I have to admit, I didn't put much thought into the ceremony itself. About one week before the wedding, I asked my brother to officiate the wedding. Kind of short notice and I didn't give him much direction except link him to Mrs. Penguin's post for some ideas. He also lives in Miami, so he couldn't run anything by me until we met up in Cancun two days before the wedding day. While we were in Cancun, he was always like, "Can we go over the ceremony together?" I was always preoccupied with something, i.e., making sure all my guests we happy, eating, etc...I kept telling my brother, "Don't worry, it'll be great, you don't have to run anything by me, I trust you." At one point, I told him, "Why don't you run it by Mr. Lovebird, cuz I would be fine with anything you said. He might have input". So poor guy tracks down Mr. Lovebird in the resort, who was probably preoccupied with pool basketball and other shenanigans with the groomsmen, and gets told, "Anything you want to say is fine."
Result... poor Brother Lovebird is stressing out the whole time leading up to the wedding and manages to catch me and the bridesmaids in the bridal suite a couple of hours before the wedding is supposed to start, with his macbook in tow. He reads me what he has down so far, which of course bring tears to my eyes and manages to get a few more insider tidbits to add to his speech. You could tell he put an immense amount of thought and time into the speech, which was not only heartfelt, but included so many great moments from our 7 and a half year courtship, many that I had forgotten about until my brother brought it up. Basically, we finished the ceremony speech moments before the wedding was about to start.
As evidenced here by my BMs copying his speech moments before the ceremony started.
I had to literally shoo him out of the room so he could get ready himself. I handed him the vows to hold onto and sent him on his way. Poor guy was so stressed about the speech, maybe even more than I was the whole day.
Everything was going as planned. Until....dun dun dun....
Brother Lovebird: "Yili and May have written their own vows and will now share them."
::: Silence :::
I turn to Brother Lovebird: "You have them right?"
Look of complete horror comes across Brother Lovebird's face.
All I could do was laugh! What do you guys love more? An ugly cry face bride or an ugly laugh face bride?
Below you can see him fanning out his speech as he frantically looked to see if they were on there somewhere and to show that's all he had on him.
The whole time he's giving death stares to my cousin Denise the bridesmaid who was responsible for giving him the speech before the ceremony started. Here's shes like, "I was only supposed to give you the speech, we already gave you the vows back in the room."
After I was finally able to stop laughing, I handed the microphone over to Mr. Lovebird. I love the picture below cuz it shows the horrified look on my brother's face.
Mr. Lovebird: "Uh uh uh, I guess I'll wing it." And wing it we did. The reason we wrote the vows down was because both of us didn't want to bother memorizing it.
Here he's probably thinking, "Damn it, what did I write?"
To be honest, the whole time Mr. Lovebird was doing the vows, I was trying to memorize what he was saying. You see, one of the few responsibilities I gave Mr. Lovebird was to write our vows. Which he singly handedly did days before the wedding. And it was a great job I might add. Short and sweet and very us. I read it once and just printed a copy out and brought it to Cancun. The night before the wedding, crafty BM Michelle took two sheets of the gocco'd place cards and some ribbon and created a little booklet for our vows. The booklets were about the size of a credit card. I guess when I gave them to my brother before the wedding, he was too stressed about officiating that he wasn't paying attention to what I gave him and it wasn't obvious that the little orange things I gave him contained our vows.
Needless to say, I had a really hard time having only read the vows once before and trying really hard to remember what Mr. Lovebird said just moments before. They weren't the most eloquent vows, but they were still special. At least it made the ceremony interesting, right? Everyone got a good laugh out of it.
The next day, Brother Lovebird comes to our room and hands me the little orange booklets. "Turns out they were on the table in my room the whole time. I guess you did give them to me afterall."
I have to figure out how to upload parts of the professional wedding video so you can see the actual ceremony, but here's some footage our friend Kevin took in the meantime for your enjoyment. It's around the 1:40 marker.
Everytime we watch our wedding video or when we look through our wedding photos, we always laugh at how utterly horrified my brother looked. I glad things happened the way they did. I wouldn't have changed it for the world.
What's the funniest thing you've seen during a wedding ceremony? Will you be memorizing your vows?
