrong in the entire wedding.

But still, it rankles a little bit. I wanted to say "I do" at my wedding, and hear my husband say it too. I wish that it had happened that way.