Life is not measured by the breaths you take…

In the morn­ing, Jack and Doug were at the amphi­theatre. Jack did a cleans­ing and asked per­mis­sion from the ancest­ors to hold a cere­mony there. I meant to expli­citly declare we were on Wur­undjeri land as part of the cere­mony, but I forgot. Doug ritu­ally swept the circle. I wanted to go up there and do stuff too, but I had my hair done and there was gen­eral con­sensus that I should stay out of the rain, so Daniel and I stayed home and fret­ted. Point­less, really, because in the end, I didn’t like my hair very much at all and the rain messed it up anyway! None of which mattered on the day in the slightest.

I remem­ber grin­ning like a loon most of the day. I remem­ber our goblet pour­ing cere­mony again. This time Doug pledged to bring ‘whimsy’ to the rela­tion­ship after he had been barely aud­ible and then yelled “I’m here’ when asked to declare his inten­tions. Our vows were ter­rific – from Seline’s book, not writ­ten by us, but great – 

I, Douglas,
prom­ise you Ros­anne, to be your love, com­pan­ion and friend,
Your ally in con­flict, your com­rade in adven­ture,
Your con­sol­a­tion in adversity, your con­fed­er­ate in rev­elry,
Your accom­plice in mis­chief and your part­ner in par­ent­hood.
I pledge my love to you
And joy­fully accept the com­mit­ments of this, our marriage.

The looks in each others’ eyes on ‘your accom­plice in mis­chief’ were great. I love our rings: mine white gold with cham­pagne amber, cognac amber and garnet, Doug’s red gold with the same stones. Again, photos later I guess. Dan­cing to ‘our song’ (“Chas­ing Cars” by Snow Patrol) was delight­ful and romantic until the part­ner of Dad’s friend Rusty came over and tapped us mid-kiss and gruffly said, “We have to go. We have better things to do.” He has a very strange sense of humour. The cake was deli­cious and looked fant­astic. The food was amaz­ing – I’m still so incred­ibly chuffed that Jess found gluten-free, vegie cater­ing with the Asylum Seeker’s Resource Centre so that our wed­ding helped people! The organic wine was deli­cious but we ordered for a hot day and mis­judged com­pletely. Many won­der­ful people fol­lowed our requests and donated to char­it­ies on our behalf instead of giving us presents. We have yet to send out thank you cards, but we will. We forgot to get people to sign the guest book. We remembered to ask for speeches and we got some lovely ones and also Dad going off on some tan­gent about whether Sydney or Mel­bourne has better food.