marry

Ken and I are celebrating our 9th wedding anniversary today.  It seems like we were just celebrating our 5th.  Time really does fly.  It is fun to think back from where we started and where we are today…and now our family has doubled in size and is about to gain one more!   I love Ken so much and I can’t imagine life without him.  I feel so blessed to have him as my husband.

We’re going on a date tonight and decided to use the money we might spend on gifts to do some more landscaping in our yard.  I know, romantic right, but I am excited!  It has been a couple years since we have been able to do anything much to it and it’ll be good to see some progress again.  Ken had hoped to take me somewhere exotic next year, like Fiji,  for our 10 year but I’ll be nursing a baby and the last time I left a nursing baby at home to go to Ecuador it had bad results…so maybe for our 11th!

A bit about our wedding…I am not one for the lime light and was always nervous about having a wedding where everyone would be focused on me for the day.  That just makes me sweat and not excited like it does most ladies.  Because of that and other issues like not wanting a million bridesmaids but not knowing how to choose less, getting family together that would be happy not to be together, and more we came up with the plan to go to an island somewhere and just get married by ourselves.

I decided that staying in the carribean area would be best since we wouldn’t have to mess with huge time changes and also flight times and cost would be better too.  After looking at all the options though the easiest place to go was St. Thomas since it is American.  The other islands had rules about having to be there for a number of days or longer to get a “residency” to be able to apply for a wedding permit.  On St. Thomas you could get off the plane or boat and get one immediately…and that is just what we did.  We didn’t want to have to go to a place and hang out for a week before we could get married.  The hotel we stayed at had a wedding coordinator (whose name was Franz which made me laugh and think about Franck from Father of the Bride) and we chose a simple wedding package that included having a professional photographer and a bouquet.  I can’t remember if there was anything else.  We didn’t need much.  It made planning for the wedding so easy…because there was nothing to plan.  We got to spend the rest of our time exploring St. Thomas and St. John.

Thankfully, our family was all very supportive of our plans.  Since they weren’t there to see it we sent out announcements and included a picture.  Here is the one we used.  We don’t have digital copies since this was before digital became popular.  So it is scanned and doesn’t look as nice as it does in person.  (And for those wondering, we were wearing shoes when we got married, we just took them off while walking around the hotel grounds for the pictures.)

It was a really great experience and we saved so much money.  In fact, we were able to put the money that would have gone to a wedding as a down payment for our new house.  To me that is a much better investment.  I would highly recommend it to anyone!

Here is a book we used to help us get great information on doing a wedding this way:  Let’s Elope: The Definitive Guide to Eloping, Destination Weddings, and Other Creative Wedding Options.